No rafters were in sight on the routine Brothers to the Rescue run over the Straits of Florida. So, on this Saturday, the Cessna crew popped open a window and tossed the ashes of a Cuban exile into the wind.

''I have two more waiting to go back at the office,'' said group founder Jose Basulto, 58, recalling the episode ruefully.

In a sense, the burial at sea symbolizes the plight of the once celebrated search-and-rescue team three years after Cuban MiG fighter planes rocketed two of their aircraft, killing four men over international waters.

Long gone is the 10,000-square-foot hangar jammed with supplies and supporters, the huge fund-raisers, the hundreds of volunteers, the image of humanitarian purpose that made the Brothers heroes of South Florida.

Today, the Brothers have shrunk to a tiny band working out of a cramped Coral Gables office. With only two aging aircraft left, they are short on funds, searching for relevance and spinning conspiracy theories over the tragedy of Feb. 24, 1996.

''Everything indicates that the Clinton administration intends to cover up the truth with silence, contradiction, falsehoods and the convenient invocation of 'national security,' '' writes Basulto, the Bay of Pigs veteran whose twin-engine Cessna carrying four people was the only survivor of the shootdown.

This year, he is marking the anniversary by issuing a fat, $50-a-copy briefing book. Stuffed with old newspaper articles, copies of long-released military intercepts and congressional correspondence, it seeks to bolster his lonely argument that someone, somewhere in the U.S. government conspired with Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba to destroy his organization.

Meantime, many relatives of the pilots and passengers who died in the shootdown shun Basulto and have little to do with the Brothers. They pointedly excluded him from their $187 million federal lawsuit against the Cuban government.

Wednesday, family members will hold a memorial Mass. Organizers did not send Basulto an invitation. Brothers plan a separate memorial, a flyover in the Straits.

Funds are scarcer

Financially, the Brothers are floundering, too.

In 1993, the nonprofit charity, then run entirely by unpaid volunteers, raised more than $1.1 million -- and ended the year with a $565,946 surplus, an impressive war chest just in time for the 1994-95 rafter crisis.

In 1997, the group's most recent federal disclosure shows, it ended the year $2,649 in the red and raised just $324,693 in gifts, grants and contributions. A quarter of the money went to staff salaries.

What happened?

U.S. policy changed, causing Basulto and his followers to adopt a less-sexy mission of advocating nonviolent, internal resistance in Cuba. Then, the wake of the shootdown brought revelations that the Brothers were infiltrated by spy agencies, both Cuban and American. The tragedy frayed the relief organization, and caused a deep divide with families of the killed airmen.

It has been a long descent.

Five and six years ago, when being picked up by a Coast Guard cutter meant a free ticket to U.S. shores, the Brothers to the Rescue enthralled South Florida, a community whose good-evil, left-right yardstick yearned for unambiguous heroes.

Hermanos al Rescate, as they are known in Spanish, were the rage of both the Cuban-exile and English-language media.

Well-known supporters

Musician Willy Chirino, then-Herald publisher Dave Lawrence, even the State Department's Cuba point man, Dennis Hayes, all clambered into Brothers' cockpits. Gloria Estefan donated a plane. Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen tried to get Congress to give them Vietnam War vintage aircraft.

More than 4,000 Cubans who risked their lives on crude rafts to leave their communist nation were rescued, by the Brothers' count.

In 1994, the Brothers raised an additional $1.15 million in donations.

American Airlines gave them cartons of inflatable life vests. People donated anywhere from $1 to $35,000, anonymously, to pay the rent on their cavernous hangar, jam it with food and water, print T-shirts and bumper stickers.

Today, the Brothers' assets are two old planes, thousands of leftover life vests, and an ever-shrinking corner of an Opa-locka Airport hangar.

While many charities keep staffing and fund-raising costs well below 20 percent, a staggering 50 percent of the nonprofit's 1997 donations went to these items: $133,716 for administration, including Basulto's $50,276 salary, and $42,945 for fund-raising.

They still fly, almost every Saturday. But the last Coast Guard-Brothers ''rescue'' took place eight months ago. A plane spotted a foundering 20-foot wooden boat near the Bahamas, and dropped a cheap two-way radio to confirm that the occupants wanted assistance.

The pilots then alerted a cutter, which took all eight people to Bimini, where they were presumably sent back to Cuba.

POLICY CHANGES
U.S.-Cuban agreements undercut Brothers' role

The 1995 U.S.-Cuban migration accords put the Brothers out of business.

Before, the Brothers were a lifeline to the Cubans' rickety rafts being rowed toward the Florida Keys. In a carefully choreographed, but certainly risky, drama at sea, pilots alerted the Coast Guard to scoop up the boat people -- and deliver them safely to U.S. shores. Here, they invoked the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, signed up for green cards and could eventually become U.S. citizens.

But in May 1994, arguing that the Straits were too treacherous, the Clinton administration stopped rescuing rafters at sea and taking them to the United States. Instead, those picked up were held in camps at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba.

Then, in 1995, Cuba agreed to take back any of its citizens caught by the Coast Guard on the high seas. In exchange, the United States agreed to welcome 20,000 Cubans a year -- as long as they got valid visas from the U.S. Interest Section in Havana.

''The United States pulled the rug out from under them by changing U.S. policy. They lost their mission,'' said Max Castro, political analyst at the University of Miami's North-South Center.

SWITCH IN MISSION
New focus: to encourage resistance within Cuba

The Brothers needed a new mission. Basulto sought a way to exploit what he saw as island prestige and South Florida support.

So quietly, the man who in the '60s fired a cannon at a Cuban hotel filled with Russians and in the '80s flew medical supplies to the Nicaraguan contras, began, in 1994, to champion internal, island resistance.

In 1995, he dropped anti-government leaflets into Cuba; at least once, he overflew Havana. Publicly, he declared plans to send money to Cuban dissidents.

But that activity did not resonate with the public as well as rescuing rafters. In 1995, contributions to the Brothers dropped to $320,455.

The group today cranks out Spanish-language versions of old pacifist manifestoes that Basulto found in the library of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change -- and sends them clandestinely to Cuba. They seek to inflame grassroots resistance to the communist regime, like several other exile organizations.

Widely disseminated

The Brothers' literature, written by an independent Cambridge, Mass., academic, has been smuggled into such far-flung places as Myanmar, the Arab world and Indonesia.

''I cannot do a radio marathon for that,'' said Tomas Regalado, the Miami city commissioner and talk-show host who helped the Brothers raise thousands in the beginning.

Regalado spoke fondly of the Brothers, during their derring-do, save-the-rafters days as ''the International Red Cross that we created,'' and said it was easy back then to raise funds for them.

But today, if they fly, ''they are betraying the Cubans'' by calling the Coast Guard, he said. The Coast Guard repatriates almost every Cuban it finds at sea.

''People think that if you want to try to leave Cuba today, you have to beat the Coast Guard and walk into Miami Beach.''

Besides, a nonviolent strategy simply does not connect with Basulto's once feisty constituency. Donors aren't interested in educating Cubans about peaceful paths to ending communist rule. ''The people say, 'Castro! You have to kill the son of a bitch,' '' Regalado said.

THE BLAME GAME
Leader spreads theory of a U.S. conspiracy

Moreover, lingering questions remain from Feb. 24, 1996.

In January, Basulto wrote to independent counsel Kenneth Starr. The Senate was about to judge President Clinton's impeachment, and he asked Starr to expand his Monica Lewinsky and Whitewater investigations to include the Brothers allegations. He got no answer.

But Basulto still finds the occasional magazine or newspaper writer to publicize his conspiracy theory. The Los Angeles Times last week highlighted his allegations, which go like this:

U.S. fighter jets should have protected the Brothers, or at least fired back at Cuba when the MiGs rocketed the two tiny aircraft, killing Carlos Costa, 29; Pablo Morales, 29; Mario de la Peña, 24; and Armando Alejandre, 45.

''Miraculously,'' Basulto says, his plane was spared, along with the Brothers' former vice president, Arnaldo Iglesias, 60, and community activist Sylvia Iriondo, 54, and her husband Andres, 58, in the back seat.

Somewhere in the Pentagon, Basulto theorizes, someone knows that a secret order was given to let defenseless aircraft fall prey to the Cuban air force -- just moments after Basulto acknowledged to Havana air traffic control that he understood that his was a hazardous mission.

''We know that we are in danger each time we fly into the area -- but we are ready to do so as free Cubans,'' Basulto radioed the Havana tower the day of the shootdown.

U.S. officials dismiss the argument as survivor's guilt, or anger.

A worrisome time

With the end of the Cold War, U.S. air forces were not on a hair trigger over the Straits, says Richard Nuccio, President Clinton's point man on Cuba at that time.

He spent a sleepless night before the killings, he said, worrying that MiGs might force the planes down -- and put Basulto & Co. before a Cuban tribunal for ''a show trial.''

The Brothers, after all, had been increasingly provocative with their Havana overflights and leafletting. So, throughout much of that year, Nuccio said, every night before the Brothers flew was a sleepless one.

But the idea ''that they would send up two MiGs in cold blood and kill four people in international airspace, I can tell you no one in the U.S. government thought that -- that I'm aware of,'' Nuccio said.

It's an episode that still haunts Nuccio.

''I take personal responsibility. I was Cuba advisor. I will go to my grave thinking that there must have been something more that could've been done'' to prevent the loss of life, he said. ''But that's not confirming Basulto's wacky conspiracy theories. That's just taking responsibility for the job I was supposed to do.''

Said Nuccio, whose proposed policy of greater Cuban engagement was destroyed with the two Brothers planes: ''I hold Basulto responsible for those four people's deaths, to a lesser extent, but to an extent. Just as I hold the Cuban government responsible.''

FAMILIES SHUN BASULTO
Political activities are target of criticism

Resentment of the Brothers today also runs deep among members of the victims' families.

''If the Brothers were really saving lives, I would support that facet. They're really not doing that anymore, and I certainly do not support their political activities,'' said Maggie Khuly, Alejandre's sister and a driving force behind the $187 million lawsuit.

She explained bitterly: ''This was a humanitarian organization, and, I think, anything that goes beyond that demeans what this group was founded for.''

Some don't understand why the team leader survived. Others don't like his attempt to shift the blame onto the United States, their adopted country. Also upsetting for some has been the Brothers' increasingly politically provocative tenor, which blurs their legacy.

''My brother was part of the organization, and he loved it because he was there for the humanitarian side of it. I don't think it's that anymore. It's more of a political group,'' said Mirta Mendez, sister of pilot Carlos Costa, who was killed on the Feb. 24 mission.

An issue of blame

Family members fear that by blaming unnamed ''high U.S. officials'' who, Basulto argues, were criminally negligent co-conspirators with Cuba, Basulto could give Cuba public relations fodder.

''Castro can turn around and say, 'Look, these people are blaming their own government!' '' Mendez said.

Like Khuly, she laments the loss of the ''humanitarian side'' that lured her brother to the group. When the men were shot down, the rafter-return policy was in place. So Basulto had already turned to his policy of leafletting.

Basulto is aware of the rift.

''Our quest is for truth and justice,'' he said. ''The family is something else. We want a criminal trial of this, not a civil trial. I want them [Cuba] tried and found guilty.''

SPIES INFILTRATED
Group was eyed by FBI and Cuban intelligence

But there's only one criminal court case on the horizon.

In September, five men face trial in U.S. District Court in Miami for supposedly snooping on South Florida exile organizations and U.S. military bases as unregistered agents of Cuba.

It highlights another Brothers problem in a community that simmers with international intrigue and microscopic examination of people's political motives:

Soon after the shootdown, it was revealed that both the FBI and Cuban intelligence had infiltrated the group. First, a much-esteemed Brothers pilot, Juan Pablo Roque, turned up in Havana to announce that he had informed on the organization for the FBI, then double-defected back to his homeland.

Then, late last year, the FBI cracked the Cuban spy ring, identifying the Brothers as one of its targets. One accused spy is a former Brothers pilot, Rene Gonzalez, who at the time of his arrest had already left the relief group to fly with Ramon Saul Sanchez's Democracia movement.

'Making a statement'

Basulto, for his part, no longer flies every mission, every weekend. Sometimes he leaves the cockpit to his core supporters, and to younger fliers like Guillermo Lares.

And although they usually don't spot rafters in the Straits, he said, the remaining few Brothers are ''very dedicated.''

''They know that they are saving lives,'' Basulto said. ''They know that they are making a statement, that they are a role model when we ask for civil action in the island. We are assisting our people. We are not going to be scared away from our mission just because there is a thug in Havana.''