NEW YORK.--A recent defector from Cuba's General Intelligence Directorate (DGI) says that the April, 1980, flood of 125,000 refugees from the port of Mariel was part of a plan to destablize the United States and relieve Cuba of "excess" population it could not support.

In an interview, defector Genaro Perez said that this "Plan Bravo" was conceived by Cuban President Fidel Castro and the DGI. Before defecting last year, Perez operated under cover of Havanatur, a DGI-run travel agency in Miami that maintained surveillance of Cuban-Americans visiting Cuba and tried to recruit intelligence agents from among them.

In June, 1980, the CIA testified before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that it had warned the State Department, National Security Council "and higher" authorities as early as Jan. 31, 1980, of Castro's intention to unload large numbers of new refugees on the U.S. The CIA added that Castro's removal of security guards from Havana's Peruvian embassy on April 4, 1980--causing thousands of Cubans to invade that embassy--"was probably calculated to precipitate a crisis and force the U.S.... to accept sizable numbers of new refugees."

Perez charges that Plan Bravo would "unleash violence in the U.S.--riots, disturbances, bombings, shootouts, assaults on banks--in an effort to terrorize the American public and government."

He adds that Puerto Rican terrorists are vital to Castro's plan and would encourage violence "in all parts of the U.S.--not only in New York or Chicago but also Washington, Miami, Los Angeles." In addition, Perez says, the plan involves the incitement of racial conflict among Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and "especially blacks."

U.S. intelligence officers express concern about the increased activities of Puerto Rican terrorists aided and abetted by the DGI. And, intentional or otherwise, Miami--where most of the Mariel refugees ended up--became the scene of riots as unemployed blacks protested not just the brutal murder of a black by white police but the refugees' alleged seizure of available jobs.These troubles discouraged tourism, contributing to a serious decline in Miami's economy while fanning blacks' and whites' resentment toward the new refugees and toward Cubans in general.

Tomas Regalado--a respected reporter whose "Cuba Today" radio program on Miami's WHRC is listened to widely in Cuba--adds another charge. Under cover of the chaotic boatlift, he says, Castro sent "hundreds" of new intelligence operatives to the U.S.

The State Department estimates that more than 200,000 Cubans hold exit visas and are ready to sail for the U.S. upon Castro's signal. However, Perez believes that Castro would prefer to succeed with another plan--the first priority "Plan Alpha." Its goal is to normalize relations with the U.S., beginning with removal of the 20-year trade embargo against Cuba.

Although his failed Marxist programs made a shambles of the Cuban economy, Castro has made the embargo his whipping boy and the keystone of the U.S. policy. The embargo choked off international credit to Cuba, without which the country cannot buy the capital goods required for economic survival. Therefore, Castro is attempting to secure normalized relations while simultaneously using U.S. businessmen and DGI commercial fronts to violate the embargo and bring in forbidden products.

This and all other DGI operations in the U.S. are directed from the Cuban mission to the UN in New York. Although Cuba is among the smallest members the mission, with a staff of 50 to 80, is the second largest in the U.N. As many as 75 percent of those accredited to the mission are not diplomats, but officers of the DGI, and other Cuban intelligence agencies

Some of them are officers of the Department of State Security, or D.S.E. which controls Cuba's internal security. Others belong to the Department of America and Daniel James is the author of "Cuba: The First Soviet Satellite in the Americas, the Cuban Institute for Friendship with Peoples, or ICAP, intelligence agencies that keep visitors to Cuba under surveillance.

Not surprisingly, many of these members of the Cuban mission don't bother to show up for regular UN duties. At least two ranking members who are listed as "political counselors" are actually high intelligence officers. One is Mario Monzon 38, chief of all DGI operations in the U.S. The other is Alfredo Garcia Almeida who heads the America Department here and performs ICAP functions.

Monzon answers not only to his superiors in Havana but also to Moscow's intelligence organization, the KGB, through its station chief in New York. The KGB created the DGI in the early 1960s and, though still a satellite of the Soviet agency, is rated professionally as among the world's top five intelligence services, after the KGB, the CIA, Israel's Mossad, and Britain's MI6.

The DGI has special value for the KGB because its officers, accredited diplomats, are allowed complete freedom of movement in this country, while Soviet and other Soviet-bloc emissaries are restricted to a 25-mile radius around New York and Washington.

"The Soviets parcel out the intelligence pie," said a State department official, "giving all kinds of functions to the DGI."

U.S. business is a central target of the DGI's Washington activities, with agents encouraging businessmen to circumvent the trade embargo. After Carter's February, 1977, announcement that he would lift the embargo if Castro withdrew his troops from Angola, U.S. businessmen flocked to Cuba in search of trade and investment opportunities.

Cuba's push for circumvention of the embargo was so aggressive that it upset even the generally sympathetic Carter administration, which threatened to expel the DGI officer in charge of the operation.

Undeterred, the DGI continues to flout the embargo. Last summer it incorporated in Panama a front that smuggles U.S, auto parts, radios, TV sets, and heavy equipment into Cuba. The DGI also uses scheduled airlines to smuggle desperately needed items like sugarmill parts to Panama and Nicaragua, from which they are shipped to Cuba.

The DGI has a special interest in tourism as a source of dollars and intelligence agents. Havanatur was the DGI's most important tourism agency in Miami until agent Genaro Perez, posing as a Havanatur executive, broke with it and exposed it last year.

Perez claims that the agency fleeced Cuban-Americans anxious to visit relatives in Cuba of $100 million in surcharges and "commissions." But more sinister, he said, was agents' secret videotaping of the tourists' Havana hotel rooms to learn whether they could be blackmailed into working for the DGI. Agents would threaten to harm Cuban relatives if the tourists did not "cooperate" with the Castro regime upon returning home.

The DGI's normalization drive was nearly successful in 1977, when a group of prominent Cuban-Americans formed the Committee of 75 to initiate a "dialog" with Cuba and to secure the release of some 3,000 political prisoners in Castro's jails.

The Committee of 75, which soon grew to 100 or more, was actually run by DGI officers. Bernardo Benes, vice president of Miami's Continental National Bank, went to Havana at the head of a six-man commission of the Committee of 75 to negotiate with Fidel Castro. He had several meetings with the prisoners, which made their families and the Carter administration happy.

Normalization of U.S.-Cuban relations seemed well on the way to becoming a reality until Benes' personal dealings with Castro made anti-Castro Cuban exiles suspect that he was an intelligence agent. Soon after breaking with the DGI, Manuel Espinosa charged him publicly with being a DGI operative.

But Benes had conducted the negotiations with Castro with the knowledge of the FBI, to which he reported his activities almost every step of the way, and of the State Department. The State Department seems to have tacitly approved of his role and later Cyrus Vance, then secretary of state wrote Benes and thanked him for his "services." In short, Benes had functioned virutally as an extra-official, one-man State Department. This might merit investigation because, in the course of it Benes, a private U.S. citizen, concluded an agreement with a foreign state, with the U.S. government's tacit agreement, that led to 3,000 foreigners' immigration to the U.S.

Athough the DGI and committee of 75 failed to achieve "normalization," they did attain another desirable objective: the breakup of the hitherto-solid anti-Castro bloc presented by the Cuban-American community. Until now, no administration has dared normalize relations, fearing that the increasing Cuban-American vote in south Florida might turn against it--as happened to Carter in November, 1980. But thanks to DGI agents, normalization is acquiring a growing constituency among Cuban-Americans, particularly those who have had relatives freed by Castro.

Most disturbing to the first anti-Castro exiles is the emergence of a generation that never knew the Cuban communist dictatorship. They do not share their parents' anti-communist attitude and have developed a tolerance or even a preference for Castroism. Some of the more radical young people have formed the Antonio Maceo Brigade—named after a hero of Cuba's 1958 war of independence—which critics like Gustavo Marin, 33, claim "is an idea of the Cuban intelligence service." Marin, head of left-of-center group that is a rival of the Maceo Brigade, says that some of the brigade's members are DGI agents.

Agents in Puerto Rico, he says, have joined the extreme-leftist Puerto Rican Socialist Party, which is known to have close ties with the Castro regime and sends members to Cuba for terrorist and guerrilla training.

The older Venceremos Brigade seeks to recruit idealistic young Americans, not necessarily of Cuban origin, offering them trips to Cuba to labor alongside the peasants. It is a creature of the America Department, the intelligence service that, in the 1970s, made serious inroads through Venceremos among such U.S. radical groups as the Weathermen, many of whose members attended Cuban guerrilla training camps.

A top-secret FBI report, now declassified, says that the DGI's "ultimate objective" with regard to Vencermos was to recruit "individuals who are politically oriented and who someday may obtain a position, elective or appointive, somewhere in the U.S. government, which would provide the Cuban government with access to political, economic, and military intelligence."

But, above all, there is fear that since the Reagan administration is unlikely to accept normalization of U.S.-Cuban relations under present circumstances, Castro eventually will unleash the full Plan Bravo upon this country. This fear is shared by some U.S. intelligence officers, who worry that Puerto Rico—troubled economically, politically, and socially—might become the first victim of a Castro destabilization effort.

Just such an objective may be the principal goal of the DG through Cuba's UN mission, which pressed for Puerto Rico's independence again—as it does every year—in the "decolonialization" committee last Thursday.

Communist, African, and Asian nations joined in the committee and voted to send the question of Puerto Rican independence to the UN' General Assembly for the first time.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico.—Although the focus has been on Libyan hit men, Puerto Rican terrorists may pose a more immediate threat to the lives of President Reagan and top U.S. officials, say intelligence officers here.

Interlocking Puerto Rican terrorist groups supported by leftist elements abroad, have waged a long, vocal and violent campaign to destroy U.S. "imperialism" and gain the island's independence. Earlier this week, in an act of what they termed international solidarity," Puerto Rican, Salvadoran and Venezuelan leftists hijacked three Venezuelan airliners. According to released passengers, the hijackers demanded Puerto Rican independence as well as the release of Venezuelan political prisoners and an end to Venezuelan support of the Salvadoran junta.

In bringing their "people's war" to the United States, Puerto Rican terrorists have several advantages over Mummar Qadaffi's hit men: As U.S. citizens they face no risk in crossing borders, and they can move freely, blending in with the millions of other Hispanics living stateside. Furthermore, the Puerto Rican terrorists are as well-trained, fanatical and reckless as their Libyan or other foreign counterparts.

In a recent speech, their reputed "godfather," 72-year-old Juan Antonio Corretjer, announced the terrorists' intention to "get" Reagan and his top aides.

CorretJer, a revolutionary firebrand for a half-century, praised 11 members of the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) found guilty of seditious conspiracy by a federal jury in Chicago and charged Reagan personally with bribing and torturing one of them, Alfredo Mendez, into betraying his comrades. Corretjer denounced U.S. authorities and Reagan—who, he said, is "humanity's worst enemy."

Intelligence officers here regard the speech as a call to Puerto Rican terrorists to punish Reagan and the law-enforcement officials involved in prosecuting the FALN Chicago Eleven, a case still on the books.

There is more than ample evidence of acts of vengeance committed over the years by the terrorists, whose actions are condemned by the vast majority of Puerto Rico's people.

In December 1979, three terrorist groups ambushed a U.S. Navy bus en route to Sabana Seca Communications Center, near San Juan, shooting and killing two petty officers and wounding 10 other naval personnel. In a communique, the terrorists took responsibility for the attack and said they were avenging the alleged murder of a comrade, Angel Rodriguez Cristobal, who was found hanging in a Tallahassee, Fla., prison cell and listed as a suicide. After the sailors were killed, Corretjer announced that "his (Rodriguez Cristobal's) death is avenged."

Last January, the same three terrorist groups—the Macheteros, Armed Forces of Popular Resistance (FARP) and Organization of Volunteers for the Puerto Rican Revolution (OVRP)—joined in firebombing nine Air National Guard jets worth $45 million at Isla Verde Air Base near San Juan as part of their ongoing "people's war of national liberation" against "Yankee imperialism." The firebombing was carried out in only seven minutes, 40 seconds—ample evidence of the terrorists' high level of precision and efficiency.

Since 1975, Puerto Rican terrorist groups have committed 260 acts of violence on the island, according to official count. These range from bombing banks, post offices and U.S. business enterprises to blowing up electric power plants and assaulting military installations and personnel. An estimated 70 or more violent attacks were committed on the mainland during the same perid, mostly by the FALN. Federal authorities have revived their investigation into 31 unsolved bombings in New York City alone, based on new information supplied by Alfredo Mendez.

The FALN is the only Puerto Rican group operating in "enemy territory"—as Corretjer characterizes the continental United States—and probably would be the logical one to entrust with forming a hit squad to "get" the president and other high U.S. officials.

The FALN was formed in 1974 to open a "second front of armed struggle for Puerto Rican national liberation"—the first front being the island itself. It opened this "second front" by bombing five prominent Manhattan locations, including Rockefeller Center, on Oct. 26, 1974. Several weeks later it killed a policeman in reprisal for the alleged murder of a Puerto Rican activist poet "by the racist New York Police Department."

Perhaps the FALN's most notorious act was the bombing of historic Fraunces Tavern in Lower Manhattan in January 1975, killing four and injuring more than 60 people.

In March 1980, armed FALN members seized President Carter's campaign headquarters in Chicago and GOP presidential candidate George Bush's in New York City on the same day. Eleven of the group were. caught in Evanston, III., three weeks later, and all have been sentenced to long prison terms. Only Alfredo Mendez admitted FALN membership, apparently hoping to get his 75-year sentence reduced.

Another suspect in the Chicago case—and, as the FALN's bomb-making expert, perhaps the most dangerous of the lot—is William Morales, who is currently a fugitive.

U.S. intelligence officers believe the FALN was connected with the October robbery of a Brink's armored truck near Nyack, N.Y., by Weather Underground and black terrorists, during which two policemen and a guard were killed. The FBI's No. 2 man in New York, Kenneth P. Walton, has stated that the joint Federal-New York City Terrorism Task Force he heads is looking to possible links with the FALN and "possibly some foreign organizations" as well.

Intelligence sources take "foreign organizations" to mean Cuba's General Intelligence Directorate (DGI)—Fidel Castro's worldwide espionage service, whose principal aim is to destabilize the United States. Puerto Rico is high on the DGI's destabilization target list.

The "father of the FALN," and, in a sense, of Puerto Rico's modern terrorist movement, is Filiberto Inocencio Ojeda Rios, a 42-year-old Puerto Rican agent of Cuban intelligence who founded and led the first of Puerto Rico's new terrorist groups, the Independent Armed Revolutionary Movement (MIRA), in 1967. MIRA members received training and arms in Cuba and began activities in early 1969, when they bombed a police station, destroying two police cars, a bank and other enterprises.

After many bombings—35 in New York City alone during 1970—MIRA was broken up by the police and Ojeda was arrested. He lumped $2,000 bail, headed for New York, was assigned to the DGI contingent attached to Cuba's U.N. mission find formed the FALN with old MIRA members as the nucleus.

Although wanted by the Puerto Rican police, Ojeda, a master of disguise, slips in and out of the island undetected. In 1979, on one of his last known visits, he, Corretjer and another old comrade unified Puerto Rico's five principal terrorist groups under a single command—repeating the Cuban pattern of unifying armed revolutionary factions, as in Central America. Under this command, known as the CRN, are the FALN, the Macheteros (formally named the Boricua Popular Army, after the island's Indian name, Bornquen), FARP, OVRP and the People's Revolutionary Commandos (CRP).

Over the Puerto Rican unified command is a Cuban group, the Havana-based Coordinating Revolutionary Junta (JCR), whose Easter Caribbean section is headed by Ojeda. The JCR—set up by the DGI and the Americas Department, the Cuban Communist Party's national liberation-intelligence unit—provides arms, training and guidance to revolutionary organizations throughout Latin America, including Nicaragua's Sandinistas and the Salvadoran guerrillas.

Other foreign organizations with which Puerto Rican terrorists may be connected include the PLO and the band around the infamous "Carlos the Jackal"—born Ilich Ramirez in Venezuela—with which Ojeda made contact during a stint for the JCR in Paris before moving to Havana.

In an interview, CorretJer acknowledged that ties have long existed between the FALN and other Puerto Rican extremist groups and the Weather Underground. He added that he fully sympathized with the Brink's attackers and revealed that his Puerto Rican Socialist League, an "open" Marxist-Leninist organization, maintains contact with U.S. black extremists and some Chicanos in Colorado.

Another island group, the Marxist-Leninist Puerto Rican Socialist Party, has had ties to the Weather Underground, principally through trips to Cuba sponsored by the Venceremos Brigade. The Brigade, whose activities were embraced by Weather leaders such as Katherine Boudin, is the creation of the Cuban Communist Party's Americas Department.

The Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP) has maintained a quasi-diplomatic "mission" in a house in Havana's luxurious Vedado section for many years, its secretary general, Juan Mari Bras, told the writer. Since the PSP pays neither rent nor, presumably, upkeep, the mission virtually is subsidized by Castro. The PSP supplied 600 Cuban-trained youths to terrorist groups after its abysmal showing in the 1976 gubernatorial elections, which caused them to abandon the electoral route to independence preached by Mari Bras after 1970 and to embrace "urban guerrilla warfare."

Mari Bras says he eschews "terrorism" while embracing "armed struggle," yet local intelligence sources say he organized one of the earliest terrorist groups, the Armed Commandos of Liberation (CAL), in 1965. CAL members received guerrilla training and arms in Cuba and committed many acts of violence, including the bombing of a U.S. Governors Conference in San Juan, until the group disappeared in 1972-73.

Nine terrorist groups have proliferated in Puerto Rico over the past 15 years. That figure may be incomplete and does not include legal "open" support groups such as the Socialist League, PSP and the Federation of Pro-Independence University of Puerto Rico student strike that has gone on since the beginning of the school year, precipitating rioting and other campus violence and twice compelling Gov. Carlos Romero Barcelo to have police units occupy the university.

Although contemporary Puerto Rican terrorism began during the relatively prosperous mid-1960s, the past year has seen a record rise in violence. This may be attributed in part to widening discontent over the island's sharp economic decline.

Twenty-one percent of the labor force and a massive 38.2 percent of youths aged 20 to 24 are unemployed. Inflation is around 11 percent and is expected to rise even higher as the rate of imports doubles that of the island's exports. The export of sugar has all but disappeared because Puerto Rico can no longer produce it economically—and as sugar production has plummeted, so has employment in the industry.

The economic crunch is expected next October, the beginning of fiscal year 1983, when federal food and nutrition assistance may be cut by 25 percent. With 60 percent of the island's 3.2 million people officially estimated to be on food stamps, this could provoke something close to revolution unless Washington takes remedial action beforehand.

This threat to living standards has hardly made President Reagan the island's most popular figure. In addition, Puerto Ricans are confused about their political status.

Many Puerto Ricans perceive the commonwealth status they have enjoyed since 1952 to be an economic failure. But the statehood alternative, advocated by Gov. Romero's New Progressive Party, is supported by only 45 percent of the people and is seen by the rest as worse than the commonwealth: Citizens would be subject to state taxes and less federal aid, and statehood might endanger their Spanish heritage.

Pro-independence forces polled less than 6 percent of the vote in the 1980 gubernatorial election, yet independence remains a potentially explosive issue. Cuba, which sees it as an opportunity to pursue destabilization, has championed the "liberation" of Puerto Rico from "Yankeee imperialism" and has had the island's "colonial" status placed on the U.N. General Assembly's 1982 agenda.

The United States thus faces a two-front war over Puerto Rico: the diplomatic one in the United Nations, led by Cuba and backed by the Third World and the island's extremists; and the terrorist front, which has assumed the character of a "people's war" or urban guerrilla warfare.

The principal target is now military. "We want to get rid of every imperialist military installation on this island," says Corretjer, adding that he and his supporter will go to every length to attain their objective.

Cuba is fully in accord with that objective, aware of Puerto Rico's strategic importance in the Caribbean. Some 60 percent of U.S. imported oil is shipped through the Caribbean. In addition, major naval installations like Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico may become decisive if Washington goes all-out to stop the flow of arms and military forces from Cuba and other Soviet-bloc countries to Central American guerrillas.

Aiding the Puerto Rican terrorists is the island's history of violence. In 1950 the nation was shocked when members of the Nationalist Party tried to assassinate President Harry Truman; in 1954 they opened fire in the House of Representatives, wounding five congressmen.

Four of the Nationalists involved in those attempts were released from federal prisons two years ago and live in Puerto Rico. Lolita Lebron, perhaps the most famous of them, has said, "We have done nothing to cause us to repent," adding, "I cannot disavow people who use bombs. I hate bombs, but we might have to use them."

Lebron's fanaticism was engendered by Nationalist leader and hero Pedro Albizu Campos, who attempted an insurrection on the island in 1950, coinciding with the attack on Truman. It has infected today's Puerto Rican terrorists, who have wedded Albizu Campos' nationalism to Marxist-Leninism, and they gladly accept the material and political support of the Soviet Union and such client-states as Cuba.

This implies an abundance of material resources and sophisticated techniques. It might also suggest that the Libyan threat to Reagan could be executed not by Libyan assassins, but rather by Puerto Rican counterparts believing in the same objectives.