By JUAN O. TAMAYO
             Herald Staff Writer

             A network of computerized telephone centers that spans the globe will soon dry
             up U.S. phone payments to Havana, like those garnisheed by a Miami judge
             Thursday, and drive up the price of calls to Cuba, experts say.

             ``It's not magic. It's basic traffic routing and management by computer, said
             Enrique Lopez, a Coral Gables telecommunications consultant who has worked on
             U.S.-Cuba telephone issues.

             The network is so sophisticated, and so politically sensitive in an era of instant
             global communications, that AT&T turned down a Herald request last month to
             visit its main computer hub in New Jersey.

             U.S. District Court Judge James Lawrence King on Thursday upheld his earlier
             ruling that at least $6.2 million owed by U.S. telephone firms to Cuba must go
             instead to relatives of three Brothers to the Rescue pilots killed by Cuban
             warplanes in 1996.

             Lawyers for the relatives, who won a $187 million award against the Cuban
             government in 1997, said they would go after any other U.S. firms that make
             payments to Cuba. But for now the dispute affects only telephone calls.

             On Feb. 25 Havana cut off all U.S.-Cuba direct-dial services by the five firms that
             had withheld payments to Cuba under King's preliminary ruling -- AT&T, MCI
             WorldCom, LDDS, IDB and WillTell.

             But the firms immediately used their computerized switching stations to route calls
             to Cuba through third countries, spokesmen for AT&T and some of the other
             firms have confirmed.

             The volume of U.S. phone calls to Cuba remained constant and quality suffered
             only slightly, said officials of AT&T, which carries about half of all the telephone
             traffic to Cuba.

             Since the U.S. firms no longer make direct payments to Cuba -- they pay the third
             countries, which in turn pay Cuba -- the Brothers relatives will have to find other
             sources of payments to garnishee, lawyers in the case said.

             The shift will almost certainly lead to higher costs to U.S. callers in the near future
             because the U.S. firms will have to pay for the longer routing, Lopez said.

             Lopez described a routing system so thoroughly computerized and ``smart that
             AT&T can control its worldwide network of switching stations from a single office
             in the small New Jersey town of Bedminster.

             As an example, he said any caller in Coral Gables dialing Havana would first reach
             a local switching station -- known as Point of Presence, or POP -- on Alhambra
             Circle that would detect the code for an international call and switch it to the
             caller's long distance carrier.

             If the callers are AT&T clients, the local POP would switch them to any of the two
             AT&T long-distance POPs in Miami-Dade County, Lopez said, which would use
             their computers to figure out what is the cheapest and most available route to
             complete the calls.

             Normally, that would be through another AT&T POP in Palm Beach, Lopez said,
             and from there by underwater cable to Cojimar, a small town east of Havana and
             site of the Cuban telephone company's main POP for overseas calls.

             But after Cuba cut off direct-dial service, AT&T and the other firms
             reprogrammed their long-distance POPS to route calls to Cuba through third
             countries, depending on costs and congestion at the time of the calls.

             AT&T routers can reprogram such changes in the worldwide network of POPs
             from the center in Bedminster simply by sending out commands from their desk
             computers, Lopez said.

             ``If there's a construction accident that cuts lines from Miami to New York, for
             example, those people can simply order the system to route calls through Chicago
             or Los Angeles or anywhere else in the world, he said.

             AT&T officials would not comment on the reasons for rejecting the Herald request
             to visit the Bedminster center, but telecommunications experts said the technology
             used is ``politically significant.

             ``Say the Iraqi government wants to listen in on any calls coming in from
             Washington. Instead those calls are routed through places like Jordan or Italy or
             even Russia. That makes the Iraqis' work harder, a retired U.S. security expert
             said.

             The computerized rerouting is so easy that Miami AT&T customers telephoning
             Cuba after Feb. 25 seldom noticed the changes. Only when all systems were
             clogged were their calls answered by operators in Canada, the Bahamas, Mexico
             and even Italy.

             People calling from Cuba to the United States appear to have been harder hit by
             the Havana cutoff.

             Only about one in 10 calls to the United States goes through, said a U.S. citizen
             who was in Havana last week.

             The other nine calls either rang busy or were answered by tape-recorded
             announcements by Cuban operators that direct dialing was not possible and that
             callers should call a local operator to book U.S. calls.