BY SETH GALINSKY
MIAMI-The U. S.-Cuba immigration accord is being hotly debated here.

As soon as the agreement was announced, phone lines at several Spanish-language radio stations began ringing off the hook with calls from angry Cuban exiles. "They've sold us to the enemy," said one woman who called Radio Mambi, the main right-wing station.

Diario Las Américas, a rabidly anti-Cuba daily published in Miami, ran an editorial titled, "Castro Seems to Have Gotten his Way in the Cuban Exodus Situation."

Tomás García Fusté, a talk show host on WCMQ, claimed, "The whole exile leadership is disgusted." But, Fusté added, "50 percent of the population is content because their family members at Guantánamo Naval Base are going to be able to come to the United States."

Some refugees at Guantánamo called WCMQ. "Today is a holiday for us," said one. "Today everyone is dancing and partying."

Aida Martínez Romanyk from West Palm Beach, who has cousins at Guantánamo, said, "They're coming? That's the best news I've ever heard in my life."

The pact is also a hot topic in the Haitian and Black communities here. Before the agreement, Cuban children with no parents at the military base were brought into Florida, as were pregnant women and those over 70. But not the Haitians imprisoned at the base in similar conditions.

"We think this is a double standard and very hypocritical from the Clinton government," stated Guy Victor, executive director of the Haitian Refugee Center. "It is unfair, and it is a racist policy. The Haitian community is very upset."

U.S. Congresswoman Carrie Meek, who is Black, passed a note to Attorney General Janet Reno just before the agreement was officially announced asking, "Will you please release the Haitian children who are unaccompanied? It's only fair."

The agreement allowing Cubans at Guantánamo to come to the United States was denounced by the main anti-immigrant groups in Florida, who are beginning to collect signatures to put a Proposition 187-type law on the ballot in the 1996 elections.

One supporter of the anti-immigrant initiative said the pact "will be fuel to the fire."

The Miami Herald backed the agreement. "On the whole," an editorial in the Herald said, "the policy shift adopts the `least worst' of a set of options containing no wholly satisfying choices."  
 
 
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