WASHINGTON -- Six Cubans who had been left behind when their baseball delegation hastily departed Baltimore returned to Cuba on Wednesday after they told U.S. officials they did not want to defect, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Most of the six men are former players and they all spent Tuesday at the Cuban Interests Section in Washington after oversleeping and missing their flight, according to Luis Fernandez, spokesman for the Cuban mission.

But Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, R-Miami, said he believed some in the group may have wanted to defect, and he said a State Department official told him the six were interviewed by INS agents on the plane just before takeoff from Baltimore-Washington International Airport.

``Many questions will have to be answered by the Clinton administration with regard to its handling of this very disturbing matter,'' Diaz-Balart said. ``Speaking to the six probable asylum applicants after they had already been placed on the plane by Castro's agents was in no way the appropriate environment for interviews to take place.''

INS officials insisted they interviewed the six privately and individually in the airport before their 8:30 a.m. departure on a charter flight to ensure they really wanted to go home, INS spokesman Don Mueller said.

``Each was talked to separately, with no Cuban officials present,'' Mueller said.

State Department officials said they had no comment.

The departure of the six was the latest twist in an unusual two-day defection drama that began with the 330-member Cuban delegation leaving its hotel before dawn Tuesday, well before schedule and just a few hours after the historic 12-6 thrashing of the Baltimore Orioles.

After the Cubans left, Baltimore police announced that one member, former pitcher Rigoberto Betancourt Herrera, 54, was seeking asylum and was in INS custody. Betancourt played on the Cuban national team from 1965 to 1975 and had become a pitching coach.

Asked how the security-conscious Cuban delegation could leave without six of its members, Fernandez said: