REPORTER'S VIEW

BY EDWARD SCHUMACHER MATOS

I went down to Pier No. 3 on a balmy evening under a shapeless sky in the rather unremarkable bay of Mariel. I was, to my knowledge, the only reporter inside the quarantined bay, and there were rumors about the ''scum,'' as Castro called it, that he was sending.

My wife, herself a Cuban exile, was desperately hiring small planes on behalf of my employer, The New York Times, in fruitless efforts to contact me by radio. She worried I would end up in a prison as her father had.

But I was discovering that Cuba was just another Third World dictatorship, cruel if you were caught in its vise, but otherwise lazy and inefficient.

I was blithely catching the shuttle to the also-quarantined Triton Hotel in Havana to file my stories by phone. A story is no good if you can't get it out, and so I risked it every day, though in furtive whispers.

But I wasn't prepared for the story I would be sending about what I found at Pier No. 3, and the reaction it would have in the U.S.

Tied to the pier was a 70-foot fishing boat called the Valley Chief crammed with 200 people, many if not most of whom were obviously common criminals or mentally disabled.

I began to interview them, taking out paper scraps to write quotes and then returning them to my pocket so as not to draw attention from passing authorities.

The first, usually uneducated response to my questions was invariably a single word: Embajada. Embassy. So as not to be arrested in Key West, the refugees had been instructed by Cuban officials to say that they were among the thousands who had overrun the Peruvian Embassy, as if they were among the political dissidents who set off the boatlift crisis. I found no one on the Valley Chief, however, with the safe-conduct pass given to those from the embassy.

I kept peppering one barely intelligible young man with questions but he kept mumbling the same: Embajada. Then I asked him how the food was in the mental institution. ''It was terrible,'' he said.

''Hey!'' barked a man next to him. My interviewee jerked his head. Embajada, he said.

With time, they all began to break down and began telling on each other. For what it was worth, I found no murderers, only thieves, vagrants and a few poor gays and unhappy souls the homophobic government was constantly framing.

Not wanting to push my luck, I left and returned early the next morning to confirm the boat was indeed leaving. There I found a double surprise. Next to the Valley Chief was a 120-foot red, white and blue catamaran called, of all things, America. It had a similar cargo of 420 refugees.

My article ran Page One in The Times, and hordes of cameramen were in Key West to greet the boats. I was unaware then of the eruption in the U.S.

Back in Mariel, my thoughts were more contemplative. Castro was perhaps having a last laugh, but that paled compared to the hope I had for the more deserving passengers that they would find the peace and generosity in their new country, my country, that this island and its delusional leader could never offer.

Edward Schumacher Matos was a reporter at The New York Times from 1979 to 1988. He was bureau chief in Buenos Aires and Madrid. Today, he is is publisher of the Rumbo newspapers in Texas.