BY CAROL ROSENBERG

 The lawyer for accused Cuban spy Fernando González cast his client Wednesday as a patriot captured behind enemy lines, a man who was trying to protect tourists and other island innocents from Miami-hatched terror attacks.

 "Fernando González was not trying to hurt anybody here. Fernando González was not trying to subvert our system of government. Fernando González was trying to save his own country,'' said public defender Joaquín Méndez, as he urged jurors to acquit his client during closing arguments of the Cuban spy trial Wednesday.

 Federal officials claim González, who was arrested in 1998 in a Hollywood apartment using the cover name Rubén Campa, was part of the 14-member Wasp Network, an espionage ring that sought to penetrate both U.S. military and Cuban exile organizations.

 González does not deny he adopted a fake identity for his Cuban intelligence work, just as FBI agents sometimes go undercover, said Méndez. But he said he did not target U.S. military bases.

 Instead, he pointed to evidence that González's Havana handlers had sent him to shadow militant Cuban exiles in and around Little Havana -- notably one-time accused airplane bomber Orlando Bosch, members of Alpha 66 and Roberto Martin Pérez, the former dissident and husband of the popular Cuban American National Foundation radio host Ninoska Pérez Castellón.

 His supposed assignment: To help thwart attacks on Cuban tourist destinations, assassination attempts on Fidel Castro and other armed attacks against communist
 targets that Méndez said were carried out or financed by ``dangerous, extremist nuts'' in Miami.

 "What stands between extremists in this community and the bombs that go off in Cuban hotels and kill innocent tourists is these men,'' Méndez said, gesturing to the
 reputed spy ring members who have sat silently in suit and tie throughout the nearly six-month trial.

 He argued that the FBI did not have the means or will to stop the attacks but had at times benefited from the agents' surveillance, delivered to them via diplomats in
 Havana.

 Earlier Wednesday, prosecutor Caroline Heck Miller ended her arguments with a plea for convictions of all five men whose trial has become a platform for Cuban
 complaints about exile activities and espionage and counterespionage techniques.

 Besides González, also charged are reputed spymasters Gerardo Hernández and Ramón Labañino as well as U.S. citizens René González, a former pilot with the
 Brothers to the Rescue group, and Antonio Guerrero, a former janitor at the U.S. Naval Base in Key West.

 Miller focused her second day of closing remarks on the government's most explosive allegation -- that Gerardo Hernández conspired in the deaths of four Miami men in the 1996 Cuban MiG attacks on two Brothers to the Rescue planes by keeping fellow Cuban agents off the doomed flights.

 She said Hernández, who lived in Miami as the cartoonist Manuel Viramontes, made sure that fellow agents posing as sympathetic members of the search-and-rescue group did not fly on Feb. 24, 1996, to clear the way for Cuban warplanes to rocket them.

 In a rare confluence of agreement, but for separate purposes, both lawyers criticized José Basulto, the rescue group founder, for provocations prior to the MiG attack.

 Miller sought to undermine the defense argument that Basulto was to blame for the downing of the aircraft:

 "Does José Basulto have something to answer for, ladies and gentlemen? He entered Cuban airspace, no question,'' she said. "But leave José Basulto to heaven. Here on earth, in this court, he is not the one on trial.''

 Defense closings are expected to continue today and Friday with Judge Joan Lenard likely to instruct the jury on deliberations Monday.

                                    © 2001