Workers at Havana's Nacional and Capri Hotels lied to foreign visitors Sunday, denying that any attacks had taken place. But other Cubans were saying they feared the two bombs that racked the hotels could signal a return of the anti-Castro bombings of the 1960s.

``Everyone my generation remembers those bombs, and people are saying that they are afraid we're going back to those days,'' said Ligio Sanchez, a 53-year-old Havana high school teacher.

Cuba's official media focused Sunday on two other stories -- Saturday's return of the remains of guerrilla icon Ernesto ``Che'' Guevara and the crash late Friday of a Cuban airliner that killed 44 people.

Civil Aviation Institute officials said scuba divers and search boats had recovered 21 bodies and the so-called ``black boxes'' from the waters off the eastern city of Santiago where the Cubana de Aviacion airliner crashed.

Divers were working against strong currents and great depths, the officials said, in the area where the Soviet-built Antonov 24 plane went down just three minutes after it took off on a flight to Havana.

The airport in Santiago, Cuba's second-largest city, is on a bluff near the entrance to the bay, near the famous El Morro castle built by the Spaniards in the 1700s and 1800s.

Floating pieces of the twin-engine turboprop also have been recovered, the institute said, but the search continues for the rest of the bodies and much of the aircraft itself.

Thirty-six Cubans, including a crew of five, were aboard, along with six Spaniards and two Brazilians.

The mayor of Santiago, Luis Estruch, said seven ships as well as a number of helicopters and diving teams were participating in the search about three miles off the coast.

Institute officials said a 40-member commission has been named to look into the crash, and government officials have carefully stayed away from making any connections between the crash and Saturday's twin bombings.

Cuban television abandoned its regular programming to broadcast mostly revolutionary films and documentaries Sunday in sober honor of the Argentine-born Guevara, captured and killed in Bolivia in 1967.

Television showed a brief film of a clearly distressed President Fidel Castro at a military airport where the plane carrying Guevara's remains landed.

Break in secrecy

In a highly unusual break with Cuba's tradition of government secrecy that underlined the seriousness of the bombings, the media published a government statement confirming the explosions and blaming them on U.S.-based groups.

Cuban television's main news program made it the last item of its program Saturday night, and the newspaper Juventud Rebelde, the only one published in Havana on Sundays, carried a two-paragraph notice.

But Havana residents said the blasts were the talk of the city Sunday, with Cubans exchanging gossip and speculation on who might have been behind it and taking discreet walks past the hotels to see the damage for themselves.

``There was some fear last night that something would happen after midnight because of the tugboat anniversary,'' said one resident contacted by phone, referring to the third anniversary of the Cuban sinking of a tugboat in which 41 people died trying to flee the communist-ruled island.

One Havana resident said she learned of the bombings only when a relative telephoned from Miami on Sunday. A man who was visiting the neighboring province of Pinar del Rio on Saturday said he learned of them only when he returned to Havana.

Neighbors talking

But four Havana residents said neighbors had been going house to house much of Saturday night to talk about the blasts and avoid the telephones.

``People are a little afraid that things are getting so bad that we're going into a period of violence,'' a 50-year-old hairdresser said. ``The idea of bombs, like in the '60s, just shakes people.''

Anti-Castro groups carried out a string of bombings of public places in the '60s, including stores and theaters. Castro used the campaign to justify a harsh crackdown that led to thousands of detentions and a number of executions.

But Cuba has experienced little political violence since then, and the government traditionally went far out of its way to hide any incidents, keeping them out of the local media.

Partitioned off

Foreign visitors to the Nacional and Capri hotels said Sunday that workers have erected wooden partitions around the damaged areas and hotel employees were denying that any bombs exploded.

``Just a small problem with the telephones,'' a worker at the Nacional, where the bomb destroyed the switchboard and telephone booth area, told a visitor.

Another insisted he had just arrived on duty and had no idea what had happened even as one of Castro's top aides, Felipe Perez, walked by on an inspection tour of the damage, the visitor reported.

At the Capri, a telephone operator repeated that ``some glass windows fell down.'' Asked about the Cuban television and newspaper reports of bombs, she insisted: ``Everything is fine. No one was injured. There's no reason to worry.''

Copyright © 1997 The Miami Herald