BY ANA VECIANA-SUAREZ
Herald Staff Writer

Anabel Ruiz Carvajal was 7 when she arrived in Miami through the Mariel boatlift. She was 9 when she returned to Cuba.

Her story is an unusual one.
 
In the summer of 1980, her grandfather went to Cuba to pick up his daughter -- Anabel's mother -- and her family, but the government allowed only the 7-year-old to leave.

''It was a very difficult situation because my mother had my little brother who had just been born, and she didn't want to leave my stepfather,'' Ruiz Carvajal remembers. ``Then there was also a health problem with my grandfather who had had to spend five days in a hospital [in Cuba] because of his diabetes.''

Her mother and father consented to her departure, because both sides thought they would eventually be reunited. But 15 days after the little girl had arrived in Miami, the Cuban government closed the port of Mariel, stranding Anabel's family on the island. The news shocked her grandfather, who died of diabetic complications.

Until then her stay in the strange city had been somewhat idyllic. Her grandfather had taken her on long car rides to show her the city and together they had shopped for toys at stores. His death, however, changed everything.

His widow did not want the responsibility of a young child. ''I did what normal 7-year-olds do,'' she says. ''I ran around and I played and I cried because I missed my mother.'' But her behavior was often met with reprimands and beatings, she says.

When the step-grandmother went to work, the women brought Ruiz Carvajal along -- and left her in the car for hours. A maternal cousin soon found out and moved her in with an aunt and uncle, an older couple with grown children. Her life changed completely. ''They were very nice to me, very loving,'' she recalls. ``They tried very hard to make me feel at home.''

Ruiz Carvajal's memories of the two years she spent with the couple are sketchy. She knows they lived in a neighborhood named Opa-locka because the sound of that name has stayed with her all these years. Their house had a big yard that led to a big lake, and at night alligators sometimes came up on the grassy banks. She had a room all to herself, and they visited relatives who had little girls for her to play with. She was taken to Disney World once, too, which she thought was maravilloso -- wonderful. She remembers dressing up for Halloween.

But she missed her mother and often cried for her. Every time they spoke on the phone, Ruiz Carvajal begged to go home.

Which she did in 1982, with the help of the Czechoslovak Embassy.

Returning to Cuba was a shock, however. Her mother and stepfather now had two young sons who shared their only bedroom. She slept in a cot in the living room. She eventually married at 15, gave birth to a son at 16, and divorced her first husband by 18. She became a secretary.

In 1997, she and her second husband joined her biological father in the Dominican Republic, where her husband works as a supervisor at an ice cream factory. Her daughter was born there two years ago.

Now her short stay in Miami 25 years ago seems more dream than history. The aunt and uncle who took her in have died, and she has lost track of the other relatives.

''If I had the money, I would like to take my children there, show them where I lived and show them Disney World,'' she says. ``For myself, I would like to revisit that chapter of my life one more time.''