U.S., Cuba Talks Show No Gains : Migration: Opening round proceeds ‘without hostility.’ Americans again reject Cuban contention that lifting trade embargo is the only long-term solution to refugee problem.

NEW YORK —  Cuban and American diplomats, while laying aside any obvious hostile feelings, remained far apart after the opening round of talks Thursday aimed at working out an agreement for halting the relentless waves of Cuban rafters seeking an American haven.

“We still have a long way to go before having an agreement and a long way to go to solving the problem,” said Ricardo Alarcon, head of the Cuban delegation. Neither side had expected to reach agreement on the first day.

State Department spokesman David Johnson described the talks, which continue today, as “serious, professional and businesslike.” This diplomatic jargon, another U.S. official explained, meant that the talks moved with efficiency and “without hostility.”

Alarcon described the opening session as “businesslike and proper.”

Judging by the few comments made to the press and television, the two sides were not far apart on the immediate issue of what needs to be done right now about the thousands of Cubans fleeing their homeland.

But the Americans still refused to accept the Cuban contention that the root of the problem lies with the American embargo on trade and that no long-term solution is possible without dealing with it.

“Every time I speak, I can assure you, I bring up the embargo . . . “ Alarcon, former Cuban foreign minister and United Nations ambassador, told Cable News Network. “By making life more difficult for people down there, you are encouraging people to leave.”

But Michael Skol, the deputy assistant secretary of state who leads the American negotiators, told reporters as he entered the headquarters of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations that he intends to talk only about ending the “chaotic, dangerous, unsafe migration north from Cuba on the waters.”

Asked about delving into wider issues, Skol held up a large binder and said: “I’ve got a briefing book here, and it is on migration issues only. There’s nothing here about embargo, about economics, or about anything else. Tabs A through M: all migration.”

The two sides have similar views on migration itself. Skol said that it is in the interests of both countries “to establish a firm system of legal, safe, orderly migration from Cuba.” Clinton Administration officials have said that they are prepared to offer a guarantee of visas for more than 20,000 Cubans a year if Fidel Castro’s government stops the exodus of rafters.

Alarcon said that the United States should grant more visas to Cubans so they can leave Cuba by plane instead of by makeshift rafts. Under an agreement reached between Castro and the Ronald Reagan Administration 10 years ago, the United States has the authority to issue 27,845 visas a year to Cubans. But, despite long waiting lists, the U.S. consular office in Havana actually grants only about 3,000 visas a year.

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The sudden exodus has embarrassed President Clinton, who--in an attempt to stop the tide--revoked the 35-year-old policy of admitting all Cuban rafters legally as special political refugees. Coast Guardsmen are instead rounding them up at sea and detaining them in camps at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base on the southeast shore of Cuba.

Although U.S. officials insist that the detained Cubans, like the Haitians in Guantanamo camps, will not be allowed to enter the United States, the Cuban rafters still keep coming. More than 2,000 were picked up by the Coast Guard Wednesday, and Coast Guard officials said that a total of 1,484 rafters had been plucked from the Florida Straits by 6 p.m. EST Thursday. According to the Pentagon, there were 15,471 Cubans and 14,148 Haitians in Guantanamo as of Thursday.

The President has assured Cuban exile leaders in Miami that U.S. officials will not discuss the embargo at the talks in New York. But this stance has been criticized by those who believe that increased ties with Cuba will do more to bring down Castro than economic sanctions.

The insistence on limiting the talks to matters of immigration drew a firm dissent from Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

“I would certainly try to see that the negotiations are expanded beyond the narrow question of migration,” Hamilton told the Fox Morning News Thursday.

“We’ve had a lot of experience with moving Communist countries toward freedom,” Hamilton said. “I think we know something about how to do that. And the key is engagement. The key is dialogue, discussion, ideas, information, letting journalists go in, letting scholars and athletes go in--open up that country.”

State Department spokesman Johnson said that the talks at the U.S. mission, which included a working lunch, lasted for six hours, and would move a few blocks away today to the offices of the Cuban mission to the United Nations. According to Johnson, the two sides used most of the time for detailed presentations of their positions.

He said that Skol discussed legal immigration, police enforcement of illegal immigration and the return to Cuba of certain undesirable immigrants. During the large exodus from the Cuban port of Mariel in 1980, Castro loosed a number of prison and mental hospital inmates, and the United States has long demanded that he take them back.

There have been hints that some inmates may be among the rafters as well. In Washington, Pentagon spokesman Dennis R. Boxx said that the U.S. government has evidence that some prison inmates were among the Cuban refugees who have been taken to Guantanamo, although the number is far less than during the Mariel boat lift of 1980.

“The evidence we have is partly based on what they tell us,” Boxx said. “We have other indications that some were more serious offenders because they have tattoos--that is standard procedure in Cuban prisons for offenders. . . . Right now we don’t see that the numbers are very large.

“It is something we’re concerned about, it is something that we’re watching and I believe it will also be a topic of discussion at the talks in New York today,” he went on.

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Also Thursday, a Washington-based nonprofit organization devoted to immigration reform said that it plans to file a civil lawsuit challenging any proposals by the Administration to raise the ceiling on the number of Cubans allowed admittance to the United States.

Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said that any such offers to Cuban negotiators would be “illegal and outside the framework of U.S. immigration law” because they would flout numerical limits established by Congress.

Times staff writers Norman Kempster and Robert L. Jackson in Washington contributed to this story.