By WILLIAM TUCKER
Reporter of the Miami News

    The extortion trial of Cuban exile leader Dr. Orlando Bosch and an aide began today with Bosch claiming outside the federal court room that he was a victim of CIA persecution.
    Bosch, 40, and Marcelino Garcia Jimenez, 58, are charged with demanding $20,000 from well-healed countrymen to finance forays against Castro.
    As the trial got under way, Bosch handed out a statement calling the trial an ignominious farce built by some 'authorities' for our only guilt of fighting for the freedom of Cuba, and because our moral and patriotic standards are not conveyable with the dishonest propositions that we continually have been receiving from the Central Intelligence Agency."
    Bosch also called it another attempt "to stop us from fighting and recovering our country."
    "But this premeditated, unreasonable and purulent accusation is not sufficient to halt the efforts of the freedom-loving Cubans."
    Before the jury selection started, the defense attorney Melvyn Greenspahn made a new motion for a change of venue--this one based on a Miami News' article last Friday.
    Greenspahn charged that the article, which contained quotes from extortion letters allegedly written by the defendants, contained "evidentiary" material that should not have been published before the trial and hence was prejudicial.
    Assistant U.S. Attorney James Matthews replied that the letters had been turned over to the defense at the court's orders and hence were part of the public record of the case, and were not presented in The News' article in a prejudicial manner.
    U.S. District Judge Charles B. Fulton reserved a ruling on the motion until it could be determined by questioning the the prospective jurors to see if they had read the article.
    The property of one alleged extortion target was actually bombed in the plot which landed Bosch and Garcia in federal court.
    Bosch, a former pediatrician, is head of the shadowy Insurrectional Revolutionary Recovery Movement (MIRR) and Garcia is one of his top aides.  The MIRR has claimed credit for numerous air and sea strikes against Cuba which Bosch cited as proof that "the Castro regime is vulnerable."
    A recent flight to Cuban which failed to return and may have taken the lives of the two exiles and an unidentified American adventurer pilot was also believed to have been an attempted strike by the MIRR.  Bosch has been in repeated trouble with U.S. officials in his attempts to obtain bombs.
    Bosch and Garcia were charged with sending typed, unsigned letters in Spanish, to three fellow exiles demanding $20,000 and threatening bomb reprisals.