Cuban Inmates Continue Tense Standoff : Immigration: Officials conduct negotiations with prisoners holding 10 hostages in apparent protest of laws requiring their deportation.

TALLADEGA, Ala. —  Cuban prisoners holding 10 hostages continued their tense standoff with federal prison officials for a second day Thursday in an apparent protest of controversial laws under which thousands of Cubans have been detained or deported.

There was no outward change in the situation as U.S. Bureau of Prisons officials conducted secret negotiations with the inmates. However, Thursday night officials did announce one small agreement had been reached--the delivery of medicine to some inmates.

The medicine, for unspecified “non-life-threatening medical conditions,” allowed prison staff members to have face-to-face contact with the inmates, who until now had been talking with negotiators by telephone. “We feel we have established . . . a beginning of communication with the detainees,” Warden Roger Scott said.

The seizure of a high-security unit of the Federal Correctional Institution occurred Wednesday morning, a day before 32 of the 121 Cuban inmates were scheduled to be flown back to Cuba. There were also 18 American prisoners in the besieged unit.

“We’re very concerned that this be resolved peacefully without anyone getting hurt,” Scott said.

The takeover here marked the most recent in a series of incidents involving Cubans who came to the United States in the Mariel boat lift in 1980 and have resisted returning. The United States took the position that any who committed crimes in this country would be deported. Family members and rights activists say, however, that the result has been to keep some immigrants incarcerated long after they have served time for the crimes.

Currently, about 2,500 Cubans who committed crimes in this country are being held in more than 60 federal, local and state facilities across the country.

Immigration experts said in interviews that the crisis here--as well as major outbreaks in Atlanta and Oakdale, La., prisons in 1987, when inmates rioted at two federal facilities--stems from the fundamental clash over enforcement of the immigration rulings.

The Mariel boat lift brought 125,000 Cubans onto U.S. shores, but Cuban President Fidel Castro refused to take any back until 1984, when the Cuban and U.S. governments signed a treaty containing 2,746 names of people who could be deported.

The deportations began the following January and by May, 1985, the United States had sent back 201 Cubans.

Then, however, Castro, incensed by U.S.-backed broadcasts to Cuba via Radio Marti in Miami, called a halt to the deportations.

On Nov. 21, 1987, with relations improved again, the U.S. State Department announced that the deportations would resume. Two days later, the bloody riot began in Atlanta, leaving one inmate dead and much of the Atlanta penitentiary in ashes and ruin.

As part of the settlement of the riots in Atlanta and Oakdale, federal officials promised to make no deportations among the 3,800 incarcerated Cubans without first conducting an expanded review of each case.

Advocates for the Cubans say that even under the new system, it was difficult to gain permission to remain in this country once an immigrant was targeted for deportation.

Carla Dudeck, a staff member of the Coalition to Support Cuban Detainees, which handled more cases nationwide than any other organization, recalled that two government panels did parallel reviews of cases.

If a person’s name landed on the parole review list, she said, he had a 50-50 chance of being able to stay. If his name wound up on the repatriation list, he had about a 10% chance, she said.

The organization, which is being phased out because the review process is virtually ended, has handled 777 repatriation cases since the fall of 1988, and only 73 Cubans won the right to stay, said Dudeck.

Federal immigration officials vigorously defend the review process.

Noting that since the 1987 riots, 457 Cubans have been sent back to their homeland, Duke Austin, a spokesman at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said each one was deported only after careful review by officials outside of INS.

Austin said that, because of the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, undocumented Cubans are allowed to apply for legal residency a year after arriving, and then for citizenship after four additional years.

Most of the 125,000 Marielitos qualified, he said, but if one commits a crime, “You have lost that privilege.”

In Los Angeles, Pamela Agramonte said her husband, Carlos, is one of the Cuban inmates here, although he is not a leader of the uprising.

Agramonte, 28, said her 29-year-old husband served two years for burglary and subsequently was ruled deportable and incarcerated here.

Sending him back to Cuba after he has served the time is “totally unfair,” said Agramonte, who has waged a vigorous campaign on her husband’s behalf, writing members of Congress in an effort to keep him in the United States.

Most of the inmates here face the same fate as Agramonte.