Avoiding possible imprisonment for the rest of their lives, two Cuban exiles were sentenced to between three and four years after pleading guilty to a weapons conspiracy.

BY JAY WEAVER

Two longtime anti-Castro activists convicted of plotting to possess illegal weapons were sentenced to between three and four years in prison Tuesday in Fort Lauderdale federal court.

Santiago Alvarez, a wealthy Miami developer who has supported Cuban exile causes, must serve about four years in prison and pay a $10,000 fine. His colleague, Osvaldo Mitat, must serve three years, but does not have to pay any fine.

Both men, who pleaded guilty in September on the eve of their high-stakes trial, avoided the possibility of spending the rest of their lives in prison.

Alvarez, 65, and Mitat, 64, had cut plea deals on one count each of conspiring to possess illegal weapons. The other charges, including possessing illegal weapons, were dropped. Those offenses, coupled with the conspiracy count, carried a maximum of 20 years in prison.

U.S. District Judge James Cohn, who imposed the sentences, had rejected bids by the pair's legal team to move the men's trial to Miami federal court and also opposed an 11th-hour proposal to include Cuban Americans from Miami-Dade County in the Broward County jury pool.

Cuban exile leaders, who view the two men as patriots in the long struggle to topple Cuba leader Fidel Castro, criticized those decisions and lamented the plea deals.

Both men, who have been in custody for one year, were accused of conspiring to stash machine guns, firearms, a silencer and a grenade launcher in a Broward apartment complex that belonged to Alvarez. Both were ordered to forfeit those weapons as part of their sentencings.

U.S. government agents first learned about Alvarez in May 2005 when he helped Cuban exile militant Luis Posada Carriles emerge from hiding before his arrest for entering the country illegally. Posada, who has been implicated in various alleged terror attacks against Cuba, is still in federal custody in Texas.

The government's star witness in the Alvarez-Mitat prosecution was going to be an FBI informant identified as Gilberto Abascal.

He allegedly transported the weapons from the Broward apartment building to Mitat in Miami -- tipping off agents from the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The defendants' lawyers claimed Abascal was a spy for the Cuban government and the FBI.

At trial, they had planned to show that Abascal set up his former friends, Alvarez and Mitat.

Federal prosecutors Jacqueline Arango and Randy Hummel had planned to blunt attacks on their witness by proving to jurors that the two defendants conspired to hide weapons in a storage facility at the Lauderhill complex.

Although they never accused the men of planning to use those firearms in an attack against the Cuban government, the prosecutors intended to introduce evidence that showed Alvarez had financed a failed 2001 incursion against Castro, among other paramilitary activities.

The defendants' high-powered legal team -- Robert Josefsberg, Kendall Coffey, Ben Kuehne, Arturo Hernandez and Peter Prieto -- was negotiating the plea deal with prosecutors until just before trial.

That deal, however, had been on the table for months. It took the threat of trial for both sides to reach an agreement.