Castro's latest coup.

THERE IS only one question about the Clinton Administration's recent policy changes regarding Cuba. Were they the victory of ideology over politics, or the product of a cynical calculation about Florida politics? Either way, they were a victory for Castro over 35 years of bipartisan American policy on Cuba.

The changes are easy to describe. First, Cubans who have been in detention camps in our Guantanamo Bay Naval Base will be admitted to the United States over the next couple of years, despite Janet Reno's stern-faced declarations that hell would freeze over before that happened. Those declarations were foolish when made, and faced with endless CNN shots of mothers and babies behind barbed wire -- our barbed wire -- the Administration gave in to reality.

The second change is much more significant, indeed historic. Refugees from Cuban Communism, hitherto welcomed into the United States, will now be forcibly handed over to the Castro regime by the U.S. Coast Guard. Of course, Castro has promised that no one who is sent back will be mistreated, and President Clinton promises that no one in real danger will be sent back. These two promises have about equal credibility.

The new policy is monstrous. This country never threw anyone back over the Berlin Wall; we never turned a Soviet Jew or Pentecostal over to the KGB; and under Presidents of both parties, we never turned a Cuban refugee over to Castro. Until Bill Clinton came along.

In both moral and international legal terms, this is a departure for the United States. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own." This right to emigrate has been repeatedly endorsed by American Presidents and American Congresses, and formed the basis of the famous "Jackson-Vanik Amendment," which penalized the Soviet Union and other Communist countries for their refusal to allow freedom to emigrate.

Needless to say, we have the right and responsibility to stop Cuban government provocations like Mariel, and to use the U.S. Navy to prevent them. But to return to Cuba individuals who have risked their lives to flee its Communist system is, to use Sakharov's word, a betrayal. Consider the prison that Castro's Cuba, by all accounts, remains. Thus:

-- It is a crime to try to leave Cuba without government permission. How, under international law, can we return someone whose very act of leaving constituted a prosecutable offense in his homeland?

-- How will Cuban government assurances against harassment be monitored? Suppose that one month after being returned, a former refugee is arrested for vagrancy, or theft, or who knows what trumped-up charge. How will we know what really happened? What due process will he get in trying to clear himself? What if he is mistreated not by the Cuban police but by the mobs that are called Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, so that the government can claim its innocence while life for the returnee is a living hell?

-- Finally, and perhaps worst of all, are we keeping Cubans from entering the United States illegally, as Administration spokesmen claim -- or are we keeping any and every Cuban from fleeing Cuba, regardless of his destination? How can we be sure that the Cubans we apprehend are not aiming for Jamaica, or the Caymans, or the Bahamas? In fact we are now acting in place of the Cuban authorities to enforce their draconian laws regarding emigration. The U.S. Coast Guard has been assigned to act as Fidel Castro's Coast Guard.

WHAT could possibly have motivated the Administration to adopt this repellent policy? There are two explanations. The first is pure politics -- the idea that people in Florida don't want any more Cuban refugees, and it's an important state, so let's just block the refugee flow. Sure, the Miami Cubans will be mad, but most of them vote Republican anyway, and there are more "anti-Cuban" votes in Florida than Cuban votes.

The second explanation is pure ideology -- the strong desire of some in the Administration, apparently including Peter Tarnoff (Under Secretary of State) and Morton Halperin (now of the National Security Council staff, since the Senate's refusal to confirm him for a Pentagon post) to "normalize" relations with Cuba. By this they mean, end the embargo and stop the Cold War - era special treatment of Cuban refugees.

The problem with this view is that the old refugee policy reflected not some bizarre Cold War ideology, but the facts of life in Cuba -- that it was and is governed by a Communist regime that denies the most elementary human rights. So we have stopped acting as if they were Communists; the only problem is that they haven't, and like all Communist regimes the one in Havana produces refugees. Now for the first time, our forces will work hand in glove with the Cuban dictatorship to prevent emigration. We are new warders in Castro's jail.

This is quite a coup for Castro, and the way he achieved it surely delighted him. For the deal was reached in secret negotiations conducted without the knowledge of the State Department's experts at the Cuba desk (who have since sought and received re-assignment). What can such secret deals bring Castro next? On the entire Clinton foreign policy team -- Bill (and Hillary); Anthony Lake and Richard Feinberg at the National Security Council; Warren Christopher, Strobe Talbott, and Tarnoff at the State Department -- there isn't one single person who favors a hard line against Castro. Every one of them, as Castro had reason to suspect and now knows for sure, wants to apologize for the embargo and adopt a more "mature" policy.

Now Americans have yet another reason to hope that Fidel Castro's regime -- or Bill Clinton's government -- ends in 1996. We have an honorable policy of opposing Communism in Cuba for 35 years, sometimes at great risk. It is shameful to compromise it all on the altar of Cold War revisionism.