Godfather Fidel.

AS HIS FLIGHT from Havana to Moscow refueled at Madrid one morning in October, Cuban army major Luis Galeana slipped out of the transit lounge for his prearranged connection with agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. He was quickly whisked out of Barajas airport and taken to a nearby safehouse; within 48 hours he had departed for the United States.

This is a highly sensitive defection for Cuba and a hot one to handle for the DEA. Galeana is carrying fresh evidence implicating Castro in narcotics traffic at a time when the ex-dictator of Panama, Manuel Antonio Noriega, is standing trial for the same offenses in Florida. Castro has already proved that he is ready to go to any lengths to keep the information from becoming public, and the government of Spain, which maintains important diplomatic and commercial ties with Havana, would rather avoid embarrassing him. Just a few years ago, an attempt by Cuban embassy thugs to kidnap a fleeing Cuban diplomat on the streets of Madrid met with nothing more than a mild protest by the Socialist government of Felipe Gonzalez.

A hermetic silence has been kept over the defection of Galeana. A veteran of the war in Angola, the major had been planning his move for several months, becoming a DEA asset when he was assigned to the section of Cuba's Interior Ministry responsible for Castro's personal security. While guarding the 26 villas which Castro reserves for his own use, Galeana came upon intelligence concerning shipments of refined cocaine entering Texas and Louisiana via Cuba over the past two years. This time frame is vital because it was in 1989 that Castro tried to clear himself of drug-smuggling charges by pinning the blame on Galeana's former commander in Angola, General Arnaldo Ochoa, and 13 other Cuban military officers who were executed after a much publicized trial in Havana. Galeana brought six microfilms out with him which also contain some important military information.

With the impending withdrawal of Soviet armed forces from Cuba and the ending of subsidies to the Cuban economy, the Castro regime is being unrestrained in its pursuit of the new patrons it needs to keep alive. Cuba may be not only expanding its role as a trans-shipment point for drug deals but for arranging with China to sell nuclear secrets to the Middle East as well.

In its first open defiance of the Soviet line at the United Nations, Cuba was one of the few countries to back Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. It is now revealed by a group of Cuban exile leaders who visited the Soviet Union and met with Foreign Minister Boris Pankin that Fidel Castro's son, Fidel Castro Diaz Balart, who is a Soviet-trained nuclear physicist, has recently visited Iran. According to the Soviet interpretations of Fidelito's trips, Cuba is proposing to aid Teheran in its development of nuclear technology, together with China and North Korea, in exchange for oil.

China's nuclear sales to Iran have caused serious strains between Washington and Peking. Yet it is hardly ever mentioned that a Soviet-built reactor plant remains in Cuba, and, despite the withdrawal of Soviet technicians, the regime has managed to retain the necessary plans and operational data to keep the facility in service. There is an unconfirmed report that two Chinese submarines are now based at a Cuban naval installation on the Isla de Pinos. The latest Cuban Communist Party Congress resolved to expand ties with the People's Republics of China, Vietnam, and North Korea, "which like Cuba have chosen the true path towards socialist edification."

Nuclear deals with terrorist ayatollahs and safe harbor for Chinese subs would hardly be surprising on the part of Castro, who during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis advised Khrushchev to launch a nuclear strike against the United States. But hard evidence on Castro's involvement in drug traffic could explode the puritanical image that Castro still tries to maintain as a justification for the degenerating living conditions in Cuba.

CASTRO has been terrified of the kind of U.S. federal indictment which led to the capture and trial of General Noriega, ever since the first Medellin cartel boss to be extradited to the U.S., Carlos Lehder Rivas, pointed to Cuba's role in drug running. Lehder, who is now a key witness at the Noriega trials, declared in public court testimony in 1987 that he had personally met with Fidel Castro to discuss the transshipment of narcotics through Cuba.

It was for this reason that Castro went to great lengths to pressure General Ochoa and the officers tried with him in 1989 to confess their guilt in twenty or more drug runs to Florida stating for the legal record that they had done it for personal gain and without the knowledge or approval of superiors in the Cuban government. How Castro maneuvered his officers into signing their false confessions is told by the daughter of Colonel Antonio de la Guardia, one of those prosecuted with Ochoa. Ileana de la Guardia, who now lives in Paris, says her father told her during her last visit with him in prison that Castro had met with him alone for three hours and given his personal assurances that "nothing will happen to him or to the family" if he toed the line. Colonel de la Guardia was shot by a firing squad the day after his sentencing.

No one acquainted with the totalitarian police state in Cuba could seriously believe that activities on the scale described by the defendants-extensive use of Cuban territorial waters and air space by drug-ferrying boats and aircraft, their refueling and repairs at Cuban installations, use of military radar cover and communications-could go on over a period of several years without the explicit approval and direction of Fidel Castro and his brother Raul, who is Cuba's defense minister. A clear example of the scrupulous fairness of the trials was the presence among Ochoa's judges of Admiral Aldo Santamaria Cuadrado, a member of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, indicted in absentia by a U.S. Federal Court on November 15, 1982, for supervising the resupplying of ships smuggling drugs to the U.S.

In his courtroom testimony, Ochoa made repeated reference to a "foreign friend" who had proposed the sale and transport of narcotics through Cuba. Castro said, in personal comments following the trial, that it was in Cuba's interest to keep the identity of the "foreign friend" a secret. An operative of Cuba's Interior Ministry who recently left Cuba (Jorge Ricardo Massetti, an Argentine who started working for Cubans when he was a member of the urban guerrilla Popular Revolutionary Army, and who is married to Ileana de la Guardia) positively identifies the foreign friend as a Venezuelan ex-guerrilla leader turned businessman by the name of Luban Peskof. Peskof's ties with Castro date back to the late Sixties, when he started the Cuban-backed National Liberation Army (ELN) in Venezuela.

PESKOF first came into contact with Ochoa when the general had just been transferred from his command of Cuban forces in Angola to coordinate military support for the Sandinistas taking power in Nicaragua. At that time Peskof suggested to Ochoa purchasing arms for the Nicaraguans through a bank account in Panama protected by General Noriega, who doubled for Cuba's intelligence service, the DGI, while working for the CIA.

Like other Cuban-trained guerrilla leaders such as Navarro Wolf of the Colombian M-19, who is now running for president of Colombia, Peskof entered the narcotics trade as a way of becoming politically and financially more powerful. The intelligence and banking connections he already had for purchasing arms and depositing ransoms collected from terrorist kidnappings provided the necessary network for the more profitable drug deals. The reason Castro wants to keep Peskof's name off the record is that he continues carrying out important business dealings with Havana. Peskof was seen meeting with high-level Cuban officials at the time of the Conzumel conference last October 27, when Castro was in Mexico trying to strike an oil deal with the presidents of Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico.

"The difference between Castro and Noriega," according to one high-level Cuban defector, "is that Castro does not work for the CIA." Since Castro is not as vulnerable to U.S. pressures as Noriega, the drug bosses have looked to him as the more formidable man to reckon with. An aide to Noriega, Jose Blandon Castillo, whose testimony before a Miami grand jury in 1988 led to Noriega's indictment, says that Castro mediated between the Medellin cartel and Noriega, whom the cartel once even tried to kill because he had bowed to U.S. wishes and allowed the DEA to raid a cocaine processing laboratory in Panama. On one occasion they approached the Spanish Basque terrorist group ETA to assassinate Noriega when he was touring Europe. (This may explain why Noriega was willing to risk U.S. prison rather than accept Spanish offers of asylum.)

A few days after the U.S. military intervention in Panama, during which Noriega was captured, his private yacht, El Bravo, carrying several members of his family, was docking at the Hemingway Marina in Barlovento, an exclusive resort outside Havana. Noriega's wife and daughters threw a big bash on the 18-cabin transatlantic cruiser. The guest of honor was Fidel Castro, who pulled up in his caravan of three Mercedes Benzes along with Osmani Cienfuegos, a top member of the Cuban politburo. Also enjoying the champagne and expensive food on board El Bravo was Robert Vesco, the fugitive American financier who docks his yacht at the same marina.

At a time when urban bus lines in Cuba are being reduced by 50 per cent, reflecting the oil shortage, and Cuban workers are being urged to buy Chinese-made bicycles, Vesco moves around in a two-car convoy with a security escort provided by the Interior Ministry. It is said that Vesco has paid Castro close to $1 billion for protection from U.S. extradition charges. Vesco has been in Cuba since Costa Rica seemed about to cave in to U.S. pressures to hand him over. He is serving Castro in a variety of operations to circumvent Cuba's economic embargo.

AS CUBA's economy decays, the Castro government grows increasingly brutal and corrupt. But the energies of average Cubans are so concentrated on daily survival that they have not been galvanized in a mass movement to topple Castro. The question is how long will Castro's 300,000-man army, most of whom are combat veterans, continue to put up with supporting an outlaw regime? Galeana's defection may in itself be proof of growing disaffection among the ranks of the officers.

Unfortunately, those in the U.S. who would be in the best position to galvanize opposition to Castro are doing very little. The U.S. State Department is promoting "dialogues" between moderate Cuban exile leaders and the Castro regime to organize a smooth transition. Radio Marti, the radio service set up to broadcast into Cuba, devotes much of its air time to nostalgic radio programs that were popular in the 1950s.

The current lackadaisical and disjointed U.S. approach to Cuba is partly the result of the end of the cold war, with Cuba no longer perceived as a security threat. But Fidel Castro is not going to leave power without a fight, and as long as his regime remains in place we will continue to have problems ninety miles off our shores. A U.S. indictment against Castro on smuggling and other charges could be what is needed to bring about his end. Radio Marti would have to broadcast it, and his army, fearing Ochoa's fate, may be stirred up enough to remove Castro before he betrays any more of them.