BY ELAINE DE VALLE
edevalle@herald.com

The last time Nohemi Herbello Cruz saw her mother, it was on the other side of the Florida Straits nearly two years ago.

'MY LITTLE GIRL': Milagros Cruz Cano, who was exiled from Cuba nearly two years ago, greets her daughter Nohemi Herbello Cruz, at Miami International Airport on Tuesday after the girls' arrival from Cuba via Cancún.

``She said, `Mama, take Chulito and Pelusa out of the cage and let me go with you, dressed like a puppy,' '' Cruz said.

On Tuesday, exactly 651 days later, Nohemi -- along with grandmother Silvia Caridad Cano and her aunt, Marlen Reyes Cruz -- was reunited with her mother after she arrived in Miami on American Airlines Flight 2186 from Cancún, Mexico. She left Havana for Cancún earlier in the day. Both cried as Cruz stroked her daughter's long, brown braid and the back of her pink shirt. ``Mi chiquitica. Mi chiquitica,'' she said. ``My little girl.''

``Nobody knows how a mother suffers when she is ripped from her child. There are no words to describe it,'' she said. ``I'm happy because many mothers have told me of waiting 10 and 15 years to reunite with their children.''

Cruz left Cuba on Oct. 19, 1999, after years of harassment, repeated beatings and a forced stay in a Havana psychiatric ward for her expressed views against Fidel Castro.

``They tried to make me crazy so they could put me on TV and say, `See? She's crazy. That's why she says such things,' '' she said Tuesday as she waited for Nohemi to arrive. ``They could not give themselves that pleasure, so they kidnapped my girl.''

At the height of the Elián González struggle, Cruz staged a 41-day hunger strike to gain international attention to her case. Tuesday, she thanked U.S. Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz-Balart for their efforts to help her and credited international pressure with Cuba's decision to grant her family exit permits. She wrote to every Latin American president, she said, and sent a video explaining her plight to Pope John Paul II.

``She has suffered such harsh reprisals, as have many of her family members because of Milagros' activity with the struggle for human rights in Cuba,'' Ros-Lehtinen said of the the 33-year-old mother who lives in a Little Havana apartment and plays the guitar for customers at the ¡Ño, Que Barato! store in Hialeah .

OTHER REUNIONS

Tuesday's reunion was the third in little more than a month following the flights from Havana of three other children to join parents abroad after years of delays.

Leonel Córdova -- whose dramatic defection last year from a medical mission in Zimbabwe made international headlines -- greeted his children at the same airport on July 3. His wife and two children -- 4-year-old Giselle and 11-year-old Yusniel -- got visas to enter the United States in December but had not been able to get exit permits.

Two weeks after his wife died in a traffic accident, the children were allowed to leave the island.

In late June, 11-year-old Sandra Becerra Jova -- who had been denied an exit permit for more than four years against her parents' wills -- arrived in an airport in Sao Paolo, Brazil, where her parents had been living since the mid 1990s.

``It's wonderful for these families, but it doesn't change an evil man overnight and nobody is being fooled by it,'' said Ros-Lehtinen.

A CONCERN FOR IMAGE?

Max Castro, senior research associate at the University of Miami's North/South Center, said the Cuban government was sending a "positive message'' not only to the White House but also to the Cuban community in the United States and the world.

"I think they're calibrating these kinds of things with concern to international appearance and image,'' said Castro.

Still, Charles Shapiro, Cuba Desk chief at the U.S. State Department, says more than 70 Cubans in the United States are trying get relatives out of Cuba.

"On a personal level, it's tremendous that Nohemi is released, that Dr. Córdova got his children,'' Shapiro said.

"Every time there is a case they release, there are others still being held,'' he said.