Jorge Mas Canosa, 58, Who Led Anti-Castro Movement

          By LARRY ROHTER

                MIAMI -- Jorge Mas Canosa, who came to the United States as a
                penniless refugee from the dictatorship of Fidel Castro and built
          the Cuban-American National Foundation into one of Washington's most
          effective lobbying groups, died on Sunday afternoon at home in Miami.
          He was 58.

          Mas died of lung cancer, officials of the foundation said at a news
          conference Sunday evening. But they also mentioned pleurisy and renal
          failure as causes of death and said he had also been suffering from Paget's
          disease, which causes the bones to degenerate.

          From the moment he arrived in Miami in 1960, Mas dedicated himself to
          seeking the overthrow of Castro, first as a conspirator in various armed
          plots and then, for the last two decades, in the halls of Congress. His
          organization became a familiar presence on Capitol Hill and over the
          years earned a reputation as single-minded in purpose and generous in its
          donations to officeholders willing to endorse its objectives.

          For more than a decade, three U.S. presidents have sought his advice on
          Cuban affairs to such an extent that many critics of Mas considered him
          the principal architect of a U.S. policy they regarded as excessively rigid.
          Every significant piece of legislation on Cuba since 1980 has borne his
          imprint, from the establishment of Radio and TV Marti to last year's
          Helms-Burton Act tightening the economic embargo of Cuba.

          At a $1,000-a-plate fund-raising dinner in Miami in 1992, President
          George Bush declared, "I salute Jorge Mas." He called Mas the living
          embodiment of the success of Cuban immigrants in the United States. By
          then, Mas had already become a millionaire many times over in the
          communications and construction businesses.

          To advance his cause, Mas also traveled extensively around the world,
          trying to form alliances with anyone he thought useful in the struggle
          against Castro. He was an early patron of Boris Yeltsin, energetically
          supported the Angolan guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi and encouraged
          Latin American leaders like Carlos Menem of Argentina to speak out
          against Castro.

          But his many detractors in the United States and abroad saw in Mas the
          same dictatorial streak, relish for power and intolerance of opposing
          views that characterized Castro's rule. Over the airwaves of
          Spanish-language radio stations in Miami and in letters to the editor and
          public debates, Mas repeatedly questioned the patriotism of those who
          disagreed with him, and threatened in some cases to ruin their lives or
          careers.

          His death leaves a power vacuum among Cuban exile groups in Miami
          and will surely be greeted with relief, if not outright glee, in Havana, where
          the state-controlled news media for years have regularly reviled him as the
          main leader of "the counterrevolutionary Miami mafia."

          Mas had neither named nor groomed a successor and held the many
          fractious currents of the exile world together largely through force of
          personality and tenacity.

          Foundation officials on Sunday named Alberto Hernandez, a physician
          who is the organization's vice chairman, as Mas' temporary successor.
          They said a permanent replacement would be elected at their group's
          congress in July.

          Jorge Mas Canosa was born in Santiago, Cuba, on Sept. 21, 1939, the
          third of six children of a veterinarian in the Cuban army. In some respects,
          his upbringing was much like that of his future enemy, Fidel Castro, who
          was 13 years older: Both had stern fathers, both were initially educated at
          private schools in Cuba's second-largest city, and both would later be
          remembered by their former classmates as fiery orators and aggressive,
          natural-born leaders.

          During Castro's guerrilla struggle against the dictatorship of Fulgencio
          Batista in the mid-1950s, Mas was sent by his father to the United States
          to study at a college in North Carolina. He returned home in January
          1959, just days after Castro seized power, plunged into student politics,
          soon got in trouble with the new authorities and in mid-1960 returned to
          the United States, this time for good.

          He quickly joined the exile force being trained by the CIA for the Bay of
          Pigs invasion but ended up being put aboard a vessel that was kept
          offshore during that April 1961 debacle. A brief stint in the U.S. Army
          followed, ending with Mas leaving after it became clear the Kennedy
          administration had no further plans to invade Cuba.

          Back in Miami, Mas held a succession of blue-collar jobs, working as a
          milkman, stevedore and shoe salesman while devoting his free time to the
          anti-Castro movement. According to his associates of that time, he helped
          raise money, obtain weapons and scout possible sites in the Caribbean
          and Central America from which Cuba could be attacked or invaded.

          By 1971, Mas had, with the aid of a $50,000 loan and recommendations
          from fellow exiles, acquired a small company, Iglesias y Torres, that did
          work for the telephone company in Puerto Rico. He renamed the business
          Church & Tower and within a year had won contracts to lay cable and
          install telephone poles for Southern Bell in Florida.

          Over the years, Church & Tower became the foundation of a
          telecommunications empire that transformed Mas into one of the
          wealthiest Hispanic businessmen in the United States, with a net worth of
          more than $100 million at the time of his death. The family business, now
          called Mastec, today has interests in the United States and in telephone
          companies and other ventures throughout Latin America and in Spain.

          But even as he was building his fortune, Mas remained active in exile
          politics in Miami. He abandoned his advocacy of armed struggle, arguing
          that ill-organized invasions of Cuba and acts of violence in the United
          States damaged the cause more than they helped, and he urged exiles to
          shift their attention to Washington and focus their efforts on using U.S.
          foreign policy to cripple Castro.

          After Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, Mas became an American
          citizen and, at the suggestion of the new president's staff, founded the
          Cuban-American National Foundation. The organization, which today has
          50,000 members, soon made its influence felt in Washington, funneling
          generous campaign donations to Republicans and Democrats alike and
          pushing for one bill after another to intensify the diplomatic and economic
          isolation of Cuba.

          One of Mas' early triumphs was the establishment of Radio Marti, a U.S.
          government station intended to provide an alternative source of news for
          Cuba's 11 million people. By the end of the 1980s, that service had
          expanded into television, and Mas had been named chairman of the
          advisory board of the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which oversees both
          stations.

          Mas' critics, as well as several former Radio and TV Marti employees
          who had clashed with him, maintained he used the broadcasts to advance
          what they described as his ambitions to succeed Castro as president of
          Cuba. But each year Congress brushed off those criticisms, and it has
          spent more than $250 million on programming for the stations.

          In 1992, Mas was instrumental in passing legislation that tightened the
          economic embargo against Cuba in all areas except telephone
          communications. That triumph was followed four years later by the
          Helms-Burton Act, which embroiled the Clinton administration in a
          complicated dispute with some of its closest allies and trading partners by
          allowing Cuban-Americans to sue foreign companies investing in or using
          expropriated properties in Cuba.

          All the while, Mas' influence in Miami and Dade County politics was also
          growing. He and other leaders of the foundation gave generously to
          candidates for municipal and county office.

          Mas also became known for personal feuds and lawsuits that were
          numerous and colorful. In one celebrated instance, he challenged Joe
          Carollo, who last week lost his re-election bid as mayor of Miami, to a
          duel, saying, "Your bullying has ended because you have encountered a
          man with a capital M."

          Given a choice of guns or swords, Carollo defused the situation by
          suggesting water pistols be used. But he continued to criticize Mas and
          the Foundation, once calling them "a little clique of millionaires who have
          made a very profitable business of combating communism."

          In another instance, Mas lost a libel suit brought by an estranged younger
          brother, who testified that Church & Tower had won several of its
          contracts by dispensing bribes.

          But perhaps his longest-running dispute was with The Miami Herald,
          which he said harbored Cuban spies on its reporting staff; he also accused
          the newspaper of encouraging "hate, disinformation and reckless
          disregard" of the Cuban exile community.

          That feud reached a peak in 1992 when Mas and his supporters paid for
          advertisements on city buses that proclaimed, "I don't believe The Miami
          Herald" and organized a boycott of the newspaper that lasted for several
          months. At the peak of the dispute, some of the newspaper's vending
          machines were filled with excrement, and death threats were made to
          some of its employees, actions that Mas disavowed.

          The apogee of his influence probably came in the summer of 1994, when
          President Clinton invited Mas to the White House to discuss how to stem
          the flow of refugees then coming across the Florida Straits in rafts, and
          adopted several of his recommendations. Mas continued his efforts into
          the Clinton administration's second term, but the pace of his activities
          slowed as his health gradually worsened.

          Mas is survived by his wife, Irma, and three sons, Jorge Jr., who has for
          several years run the family business, Juan Carlos, a lawyer, and Jose
          Ramon.