The accused agents' defense has had unprecedented access on the island.

 BY GAIL EPSTEIN NIEVES
 

 Just five weeks after federal agents busted a suspected Cuban spy ring in South Florida, Fidel Castro admitted he sent spies to the United States to gather information about "terrorist activities'' by anti-Castro exile groups.

 "We aren't interested in strategic matters, nor are we interested in information about military bases,'' Castro told CNN in October 1998, adding that his top interest was "sabotage plans'' against his country.

 That same theme is being put forth now, this time during the trial of five accused Cuban spies in U.S. District Court in Miami. The five court-appointed defense lawyers in the case have become surrogates of sorts for the Cuban government, which has granted them access and cooperation unprecedented in the strained 41-year history of  U.S.-Cuba relations.

 The reasons are obvious, lawyers and other observers say: Cuba has higher stakes in the outcome of this case than in any recent U.S. prosecution.

 The attorneys -- Paul McKenna, Joaquín Méndez, William Norris, Jack Blumenfeld and Philip Horowitz -- are representing acknowledged agents of Cuba's Directorate of Intelligence, Castro's main foreign espionage agency.

 But beyond that, either by choice or by necessity, the lawyers' defense strategies are so intertwined with Cuba's controversial political positions that on some days,
 depending on the testimony, it's difficult to tell whether the trial is taking place in Havana or Miami.

 Codefendants Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero and Ramón Labañino face a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted of espionage conspiracy. Fernando González and René González (no relation) face 10-year prison terms if convicted as unregistered foreign agents. Hernández alone faces the most serious charge: conspiring with Cuba to murder four Brothers to the Rescue fliers.

 EXILES UNDER ATTACK

 But in the seventh-floor courtroom of Judge Joan Lenard, Brothers and other Miami exile organizations also are under attack. The defense, with much of its ammunition coming from Cuba, has tried to portray them as "counterrevolutionary'' terrorists.

 "Of course Cuba is going to do everything it can to defend this case,'' said Tampa lawyer Rafael Fernández, who has long represented anti-Castro clients and stopped by the Miami courtroom two weeks ago. "This is the Republic of Cuba on trial. It's got nothing to do with Gerardo Hernández.''

 Just how much did Cuba help craft the defense? Consider:

   All of the defense lawyers traveled to Cuba, some six or seven times and as recently as Thursday, where they interviewed witnesses and government officials,
 consulted with attorneys and managed to fit in baseball games or side trips to Varadero beach. On some trips, Cuba provided drivers, interpreters and housing.

 STARK CONTRAST

 By contrast, defense lawyers for 9-year-old Jimmy Ryce's killer, onetime rafter Juan Carlos Chavez, weren't allowed inside Cuba even once.

 "We were representing someone who left Cuba on a raft, as opposed to [government] agents who are part of the Cuban elite,'' Miami-Dade assistant public defender Patrick Nally said. ``These guys were sent to mess with America, so I assume the Cuban government has an interest in allowing them to be defended.''

   In a first, the Cuban military gave defense lawyer McKenna and his hired expert a private air show with a MiG fighter jet to help demonstrate Cuba's version of events regarding the Brothers shoot-down, in which two Cessnas were shot from the sky in February 1996.

   In another first, Cuba allowed the defense and prosecution teams to travel there for a joint week of videotaped testimony from eight Cuban government officials --
 including high-ranking military and anti-terrorism agents -- whom Cuba refused to allow to travel to the United States for the trial.

 The group included some 18 lawyers, investigators, FBI agents, a court reporter, interpreters and a monitor of classified information.

 They took the depositions at the Swiss ambassador's house and stayed at the famed Nacional hotel.

   Cuba sent to Miami a state security officer, Lt. Col. Roberto Hernández Caballero, who testified for the defense about his investigation into hotel bomb attacks in
 Havana, which Cuba blames on exile extremists.

 It was only the third time since 1997 that Cuba has allowed one of its officials to travel to a Florida court; the prior trips were to help U.S. prosecutors press charges of cocaine trafficking and skyjacking -- two crimes that Cuba has publicly discouraged in recent years.

   Two defense liaisons with Cuba are attending the trial. The brother of defendant René González, Roberto González, a criminal lawyer in Havana, has helped the defense team in Cuba and Miami. So has Puerto Rican criminal lawyer Rafael Anglada-López, a socialist and independence activist whose ties to Castro's regime got him hired as a court-paid defense investigator. Anglada-López recently sat through nine days of trial.

 Lawyers in the case are under orders from the judge not to talk. But the red-carpet treatment from Cuba in this case is a far cry from what other attorneys have
 experienced.

 A NEW WILLINGNESS

 Allan Sullivan, a former federal prosecutor who visited Cuba twice in 1997 in the cocaine-trafficking case, said Cuba's cooperation was ``given grudgingly and with some trepidation,'' particularly when it came to producing witnesses whom the U.S. government needed to make its case at trial.

 ``It seems pretty clear there's a strong interest in the present circumstance to assist their former agents, whereas in my case, while it was not an insignificant case, it
 was simply another narcotics case,'' Sullivan said. ``And while they cooperated . . . there was clearly not the foreign interests that are at stake in the current prosecution.''

 Luis Fernández, spokesman for the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C., said he had "no details'' of his country's cooperation in the spy case. He downplayed any notion that the trial was providing Cuba with a new public forum.

 "For a long time, thousands of terroristic actions have been committed in our country, some with the cooperation of the Cuban American National Foundation, and we have denounced them each time,'' he said. ``That's been clear to everybody.''

 The foundation has denied the allegations.

 GREATEST IRONY

 The greatest irony, lawyer Rafael Fernández said, is that U.S. taxpayers are paying to defend the accused spies for alleged crimes against the United States -- and that the same due process would never be afforded the men in their own country.

 "These guys must be sitting there thinking, 'Only in America!' '' said Fernández, who complimented all of the defense attorneys in the case: "They're doing a great job -- and I hope they lose.''

                                    © 2001