Mona Island, Puerto Rico ? Taking the back door into the United States, droves of Cubans are crossing some of the world’s stormiest seas and clambering onto this rugged speck of an island belonging to Puerto Rico.

Forsaking the heavily patrolled Florida Straits, Cubans are increasingly reaching the U.S. by flying to the Dominican Republic and traveling about 40 miles by boat to Mona Island.

In fiscal year 2001, no more than five Cubans landed on Mona. But in the past nine months 579 have arrived, Jorge Diaz, a senior U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent, said last week.

Under the general U.S. “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy, Cubans who reach U.S. soil get to stay, while those caught at sea are sent back. A Puerto Rican nature reserve inhabited by a few park rangers and lots of iguanas, Mona Island, like the rest of Puerto Rico, is as much a part of the U.S. as Miami is.

On a recent morning, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents, accompanied by an Associated Press reporter and photographer, sailed 45 miles from mainland Puerto Rico to Mona to pick up two groups of Cubans. Approached from the east, among leaping dolphins, the 6.7 square-mile island looks forbidding, rising in sulfur-colored cliffs. But on the western side, facing the Dominican Republic, a white-sand beach beckons.

Eight Cubans sat at a picnic table under a palm tree, having spent 12 hours in a smuggler’s open-air boat. Arriving just past midnight, they spent the rest of the night on mattresses provided by the island’s rangers.

A Cuban migrant gives a thumbs up to rangers on the shore of Puerto Rico's remote Mona Island as he and other migrants pull away on a U.S. Border Patrol boat en route to processing on mainland Puerto Rico. Increasing numbers of Cubans are seeking asylum in Puerto Rico rather than in Florida.

They said they were scared they would either drown or be caught by authorities during the journey.

“We prayed for 12 hours, aloud or silent, but we prayed,” said Richard Echevarria, his green T-shirt shirt stiff with sweat and salt spray. Another boat carrying nine Cubans had arrived two days earlier.

Smugglers profiting

The Cubans said they flew to the Dominican Republic on commercial airliners. Even accomplishing that step required patience and luck. To leave Cuba legally, Cubans must generally get a visa from the country they’re going to visit, plus a letter of invitation from a citizen of that country. They then must ask the Cuban government for an exit visa, which is sometimes denied. The process can take months.

The Cubans – who couldn’t simply fly from the Dominican Republic to the United States without a U.S. visa – then paid between $1,500 and $2,000 to be taken by boat to Mona. That’s at least $12,000 total for one boatload.

Dominican people-smugglers are turning huge profits in this growing industry, and few are prosecuted.

“If they hear you speaking with a Cuban accent in Santo Domingo, someone is going to come up to you and offer to arrange the trip,” said Jorge Bueno, one of the new arrivals. Another Cuban said he hadn’t left the Dominican capital’s airport before someone sidled up with an offer.

“It’s very lucrative. It’s better than trafficking drugs,” Bueno remarked as he donned an orange life vest and settled into the back of the Customs boat.

Few migrants of other nationalities plying these seas show up at Mona, which sits about halfway between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, because they know they’ll be sent back. Instead, they try to make it all the way to Puerto Rico’s western shores. About 600 have been arrested since October, most of them Dominicans, Diaz said.

The trip aboard low-slung boats called yolas is hazardous and many have died in the 80-mile-wide Mona Passage between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, where the Atlantic collides with the Caribbean and is often stormy.

In November a federal judge in Puerto Rico sentenced five Dominicans to prison terms of 10 to 17 years. They were captured after their yola capsized with 93 Dominican migrants aboard. At least seven of them drowned.

It was a rare victory over the smugglers. About 80 suspects were arrested in the Dominican Republic in the first three months of this year, but nearly all were released for lack of evidence, said Adm. Delfin Bautista, the commander of a Dominican naval unit that searches for the yolas. Migrants hoping to make the voyage again refuse to testify for fear of being blacklisted by smugglers. Bautista said smugglers are treated locally as heroes.

When a Coast Guard cutter intercepts a yola, the pilot pretends to be one of the migrants, said Petty Officer First Class Howard Sanchez, of the Coast Guard cutter Matinicus.

“You can’t tell who the smuggler is, and none of the migrants will point him out to us,” the Brooklyn native said.

After taking the migrants aboard, the Coast Guard sets the yola on fire or sinks it with machine gun fire.

As the Customs boat headed back to Puerto Rico, it leaped over 10-foot swells and smashed into cavernous troughs, drenching the 17 Cubans aboard in spray. One threw up.

“Imagine if you were out there in one of those yolas,” Agent Art Morrell shouted over the roar of the engine.

On to the mainland

Three hours later, the boat docked in Boqueron, southwest Puerto Rico. Carlos Alvarez, a butcher from Higuey, Cuba, combed his hair. Wearing a red tank top, he was the first to step off the boat.

There was no ceremony or celebration. The exhausted migrants said they just wanted to get to the U.S. mainland, mostly to Florida, where relatives awaited them.

For those without money, help comes from a group of women in San Juan who left Cuba decades ago and devote themselves to aiding their newly arrived compatriots. They give them clothes, put them up in a San Juan hotel and help pay their passage to the mainland.

The migrants were locked in Customs vans and driven to a processing center on a former U.S. Air Force base. The agents checked the migrants’ Cuban IDs and fingerprinted and photographed them. The agents can detect the distinctive Cuban accent but generally don’t contact Cuban authorities to verify the migrants really are Cuban or have a criminal record.

These newly arrived migrants were among the lucky ones.

Capt. James Tunstall, commander of Coast Guard operations in the eastern Caribbean, says the traffic should be stopped before it leads to “a catastrophic event … when you have an overladen yola coming across with men, women and children in a sea that can become very rough very quickly.”

Alvarez, the butcher, said he had planned to bring out his wife and daughter by the Mona route. But after seeing how dangerous it is, he expressed second thoughts.

“I wouldn’t want to put them through that,” he said.