By Vanessa Bauzá
HAVANA BUREAU

HAVANA · Francisco Carbonell Cleger lives alone in a bare, one-room shed not unlike the U.S. prison cells where he spent a decade.

He sleeps on a folding cot with no mattress and hangs his few clothes tidily from beams in the ceiling. A bicycle and old radio are among his few belongings. When he tunes in to Miami stations, thumping static fills the room.

"I wish my life had taken a different turn," he said. "There were good people who showed me the right path, but I didn't have much experience then. I didn't know how to take advantage of it."

Carbonell Cleger, 51, once had a chance at a fresh start on the "Freedom Flotilla." He left Cuba 25 years ago on a dangerously overloaded tugboat during the Mariel boatlift and began a new life thousands of miles away in Anchorage, Alaska. He found work at a gas station and a salmon cannery. He saved some money and spent long winter nights learning English with his sponsor family.

He tried to stay away from trouble, but it found him.

Just 18 months after arriving in the United States, he was convicted of shooting another man during an argument over a car. He served 41/2 years in prison. But more significantly his name was added to a list of 2,746 Mariel refugees deemed deportable under a 1984 accord between Washington and Havana.

After completing his sentence, Carbonell Cleger spent the next five years in federal custody, being transferred from one penitentiary to another until 1991, when he was placed on a 90-minute flight back to his homeland.

In Havana, Carbonell Cleger, like other so-called "excludables," says he is forever branded as undesirable and dangerous. Employers see him as a liability while Cuban authorities have kept a close eye on him over the years, visiting his home and summoning him to the police station repeatedly, he said.

Deported as criminals from the United States and unwanted in Cuba, many excludables live a life on the margins, between worlds. They are the flotillas castoffs.

"That word, excludable, is like a mark," Carbonell Cleger said as he sat on a metal chair in his trash-strewn yard, a few feet from Havana's seawall. "I live here frightened that from one moment to the next I could be taken to prison."

He said he has written to the U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Havana three times, "asking for a second chance," but has received no response. A U.S. diplomat here said the mission does not keep information about deported Marielitos.

"I feel bad here. I can't adapt to the system," he said. "I am not an enemy of the government. I love my country, but I want to feel free."

In Cuba many deported Marielitos shuttle in and out of prison on charges ranging from selling goods on the black market to armed robbery and drug trafficking. Some work jobs most Cubans don't want, such as sweeping streets, tending highway medians or doing construction work. Others, like Carbonell Cleger, scrape by with occasional odd jobs and help from their relatives.

"I resign myself to what little I have," he said. "I wish I could be somewhere where I could be relaxed. Where I could ... live from my work."

Another deported Marielito, Rafael Perez Arias, blames himself for having squandered his opportunities in the United States. He was 18 when he left Cuba on a shrimp boat only to be deported five years later after drug trafficking convictions in San Diego.

"It was easier for me to take the wrong path than the right path," said Perez Arias, 44, who now works as a house painter in Havana. "I messed up."

He has been in prison at least four times since returning to Havana in 1985, for assault and selling goods on the black market.

"I am not viewed well," he said. "From the time I left my country I became an enemy."

Cuba generally does not accept deportees from the United States and the two countries do not share an extradition treaty. But over the past two decades roughly 1,700 Mariel-era excludables have been returned to Cuba. About 1,000 names remain on the original repatriation list drawn up in 1984, according to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

"The irony of the whole thing is [President Fidel] Castro created the problem and had the final word on who he would take back," said Miami lawyer Rafael Peñalver, who helped release hundreds of Marielitos on the list during review hearings in 1987. He said most of the Cubans on the repatriation list were not the worst offenders, but rather those who happened to be in immigration custody at the time.

Immigrant advocacy groups celebrated a January U.S. Supreme Court decision which ruled foreign nationals, including about 750 Mariel refugees, could not be held indefinitely. But the ruling has had no impact on the Marielitos listed for repatriation because courts can argue they are not in legal limbo, but awaiting deportation.

"It is a brick wall. There's nothing you can do about it," said Maya Storm, an attorney who has represented several Mariel excludables deported to Cuba. "The treaty between the U.S. and Cuba trumps any action in federal court."

Despite their criminal records, both in and out of Cuba, many Mariel deportees say they still hope for a second chance at a new life.

"My aspirations are to leave [Cuba] again, not to the United States but to Canada or Mexico, any country," said Roberto Carbonell Lescay, Carbonell Cleger's cousin, who was deported from the United States for drug trafficking in 1993. "If I had known the consequences I never would have sold drugs. I regret not having taken another road [and] lived a modest life."

Like some other Marielitos, Carbonell Lescay was in prison at the time of the boatlift. Prison officials came to him in May 1980, 13 years into his 20-year sentence for robbery, and told him to gather his things because he had to leave for the United States.

He was loaded onto a boat at the Port of Mariel along with other prisoners and relatives of Cuban Americans.

In Miami he almost immediately turned to drug dealing for quick cash. Within a few years he went from being a Cuban convict to living a lush American life, buying a house, several cars and sending money to his family in Havana.

But things spiraled out of control when he turned from selling to using drugs. After convictions in Miami and Detroit, Carbonell Lescay, 56, was deported to Cuba.

Now he is a public works employee, sweeping and pruning roadside parks in the early morning. Like other excludables, he said Cuban security officials have visited his home on and off since his return and warned him to stay away from political rallies and other public gatherings.

He still remembers his time in Detroit as "the best years of my life" and chalks up his mistakes to youthful ignorance. He lives in a small, sparsely furnished Havana apartment with his wife and her two children. A TV stands on one wall. On the other Carbonell Lescay prays to an Afro-Cuban deity he hopes will help him find a new life.

"If life gives me another opportunity," he said, "I would adapt."

Vanessa Bauzá can be reached at vmbauza1@yahoo.com

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