CUBAN DEFECTORS CHOSE FREEDOM OVER ATHLETIC GLORY.

Byline: Daily News Wire Services

For Ramon Garbey and Joel Casamayor, the years of training, success, and intense political pressure, their frustrations and hopes, sports and personal identity, all came together a week ago in Guadalajara, Mexico.

As highly rated members of the Cuban Olympic boxing team, training in Mexico, they recalled that their coaches effectively presented them with a choice of either standing on a podium later this month at the Atlanta Games accepting what almost certainly would have been silver or gold medals, or languishing in shame back in Cuba, removed from the team, for their refusal to join or support the Communist Party.

In a way, each independently stood up for one facet of the Olympic ideal: They decided the issue was one of personal will, and they exerted theirs.

They abandoned the prospects of Olympic gold - Casamayor, 24, a bantamweight, had already won a gold medal in Barcelona, Spain, four years ago - fled the Cuban training camp in Guadalajara independently, made their way to Tijuana near the U.S. border and last Sunday stumbled on each other and embraced with great shouts of surprise before crossing.

They had just left their families behind - joining an exodus of athletes from Cuba in recent years, in part because of declining economic conditions - and were unexpectedly detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service at a holding center at El Centro, in the California desert. But Garbey, a 25-year-old super middleweight, said in an interview here on Thursday that he did not really mind.

``I was detained, but I was safe and I was free,'' said Garbey, a serious man whose face and hands, like Casamayor's, bore the scars of a fighter.

The boxers were released late on Wednesday and were flown by their lawyer to Los Angeles after a strange odyssey that quickly brought them face to face with American ways and capitalism.

Their clandestine flight across Mexico and a near disaster at the border on Sunday left them looking surprisingly calm and confident, and little interested in discussing a critical issue their flight has raised: whether Cuba will send its entire Olympic team to Atlanta or hold it back to prevent more embarrassing defections. Casamayor admitted that he had planned to defect in Atlanta before it became clear that he might not be sent there. In the 1990s, more than 70 Cuban athletes with international experience have defected, mainly to the United States and Puerto Rico.

They met reporters under a freeway overpass Wednesday night, jet liners screaming overhead, their lawyers interrupting them to answer some of the questions by declaring that the boxers hated communism and Fidel Castro.

Their laywer, Frank E. Ronzio, an immigration specialist who also manages professional fighters, told of how another group of lawyers and promoters tried to hijack the boxers in El Centro after their release and sign them up - a hint of the sort of flim-flam men who await them at the fringes of the boxing world.

U.S. beats Cuba: Travis Lee and Jason Williams homered early and the U.S. Olympic baseball team used four double plays and clutch pitching to defeat Cuba 8-4 in Norfolk, Va.

The victory gave the Americans, playing their first game since the roster was trimmed from 25 players to 20 late Wednesday, a 2-3 record against Cuba, which heads for Atlanta seeking to defend its Olympic title in baseball.

The U.S. jumped on Cuban pitchers Ernesto Guevara and Elicier Montes d'Oca for six runs in the first three innings as Williams and Lee each homered. Lee's three-run shot in the third made it 6-1.

Cuba rallied against starter R.A. Dickey, drawing to within 6-4 in the fifth before Jim Parque and Braden Looper combined to keep the Cubans at bay over the final five innings. Parque, of Crescenta Valley High and UCLA, pitched three innings for the victory.

On a roll: Lisa Fernandez pitched a perfect game and Michelle Smith followed with a one-hitter as the U.S. softball team swept a doubleheader against a pair of All-Star teams in Decatur, Ga., and finished its pre-Olympic tour with a 60-1 record.

Neither Fernandez nor Smith allowed an earned run during the pre-Olympic tour in 13 starts apiece. The U.S. team, the heavy favorite for the gold medal at the Atlanta games, outscored their opponents 441-3 on the tour.

Fernandez retired all 15 batters in a 9-0 victory over the Atlanta All-Stars in a game called after 4-1/2 innings because of the eight-run rule.

Smith, who struck out 13, had to go extra innings for her win as Gillian Boxx hit a two-out, two-run homer in the eighth for the 2-0 victory over the Tennessee All-Stars.

U.S. wins: Substitute Cindy Parlow, the youngest player on the women's U.S. Olympic soccer team, scored on a bouncing header in the 81st minute to give the Americans a 2-1 victory over Australia in an exhibition match in Tampa, Fla.

Parlow, an 18-year-old sophomore at the University of North Carolina, entered the game midway through the second half. She had three consecutive scoring chances, and connected with nine minutes remaining after taking a crossing pass from Mia Hamm.

It was the 12th straight victory for the U.S. team.

Early showdown: Michael Johnson and Frankie Fredericks, the hottest sprinters in track, meet for the first time this year two weeks before the Olympics in the 200-meter dash at today's Bislett Games in Oslo, Norway.

Fredericks is switching to the 200 after two sizzling races in the 100, 9.86 on Wednesday and 9.87 last week. His stunning performances came after a brilliant indoor season in which he broke the 100 and 200 world records.

``This is the only time we're going to meet before Atlanta, so I think that whoever wins tomorrow will have the mental edge going into the Olympics,'' Fredericks said Thursday night.

Sailing along: The Olympic torch didn't arrive in Miami on Independence Day via a sweaty runner or breathless cyclist.

Instead, for the first time during its 15,000-mile trek to the Olympic Games at Atlanta, the 3-1/2-pound torch was put aboard a Short Sunderland - a 57,000-pound flying boat once used to search for Nazis during World War II.