By IRVIN MOLOTSKY

          WASHINGTON, Feb. 19 -- The United States today ordered
          the expulsion of a Cuban diplomat linked to an American
          immigration official charged on Friday with spying for the Cuban
          government.

          James Foley, a State Department spokesman, said that the diplomat,
          whom he did not identify, was given seven days to leave the United
          States for activities "incompatible with his diplomatic status."

          Mr. Foley said that Felix Wilson, the acting head of the Cuban interests
          section -- an embassy in all but name -- was summoned to the State
          Department by Charles Shapiro, the coordinator of Cuban affairs, and
          told that the diplomat was being expelled.

          When expulsions like this are made, the targeted country usually retaliates
          by expelling a diplomat from the country that sent off the first one.

          Asked about the likelihood of such a reprisal, Mr. Foley said: "We don't
          see any grounds for that. Our diplomats are operating in an open and
          acceptable manner."

          But a spokesman for the Cuban interests section, Luis Fernandez, said:
          "It depends. They need to convince our government that they have
          proof."

          Mr. Foley declined to identify the expelled diplomat. "He is making
          arrangements to depart and it doesn't serve any interests to identify him."

          An official said that Mr. Wilson had maintained that the expulsion was
          groundless but that Cuba would comply.

          Although the United States and Cuba do not have formal diplomatic
          relations, they are represented in each other's country by an interests
          section under the flag of another country, in this case Switzerland.

          It is a sort of intermediate diplomatic severance. In the cases of Iran or
          Serbia, for example, the United States does not even have an interests
          section.

          The American charged with spying, Mariano M. Faget, is a senior official
          in the Miami field office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
          He was born in Havana and left Cuba for the United States as a
          teenager.

          The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it arrested him late Thursday
          after he was caught passing along to a Cuban-born New York
          businessman false information that American officials had fed him about a
          Cuban intelligence agent's plan to defect to the United States.

          Federal officials said they could not recall another case in which a
          government official was charged with spying.

          Mr. Faget's arrest further complicated Cuban-American relations already
          strained by the custody battle over Elián González, the 6-year-old boy
          who survived his mother's drowning when she fled Cuba with him in
          November. Elián's relatives in Florida are trying to continue custody of
          the child in the United States over the objections of his father in Cuba.

          At the Cuba mission today, Mr. Fernandez, the spokesman, said: "This is
          a very dirty maneuver to try to create a smokescreen."

          He was referring, he said, to the incident involving Elián.

          When asked whether he knew Mr. Faget, Mr. Fernandez said he did not
          but that the interests section might have. "We are in contact with many
          persons," he said.

          In response to a question in an interview outside the gate at the interests
          section as to whether the expulsion would hurt relations between the two
          countries, Mr. Fernandez said, "This is a very traumatic situation."