Agents from several federal agencies on Tuesday rounded up 16 Cuban rafters who tried to elude a Coast Guard ship by jumping overboard and swimming to shore in Miami Beach.

Keith Roberts of the U.S. Border Patrol said agents from his agency and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service had picked up 10 immigrants. Seven men attempted to sneak into a construction site at Collins Avenue and 47th Street. Three others were found nearby.

The Coast Guard is holding six Cubans, including a woman who suffered from shock and an infant with a groin condition.

Miami Beach police, who participated in the roundup, said groups of Cubans were waiting along shore and asking for people by name, leading investigators to suspect they were family members who knew the boat was coming. The migrants will be taken to a Coast Guard ship, where they will be interviewed by INS agents.

The incident began after 2 p.m. when the Coast Guard began to chase a 30-foot boat suspected of carrying rafters. The boat was smoking, but it may have only been the engine churning. The boat touched shore in at least two places between 47th and 50th streets and Collins Avenue, investigators say. Pilots from the Border Patrol then radioed that several men were jumping off the boat and swimming to shore.

``I saw a few of them in the water, swimming toward shore, but few of them made it,'' said Calixto Banos, a construction worker at the site. ``The ones who made it on shore ran into the surrounding buildings.''

Roberts said this latest boatload of migrants is part of small groups of rafters the agency has been interdicting recently. In addition to these landings, agents are monitoring refugee smuggling, a larger problem.