Cuban American

At the invitation of a fringe political group, David Duke came to town recently to kick off his presidential campaign. Demonstrators greeted him outside the radio station where he was to make an appearance. "The man is anti-Cuban; he's one of the most disgusting monsters there are," said Giuseppe Concepcion, a Cuban American who decided to picket Duke. Said Tom Moskowitz, a member of Children of Holocaust Survivors, "He continues to be anti-Semitic. " But - this being Miami - there was an unusual twist.

"Comunista! Comunista!" Marta Cunzio, a clothing factory worker, let out a piercing, acrimonious scream yesterday at the corner of Bergenline Avenue and 48th Street in this Cuban enclave of Hudson County, just minutes before the arrival of George Bush, her choice for president. With dozens of other Cuban-Americans, she screamed at about 20 supporters of Democratic presidential nominee Michael S. Dukakis, who, with anti- Republican signs and a little bitterness of their own, were attempting to disrupt the harmony of a Bush rally.

Vice President Bush yesterday took the foreign policy offensive by raising a series of pointed questions about the national security views of his Democratic opponent, Michael S. Dukakis. In a noontime speech to a small but enthusiastic crowd of flag-waving Cuban-Americans, Bush recalled the 1983 U.S. military action on Grenada and the 1986 raid on Libya, describing them as appropriate exercises of American military power - actions which, he suggested, Dukakis might have been unwilling to take.

One of the more ironic sights here in the week-long siege of a federal prison has been the Cuban flag flown from the roof by Cubans who say they fear being sent back. And just as ironically, the banner was sent into the prison by Cuban- Americans who have shunned and ignored their countrymen since they came to America in the 1980 Mariel boatlift. "We share some of the blame for what has gone on here," said Huber Matos Jr., a leader in a Miami-based anti-Castro group called Independent Democratic Cuba.

For most of the 980 Cuban detainees, the modern detention center here was just another stop on the road to nowhere. Long before the State Department announced Friday that it had reached an agreement with Cuba to send 2,500 detainees back, the men confined to the isolated prison believed that they had been betrayed by the U.S. government and forgotten by the American - and Cuban-American - public. On Saturday, the frustration exploded when the prisoners rioted and burned down the federal detention center's administration building and took more than 20 hostages.

One of the odder stories to come down the pike has been the U.S. dispute with Cuba over our refusal to take released Cuban political prisoners unless Cuba finally agrees to take back the Mariel criminals and mentally insane. But far odder - and more ominous - than that exchange is the hitherto unrevealed story of how Cuba actually gains close to one-tenth of its fragile income. It comes from "American-paid" Cuban troops in Angola, from Miami payments for visas for Cubans to emigrate, and from illegal commercial deals through a range of Panama companies.