By Mary Louise Wilkinson
Reporter of The Miami News

Hard times have hit the militant Cuban exile groups here.

Where silent commandos once stockpiled recoilless cannon, automatic rifles and bags of explosive plastic, today phones ring unheard in empty offices. Some stand vacant of furniture with only a forgotten map of the island pinned to a scarred wall.

There's little money and a lot of apathy among the activists who dreamed of liberating the island by hit-and-run raids.

Of all the multi-splintered action groups that once kept Miami police hopping on arms raids, there remains only a handful clinging to plans for the future. These plans are still secret - but probably small.

"It's the same old story, no money," said a disillusioned young member of one group. "Fewer and fewer people come to the meetings and you can't raise a dime anywhere.

"Anyway, what good are the raids? Where have they gotten us?"

Two of the remaining groups - the Second Front of the Escambray and RECE - feel differently. Both count anti-Castro forays by their members high on the exile agenda for this year.

Andres Nazario Sargen, of the Second Front, feels this will be the "most violent year sine the 1961 Bay of Pigs," while RECE leaders predict that actions will "start soon."

But the Second Front was hard hit by the capture of its leader, Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, after he infiltrated into Cuba last year.

And RECE, created and once sponsored by rum manufacturer Jose Bosch after an exile referendum, moved months ago from its large, bustling downtown office to smaller, quieter quarters.

Ex-Commandante Armando Fleites had replaced Gutierrez Menoyo as the Second Front leader. He stays out of the spotlight, planning for the future.

"Actions should speak, not words," said Fleites.

However, his first action after assuming leadership was to take down a yellowing banner proclaiming "Estamos en Guerra" (We are at War) which had hung over the Escambray headquarters for over a year.

Manolo Ray, the one-time hope of the exile colony, failed to land in Cuba two years ago when he vowed to infiltrate and work towards triggering an internal rebellion. Today, he is back at his architectural job in Puerto Rico, his JURE group split by internal personality problems of its own.

The students, traditional leaders of armed violence throughout Latin American history, have returned to their books at universities from here to New York. Their Students Directorate (DRE), which once blasted Havana's Rosita de Hornedo Hotel from a small boat, is all but dissolved.

Laureano Falla Batista, flamboyant leader of the Christian Democrats who claimed to have bombed Havana oil refineries in 1963, has dropped from sight

But Orlando Bosch hasn't. The medical doctor who heads the Movement of Insurrectional Revolutionary Recovery (MIRR) has been arrested for arms possession and attempted extortion almost as many times as he has made successful raids on the island.

Silent these days are Felipe Rivero Jr. and his Cuban Nationalist group, dedicated to colorful strikes "against Communism anywhere in the world" and sometimes linked to the December 1965 bazooka blast at the United Nations building where Ernesto "Che" Guevara was speaking there.

The latest of the Nationalist attempts was unsuccessful - a bomb placed at Karl Marx's London tomb last August was discovered before it went off.

Perhaps the most favored of all the militant leaders was Manuel Artime, poem-writing civilian chief of the 1961 invasion.

His exile training camps in Central America once loomed as a threat to Castro. Today, his men disbanded after international allegations of whiskey contraband and a "kangaroo" court execution of an MRR member, Artime has settled down to marriage and fatherhood.

"The future of Cuba no longer depends on us exiles," a member of one action group said dejectedly. "It's time we stop kidding ourselves.

"Once it was a matter of clandestine contacts you had inside the island," he said. "Today, it boils down to just the reverse - what Castro officials have tried to make contact outside Cuba, if they've tried at all."

This year may see a few sporadic hit-and-run raids against the island. But few exiles today believe they will seriously alter Castro's position which they say depends more and more on an armed revolt from within.