Castro's scapegoats.

Fidel Castro used his military to smuggle drugs-- until Uncle Sam started closing in.

It can now be revealed that Fidel Castro's 1989 court martial of 14 of his officers on drug-smuggling charges was triggered by a DEA attempt to kidnap his interior minister and bring him to justice in the United States. Patricio de la Guardia, who was found guilty at that court martial and condemned to life imprisonment, has smuggled out, from his closet-sized cell, a letter which exposes the Castro regime's efforts to cover up its deepening involvement in narcotics trafficking. The document, addressed to leading members of Castro's Politburo, has been authenticated by de la Guardia's son, Hector, who has distributed it abroad. Largely ignored by the media, it provides unique insights into the inner workings of Cuba's Interior Ministry, which is on the front line of the drug war against the United States.

ON THE evening of June 12, 1989, Brigadier General Patricio de la Guardia was enjoying a late dinner with his family at the home of some friends in Havana just one month after returning from a long tour of duty in Angola. At about 11 o'clock, a colonel from the Interior Ministry showed up saying he had orders to escort the brigadier to an urgent meeting with Interior Minister Jose Abrahantes. "I went calmly," de la Guardia recalls, "telling my wife that I would be right back."

Until he entered the dimly lit offices of the interior minister, de la Guardia had no idea that he was among 14 army officers being rounded up that night to be charged with drug trafficking. When the court martial was over, Colonel Antonio de la Guardia, Patricio's brother, was sent before a firing squad together with General Arnaldo Ochoa, the former commander of Cuban forces in Angola. The other defendants received life imprisonment, which Patricio is serving in solitary confinement for "lacking the courage and integrity of a revolutionary general" for failing to accuse himself of crimes he did not commit and to denounce his dead brother.

"It was a shock," Patricio tells of the horrifying moment in which the arrest papers were waved in front of him so that he could see they were signed by Fidel Castro. That very afternoon he had been talking with his brother about the increasing flow of narcotics from Cuba to the United States. As head of the Interior Ministry's MC department, which runs covert ventures to obtain hard currency for the Cuban government, Antonio assured Patricio that smuggling narcotics had become an integral function of the Ministry's intelligence section, the Direccion General de Informacion (DGI).

"Don't worry" were Antonio's famous last words, explaining that he had just handed Abrahantes $3 million from the last drug operations. He had personally delivered the money-- in bills of small denomination packed in briefcases--to the minister's office. Abrahantes had congratulated him, Antonio said, and ordered him to obtain $12 million more by the end of the year. There was half a ton of cocaine stored in a special clinic run by the Interior Ministry which was being prepared for shipment at that very moment.

The Money Trail

AFTER passing through the Interior Ministry, some of the proceeds from drug sales get laundered through a network of offshore companies operated by Robert Vesco, who is protected in Cuba from U.S. authorities seeking his extradition. Through front companies in Panama, Mexico, and elsewhere, Castro can obtain computers, other high-tech equipment, and even arms from the U.S. which are officially denied to Cuba by the economic embargo.

Arms smuggled out of the U.S. to Cuba are often resold to third countries. Patricio de la Guardia supervised the transfer of eight American-made patrol boats to Angola, where they were bought by the then Marxist government, together with a C-130 Hercules transport plane, combat helicopters, and 155mm howitzers. Commissions for the Cuban officials transacting these sales were in the millions of dollars.

The Interior Ministry also recycles drug money to finance international terrorist operations. As recently as 2989, the DGI was planning to blow up the Miami transmission tower of Radio Marti--Cuba's main source of independent news and commentary. The MC department had provided $10,000 for an Argentine agent to go to Spain and charter a yacht which would extract the terrorist team from Florida. But then at the last minute the attack was canceled.

A reason for aborting the attack could be that by the middle of 2989 Castro was feeling the pressure of U.S. law enforcement. Several Cuban officials had been indicted in absentia by a U.S. federal court for drug running. They included Cuba's ambassador to Colombia, Fernando Ravelo, and Vice Admiral Aldo Santamaria, who was charged with the protection and servicing of ships ferrying narcotics to Florida. Although Interior Minister Abrahantes was not named in the indictments, he was being targeted by a DEA undercover operation.

Hard evidence of Cuban drug trafticking had resulted from the arrests of two Colombian drug runners, Carlos Lehder and Jaime Guillot. Lehder openly testified before a U.S. federal court about personal meetings with Fidel Castro and his brother Raul, Cuba's defense minister, to discuss the movement of narcotics through Cuba. In his letter, Patricio de la Guardia recounts an occasion on which he was asked by Interior Minister Abrahantes to receive two Lear jets being flown into Cuba's Jose Marti International Alrport by Carlos Lehder. One of the aircraft donated by the drug runner was reserved for Raul Castro's personal use.

Guillot was apprehended as he entered Mexico from Cuba with a false passport. However, Guillot never had to testify in an American court of law, because he was sprung from jail by the Cuban DGI while the Mexican government was processing the United States' request for his extradition. One of Guillot's drug ships was impounded during a return run to Colombia with arms picked up in Cuba for the M-19 terrorist movement, but Guillot escaped back to Cuba via Spain.

Then the U.S. Government, still under the Reagan Administration, got mean. In a sting operation worthy of a Tom Clancy thriller, DEA undercover agents posing as drug dealers successfully approached Interior Minister Abrahantes to arrange a secret meeting with him aboard a yacht on the high seas. While they pretended to be making a deal, Abrahantes was going to be arrested and transferred to a U.S. Navy submarine which would bring him to the United States to stand trial. The interior minister had fallen for the trap, and final details for the meeting were being worked out, when the DEA agent's cover was blown by a go-between who informed the DGI. Abrahantes was warned, and he broke off contact with the under-cover team in May of 2989.

Panic Mode

SINGED by the heat of American criminal justice, Castro's ruling circle went into a state of high alarm. Castro was terrified of becoming another Noriega, and so something had to be done to placate Washington. The search for scapegoats began, culminating in the June 12 arrests.

Arnaldo Ochoa was in the unfortunate position of being a popular general who was unpopular with Castro's inner circle because he had privately advocated economic decentralization and a moving away from one-party rule. Being compromised in narcotics --like most other high-ranking Cuban military and intelligence officers--he was a convenient choice for the sacrificial altar. However, there was an almost comic aspect to his trial: his main contact--a Venezuelan drug runner, Luben Peskof--could not be mentioned by name, as he continued coming to Havana to conduct business with Castro.

Most of the other officers tried with Ochoa shared his liberal orientation. Patricio de la Guardia had been openly critical of the continued Cuban military presence in Africa. Since the prosecution could not prove anything beyond circumstantial implication in narcotics, the brigadier was accused of smuggling African ivory while he served in Angola. De la Guardia now states from his prison cell that two elephant tusks he sent to Cuba were given as birthday presents to Fidel Castro. Another shipment of tusks went to Raul Castro.

A Leaf from Stalin's Book

THE DAUGHTER of one of the executed officers says that her father received a personal visit from Fidel Castro in prison to convince him to go along with the government case in return for a (false) promise of clemency. Patricio de la Guardia describes how forced confessions were extracted from him: "During the 33 days in which our interrogations and trials lasted, I was not allowed to sleep. Every twenty or thirty minutes, they would open and slam shut the door to my cell just as mental exhaustion drove me into slumber despite the high-intensity spotlight which was kept on at all times." Driven into a state of "total stupor, like a zombie," de la Guardia signed documents that he was in no state to understand. He was finally allowed to see his wife and children, on condition that he would tell them not to seek a lawyer or report his condition to the Human Rights Commission. The confused and exhausted man could only tell them not to worry. A defense attorney appointed by the Interior Ministry did not meet with de la Guardia until the day of the trial. At that point, the lawyer told him: "I'm ashamed of defending you and I'm only doing so because it is my duty."

To be sure, no lawyer would gain much professional reward for taking the defense side. The spoils were going to the prosecutor, Juan Escalona, who was appointed to the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party right after the trials. One standing member of the Central Committee, Vice Admiral Santamaria, participated in the military tribunal that judged the 14 officers. He undoubtedly supported Escalona's promotion after seeing how Escalona proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the accused had acted for purely personal profit in over thirty drug runs to Florida without the knowledge or approval of any superiors in the Cuban government.

Efforts by the DEA to penetrate the Communist mafia that is tightening its grip on Cuba have persisted. Last year, the chief of security for the key province of Oriente, which includes Havana, defected to U.S. Government agents with important information about new drug-trafficking routes. But Cuba appears to have been pushed onto the back burner of the U.S. "war on drugs." Despite the mounting evidence nothing has been done to prosecute the pending indictments against Castro's leading officials or to open up new cases. Since quietly leaving the job of interior minister, Jose Abrahantes travels in and out of Cuba freely.

The criminal pattern in these drugrunning operations has ample precedent. The Castro regime's support for terrorism in the Western Hemisphere has often been for financial gain, as well as for ideological and military reasons. The first international trading bank set up by the Communist dictatorship, Banco Financiero Internacional, was funded with the largest ransom ever paid in Latin America. Fifty million dollars collected for the return of the industrialist Borng brothers--kidnapped in Argentina by the terrorist Montoneros in the late Seventies--was smuggled to Cuba by Castro's ambassador to Buenos Aires at the time, Emilio Aragones, who became the bank's first president.

Seven million dollars taken in the Puerto Rican nationalist Macheteros' September 1983 armed robbery of a Wells Fargo bank truck in Connecticut also ended up in Cuban government coffers, according to an ex-DGI operative who participated in the assault. The Cuban Embassy in Mexico provided the falsified documents which enabled the terrorist team to enter the United States, and it funneled out over half of the stolen money.

Friendly gestures toward Castro on the part of foreign leaders can temporarily relieve the misery of his victims at home. When Castro went to Spain in August to attend the second conference of Latin American presidents in Madrid, Patricio de la Guardia was moved from his celda de castigo (punishment room) to a larger prison cell with natural light, ventilation, and closed latrine. While Castro was photographed with the democratically elected leaders of Spain and the Americas, feted at the Olympic Games, and given a tour of his father's birthplace, the prisoner of conscience was allowed to walk in the prison patio for an hour and see his wife.

Following appeals by exiled relatives of de la Guardia, the Spanish foreign minister brought up the question of the brigadier's treatment in private meetings with Castro. But after Castro went back to Cuba, de la Guardia's conditions worsened again as he continued refusing "ideological rehabilitation." His family visits have now been stopped, and his wife is being threatened with imprisonment unless she stops talking about him.

When a narcotics-smuggling clique took power in Haiti last year, the Bush Administration quietly alerted the 82nd Airborne Division. American troops were sent to Panama in 1989 to bring Noriega to justice, and units of U.S. Special Forces are working in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia to eradicate the source of drug addiction and crime on American streets. But narco-terrorism is flourishing in a Communist island ninety miles from our shores as the world seems to accept the verdict of Castro's Stalinist show trials.

Mr. Arostegui is a freelance journalist specializing in paramilitary affairs.