Fifty years later, Cubans still are fleeing the revolution

Four months after they appeared in the waters between Havana and Miami, the four dead men remain nameless. At a morgue in the Florida Keys, they lie on stretchers stacked like bunk beds, their bodies chewed by sharks, their faces too putrified to be recognized.

The police suspect they were Cuban rafters. Nilda García thinks one of them might be her son - and the thought makes her weep. Fourteen years after she left Cuba on her own makeshift boat, she finds herself wondering once again: When will it end?

"How many mothers are going through this?" García said in an interview at her daughter's apartment here as she awaited DNA results on the bodies."How many more are crying for their losses? How many young people have drowned in this sea? How many?"

Fifty years ago on Thursday, many Cubans cheered when Fidel Castro seized power in Havana, and even now, the revolution attracts many fans - as evidenced by a Canadian tour agency advertising trips"to celebrate five decades of resilience."

But the bodies speak to a different legacy. Here in South Florida, where roughly 850,000 Cubans have settled over the years, repeated waves of painful exile and family separation define the Castro era.