Spain offers 200,000 a get-out-of-Cuba card

Marisabel, a warehouse clerk in her 40s, wants to leave Cuba and move to Spain. A tattered piece of paper -- her grandmother's Spanish birth certificate -- may allow her to do that.

Marisabel is one of thousands of Cubans who have applied for Spanish passports since Spain enacted a new citizenship law in December. Officially known as the Law of Historic Memory, it grants citizenship to the children and grandchildren of Spaniards who fled the country during the Spanish Civil War or were exiled during the regime of Gen. Francisco Franco.

The Spanish government estimates that more than a million people worldwide will become citizens, including as many as 210,000 Cubans, or 1.9 percent of the population of the island. The Spanish Consulate in Miami is also expecting several thousand applications, mostly from South Floridians of Cuban and Venezuelan descent.

For Cubans still living on the island, the new law offers a legal, safe and not terribly difficult alternative to the way so many have escaped -- spending $10,000 to ride a fast boat across the Florida Straits, or marrying a foreigner.

Since the law was passed, the Spanish newspaper El País has called the consulate in Havana the ''factory of Spaniards'' because so many people are eligible and trying to take advantage of it.

''There was a large migration to the island of Cuba from the beginnings of the last century until the 1930s and 1940s and later,'' explained Pablo Barrios, the Spanish consul general in Havana.

The law, often referred to as the law of grandchildren, was passed as an effort to make amends to the families of people forced to flee Spain during some of the darker moments of that country's recent history. The law makes it possible for people to apply for Spanish passports for the next two years, with a provision for the deadline to be extended for another year.

When it was passed, the Spanish government was expecting 75,000 and 100,000 applications in Havana every year.

''Now it looks like it will be closer to 100,000,'' Barrios said.

His office already has set up appointments to interview 40,000 Cubans and is talking with about 220 a day, he said. He hopes to interview 350 a day once a variety of technical problems with the process are worked out. The problems include misinformation spreading through Havana's rumor mill and an inability to get more phone lines installed in the consulate to handle the volume of inquiries.

The consular staff in Havana was nearly doubled to handle all the work, and Barrios expects to issue between 50,000 and 70,000 new Spanish passports each year the law is in effect.

HIGH INTEREST

The consulate in Miami has been inundated with requests for information, receiving as many as 4,000 calls a day, according to Santiago Cabañas, consul general. His office did 572 interviews in January and is booked