By JUAN O. TAMAYO and MEG LAUGHLIN
Herald Staff Writers

In a tit-for-tat reply to a suit against Havana for killing four Miami pilots, Cuba has
sued Washington for $181.1 billion in compensation for victims of anti-Castro
attacks since 1959.

The suit filed Monday in a Havana civil court seeks $30 million for each of the
3,476 people allegedly killed in such attacks, $15 million for each of the 2,099
allegedly left disabled and $45 billion for ``general hardship.

``The hostile and aggressive actions carried out by the U.S. government against
Cuba, from the very triumph of the revolution to the present, have caused
enormous material and human losses, said the suit, whose text the Communist
Party newspaper Granma published Tuesday in Havana in a seven-page
supplement.

The text did not explain why Cuba waited so long to sue, but made its
propaganda intent clear by noting that U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King
had awarded $187 million to relatives of the Brothers to the Rescue pilots killed in
1996.

Trying to collect on King's judgment, the relatives have garnisheed $6 million that
U.S. telephone companies owe to Havana and have targeted $60 million more.
Cuba retaliated by shutting down 1,200 U.S. telephone circuits.

``This is another effort by Cuba to manipulate the media and create a public
relations splash in a case that's really about the murder of four innocent people,
said Frank Angones, a lawyer for the relatives.

``To equate a legal proceeding in Cuba, where everyone knows [President Fidel
Castro] decides everything, with a case in a federal courtroom before Judge King
is a travesty, Angones said.

The eight groups that filed the complaint are all controlled by the Cuban
government, ranging from the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution to the
Cuban Confederation of Workers.

That Cuba is seeking to score more propaganda than legal points with the suit is
clear from its text, little more than a lengthy chronology of known events with
almost no legal arguments.

It seems to make no distinction between actions directly backed or financed by
Washington, mostly in the 1960s, and the attacks carried out by Cuban exiles
without U.S. support since then. And it tacks onto the bill the Cuban military's
extra costs as a result of U.S. enmity.

The suit claims 637 attempts to assassinate Castro and repeats Cuban
allegations of U.S. responsibility for a 1981 epidemic of dengue fever that killed
158 people, including 101 children.

The list of casualties begins with several people killed and dozens wounded Oct.
21, 1959, when an unidentified plane strafed Havana. The last fatality is an
Italian-Canadian businessman killed by an exile-financed terror bombing in 1997.

In between it lists numerous losses, including 176 killed and 300 wounded in the
Bay of Pigs invasion by U.S.-trained exiles, and the 73 passengers killed in the
midair bombing of a Cuban airliner that was blamed on Cuban exiles.

Just what the real impact of the suit might be is unclear. The United States has
few assets in Cuba that the Havana court could seize, and international court
rulings can seldom be enforced.

Nicaragua's Sandinista government won a suit against Washington in the World
Court in the Netherlands for mining its harbors in the 1980s, but could not enforce
the ruling or collect any damages. The issue was not pursued after the
Sandinistas lost power in 1990.