Return of the godfather.

IN OUR last episodes (see NR, Dec. 18, 1991, and Dec. 28, 1992), Godfather Fidel was secretly protecting fugitive financier Robert Vesco while contriving drug-trafficking accusations against his own army officers in order to deflect DEA investigations into his regime. General Ochoa and 13 other Cuban officers who had loyally served in Africa and Central America were being shot by firing squad or condemned to life in dungeons while Vesco was drinking champagne on board General Noriega's visiting yacht and driving to meetings with top Castro officials in Mercedes limousines.

But Vesco is now suffering the fate of others who outlive their usefulness to Castro. After denying his presence in Cuba for more than ten years, Havana announced his arrest in June. Another coup which the maximum leader can be sure media sycophants will give the appropriate spin.

The New York Times set the tone in a breezy editorial about how the arrest should speed up the thaw in relations between Washington and Havana. Cuban officials were working overtime to expedite Vesco's extradition, according to the Times, which blamed the U.S. State Department for holding up the paperwork. Time magazine had a team of federal marshals standing by for Vesco's historic handover. But a week later, the Washington Post had to report in a back-page story that Cuba has no intention of returning Vesco, who stands accused of ``conspiring with foreign agents.'' The Godfather had spoken: ``It's an immorality to use a human being as a pawn in international negotiations.''

Castro surely had stronger reasons for arresting Vesco than to make magnanimous gestures to U.S. law-enforcement officials -- who are the last people he wants his disgraced protege to see. Vesco might yet prove a useful card in the high-stakes game of secret negotiations with the Clinton Administration to lift the U.S. trade embargo. But according to a highly placed Cuban source who was recently in Havana, the move was triggered by even more urgent considerations. It is suspected that Vesco was building his own bridges to American authorities. Possibly anticipating the end of Castro and the loss of his last refuge, he was secretly bargaining for reduced U.S. sentencing in exchange for revealing the depth of Cuban government corruption. ``Don't be surprised if Vesco suddenly dies of a heart attack in prison,'' says the source. ``That can easily happen to a man nearing sixty.''

Among the matters that Vesco might clarify are the recorded testimonies by convicted Colombian drug lords and Cuban defectors about meetings held in Havana with Fidel's brother, Defense Minister Raul Castro, to arrange the transshipment of drugs to the United States. He might shed some light on the policy of laundering ransoms from terrorist kidnappings through Cuban state banks. He might know about the large commissions earned from illegal sales of American C-130 aircraft, high-speed patrol boats, helicopters, and Howitzer guns smuggled out of the U.S. by a Cuban-American and one-time CIA employee who is currently in a Florida prison. Cuban officials who resold the arms to Angola have yet to be prosecuted, and it's believed that a lot of their money passed through Vesco.

Fifteen years of U.S. investigations have already led to defections by Cuban security officials like Major Luis Galeana, who was picked up by DEA agents in 1991. There are also operations which have been frustrated, like an effort to sting one of Castro's Interior ministers. Federal indictments have been filed in absentia against Cuba's former ambassador to Colombia, Fernando Ravelo, and Admiral Aldo Santamaria, a member of the Cuban Communist Party's Central Committee who is accused of arranging naval support for drug-carrying vessels. Santamaria was among the officers presiding over the kangaroo court that condemned Ochoa.

THE uncovering of Cuba's official Mafia is something Castro cannot risk at a time when a last-ditch public-relations offensive is under way to maneuver President Clinton into vetoing the bill to tighten the American trade embargo. Castro also needs to present a good face in Europe, where his good friend, Spain's scandal-ridden Socialist prime minister, Felipe Gonzalez, is barely managing to survive in power as he assumes the rotating presidency of the European Community. His priorities include arranging a special EC trade deal for Cuba, where Spanish firms are heavily invested. In the wave of corruption cases which have shaken Gonzalez's government over the past year, private banking sources have indicated that several leading Socialist ministers own personal investments and properties in Cuba. There are reports that Castro's personal finances are handled through Madrid by a high-level operative of the Cuban Direccion General de Inteligencia (DGI) who runs a Cuban tourist agency.

Inside Castro's prisons, Vesco might get re-acquainted with Patricio de la Guardia, the DGI officer assigned to him when he first set up his base around the yacht marinas of Barlovento outside Havana. Colonel de la Guardia, whose brother Antonio was shot along with General Ochoa in 1989, is still in jail for refusing to support the verdicts handed down in those Stalinist proceedings. Patricio set up security arrangements and a satellite communications system for Vesco's villa, and he handpicked Vesco's troop of bodyguards.

ALONG with far worthier men who have been betrayed by Castro, Vesco is becoming another dark skeleton in the regime's cramped closets. Every ``calibrated'' step taken to meet conditions for the lifting of U.S. sanctions -- for example, the token release of six political prisoners in May -- must be painstakingly choreographed to prevent the secrets from spilling onto the diplomatic carpets. If, as is now required by U.S. laws governing the embargo, Castro were to free all of his political prisoners (estimates of the total number run close to 1,500), allow opposition groups to organize openly, publish their own newspapers, and get access to radio and TV, the regime would collapse in no time, according to a Cuban lawyer who is fruitlessly trying to promote some sort of constructive dialogue between the Cuban regime and its opposition. ``Castro just tries to work with mirrors,'' he candidly states. Perhaps there was more to Castro's acceptance of Vesco in the early Eighties than the billion dollars which the fugitive allegedly offered to obtain his protection.

Perhaps Castro could identify with the capitalist Houdini. While Vesco defrauded pensioners out of their retirement funds, Castro embezzled the soul of an entire generation of intellectuals. From the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to the guerrilla adventurer Regis Debray, from the poet Susan Sontag to the prize-winning Mexican historian Carlos Fuentes, the list of Castro enthusiasts who ended up denouncing him after he killed or tortured somebody they knew reads like a Who's Who of the left-wing illuminati. Even his own daughter had to resort to an elaborate escape plan using wigs and false passports to leave her father's penal colony.

That, almost forty years since the New York Times lionized Castro as ``The Robin Hood of the Caribbean,'' he still manages to fool, bamboozle, and cajole is the most enduring testimony to his real genius. A faithful few, like Colombian Nobel Prize laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, continue trumpeting the achievements of the Cuban revolution at fashionable parties in Martha's Vineyard. But having gotten the better of the intellectuals, Castro is now concentrating on the yuppie establishment.

Businessmen from all over the world are lining up to sign deals with Cuban state-run companies recently reorganized under the tutelage of former Spanish finance minister Carlos Solchaga. It's all neatly arranged so that foreign firms building hotels, for instance, deposit fees for their construction workers in Cuban state banks at the internationally agreed minimum wage of $6 per day. The Cuban government keeps the money, disbursing six pesos to its workers -- which hardly qualifies as a starvation wage.

It's not only the workers who are being conned. Castro is also wooing oil companies. ``All the oil men have to do,'' according to a Cuban geologist, ``is look at the most extensive oil surveys of Cuba ever made, which are available in Moscow. No other country has been explored for oil as much as Cuba was by the Russians, who searched every corner of the island for a source to relieve them of the heavy annual fuel subsidy they had to provide during decades of propping up Castro.'' The answer: some minor low-grade oil deposits of insufficient quality to serve as vehicle fuel.

There is diplomatic cable traffic circulating around the Spanish Foreign Ministry describing how the appalling conditions of Castro's Fourth World economy are degenerating from worse to worse yet. Qualified doctors, teachers, and engineers are having to moonlight as gardeners and servants for favored state bureaucrats and their foreign partners to supplement their practically non-existent state salaries. Some accounts describe the failure of recent moves to open up free markets for surplus agricultural produce. The army has moved in to manage everything from distribution to retailing, taking more than a fair share of the food intended for Cuba's starving consumers, and pocketing the bloated prices charged for it.

While much of this information is being suppressed in unrelenting efforts to whitewash Castro, one Spanish businessman talked about his recent misadventure to the Madrid daily, ABC. He used his life savings to start a discothcque along Havana's seafront, and a DGI official became one of the steady customers. The colonel liked it so much that he used Cuban laws -- based on the Communist principles which Castro so loyally defends -- to expropriate him.

The same twisted classes of Communist bureaucrats who have run Castro's military-intelligence and secret-police apparatus, promoted international terrorism, and engineered the Western Hemisphere's gulag are now forming a kleptocracy to survive an eventual transition. They are copying their mentors in the former Soviet Union -- the apparatchiks and KGB bosses who managed to retain control of dynamic sectors of the Russian economy while the Communist regime collapsed.

The United States is in a position to stop a mega-corruption similar to the one now sweeping Russia from happening in Cuba. Efforts to curb the multinational drug mafia are succeeding elsewhere in the hemisphere. American troops toppled the criminal clique running Haiti, and U.S. Special Forces advised in last month's successful roundup of the Cali cartel. U.S. Justice Department lawyers who had been moonlighting in service to the drug barons are being prosecuted. The immediate and unconditional return of Robert Vesco should be demanded from Cuba, and tightening the blockade around Castro should follow his refusal to comply.