They have suffered enough

First they were persecuted by Cuba's government. Now they are imprisoned by the U.S. government. Thus 21 of some 45 Cuban refugees being held indefinitely at the Guantanamo naval base are in the second week of a hunger strike -- for cause.

``It seems incredible that you leave your homeland looking for freedom, and you demonstrate to the American government that you are persecuted politically, and then you find yourself in prison all over again,'' hunger striker Raul Olivera told The Herald via telephone this week.

It's unconscionable, too. Mr. Olivera says that he's been at the camp two years, hemmed in by barbed wire and security cameras. The shortest tenure of the strikers appears to be six months.

This intolerable internment results from U.S. policy to discourage Cuban rafters after the 1994 balsero crisis. Since then, the United States generally repatriates Cubans it finds at sea. A few, after very rigorous screening, are deemed to merit protection because of likely persecution if repatriated. Here, these folks would get political asylum. Instead, these rafters, children among them, are sent to Guantanamo to wait while the U.S. State Department ostensibly tries to persuade some other country to take them -- whether the refugees want to go there or not.

The State Department says granting entry to the persecuted few who actually get protected status might encourage hordes of Cubans to take to rafts. But that fear didn't stop this administration from offering entry to baseball star Orlando ``El Duque'' Hernandez when he washed up in the Bahamas.

Short of developing a 96-mph fast ball, hunger strikers and their brethren face indefinite detention at Guantanamo, forsaken by U.S. State Department and immigration authorities. Without committing any crime, they are political prisoners of U.S. policy. Does the Clinton administration really want to play jailer to Fidel Castro's gulag?

It shouldn't. The persecuted rafters have waited enough for freedom. Now bring them to the United States.