I am having great success in getting my cuttings to root, thanks to all whom have taught me, but I really need to figure out how to toughen or harden the roots prior to moving them to cups.  I believe if there were a way to toughen the roots my plant infant mortality would be a lot less.

Is there a process, such as light exposure, compression, etc or a rooting medium enhancement, such as an organic chemical (hormone) etc??  I am using Spag moss in Plastic shoe boxes in a dim corner in my garage and transferring the rooted cuttings to a 50-50 perlite/peat mix.

The survivors look great.  The ones that don't make it generally fail after an initial, small leafing, 1 or 2 leafs, growing to 1-1 1/2 in and then withering and dying.  It is real frustrating to have a nice set of roots and then have it die.

It happens to the best of us. Having a cutting start out growing roots and leaves only to crash that is. I don't know of a method to toughen roots at that stage, guess the best thing is, if in doubt about moving to cups wait a week. 

A lot of it seems to be inherent in the variety. I can do 10 cuttings of one variety, and get 9-10 successes. The next variety can have abundant roots and still fail 9 or 10 out of 10. And the same varieties seem to have issues every year.

I have had pretty good luck moving them to cups earlier, when roots are very short so they will not be broken when put into a cup. If there are no leaves and good roots (many thick ones emerging) showing I put directly in a bright spot, if there are leaves and the roots are not great I pot them and put in a bin that has higher humidity. I think the only thing to harden roots is a good environment for them and time. The connection of root and cutting is the most important thing to be careful of, if broken then the cutting will almost certainly die from a pathogen entering at that spot.

Crazy plants these friends we call figs!  I can take 5 cuttings from the same branch and get 100% rooting and 100% survival thru the cup stage, I can take 5 cuttings from the branch next to it get 100% roots and experience 50 % mortality upon early leafing.  I can set them all side by side, same sunlight, same water, same everything and get 50% mortality in one group, and 0% mortality in the other, and I don't know why.

I almost never lose any from bag to pot, but I haven't tried any Ichia Black or other ultra-twitchy varieties.  I take it out of the bag into a 1 gal pot as soon as I see roots longer than 2.5 - 3 inches.  I think 1:1 perlite/peat mix is too water retentive.  Look for Al's 5:1:1 mix.  You can use perlite instead of sand.  In your heat you might be better off using the Napa Floor dry or Turface instead of the sand.  The point is to avoid very fine particles that fill the airspaces in the soil that figs need.  10% peat might be ok, 50% will fill every available airspace.  Good luck!