By GUILLERMO MARTINEZ
And HELGA SILVA
Herald Staff Writers

While publicly maintaining an icy silence, top-level Carter Administration officials met secretly with Cuban counterparts over a 2 1/2-year period in an effort to normalize relations between the two countries.

The negotiating sessions -- held in three countries, over lunches and dinners, in airports, hotels and in the Palace of the Revolution office of Fidel Castro -- ranged from such mundane matters as allowing the U.S. Coast Guard to tow a grounded oil tanker from Cuba's coast to presidential politics.

At a September 1980 meeting sought by Cuba, a Carter negotiator warned Castro's representatives that then-Republican nominee Ronald Reagan would be the next U.S. president unless Cuba closed the port of Mariel, ending an embarrassing political problem. Within days, Castro obliged.

At another of the eight clandestine sessions, Cuba agreed to release 3,600 political prisoners, a deal previously said to have been worked out between the Castro government and Cuban exiles, without any U.S. involvement.

To this day, none of the meetings has been acknowledged by either government. The Herald, however, confirmed details of the still-secret negotiations through interviews with current and former U.S. government officials who had direct knowledge of them.

The officials gave details of the sessions held between the spring of 1978 and late summer of 1980 -- including a 1978 "confrontational meeting" with Cuban President Castro -- but stressed that they never provided the impetus to re-establish full diplomatic relations.

The talks reached an impasse when Castro steadfastly refused to abandon his role in Africa, sources told The Herald.

These sessions were not the only meetings that took place between the two countries during Carter's administration. In the early months of 1977, talks between Cuban and American officials led to the establishment of a U.S. Interests Section in Havana and a Cuban Interests Section in Washington.

Subsequent talks hammered out fishing, narcotics-enforcement and boundary agreements between the governments. And in the closing weeks of the administration, the two governments again discussed family reunification and refugee issues.

The administration acknowledged, and the media reported, these sessions. But what has never been acknowledged is that the early talks provided the basis for subsequent secret high-level contacts between the two countries. It is these contacts that have not been made public.

Weaning Cuba

"We were interested in a relationship with Cuba to lessen its dependency on the Soviet Union and help bring Cuba back to more normal relations in order to moderate its behavior," said a former Carter Administration official, who agreed to comment only in exchange for anonymity. "We wanted to explore if they were prepared to moderate their behavior -- to pull out of Angola and limit their time in Ethiopia."

For their part, Cuban officials were interested in determining whether they could exploit Carter's interest in human rights in such a way that the United States would overlook Cuban involvement in Africa. They would, in effect, trade Carter the release of political prisoners in return for free rein in Africa.

The first step was taken by Castro. According to former Carter Administration officials, Cuba used intermediaries from the Cuban-American community in late 1977 to send word that a secret negotiating channel might iron out the issues that had kept the two countries apart for two decades.

Officials from both governments recognized that a substantive agreement -- such as one leading to full diplomatic ties -- would be difficult. But if a climate of understanding could be established and tensions between the two countries eased, such a result was possible, they said they believed.

Thus, in the early meetings, officials of both countries repeatedly talked of finding "significant reciprocal gestures" that wold improve this climate.

The officials said these would entail ostensibly unilateral actions designed to generate goodwill.

These first meetings were held in Washington, Atlanta and New York City in the spring of 1978. Two men led the U.S. delegation: David Newsom, undersecretary of state for political affairs, and David Aaron, the hand-picked representative of then-national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Cuba was represented by Jose Luis Padron, minister of tourism and a personal counselor to Castro. His deputy, Antonio de la Guardia, also participated.

These early meetings in the United States led to subsequent and more substantive talks in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in August 1978.

Former Carter officials said it was in Cuernavaca that Cuba agreed to the release of 3,600 Cuban political prisoners. Cuba also agreed to permit U.S. citizens living in Cuba to leave the island with their relatives and to allow exile family visits and reunification.

Publicly, Cuban and U.S. officials have never admitted that the prisoner-release program had been either hammered out or discussed directly by the two countries.

They have maintained that it was an agreement reached during a Havana meeting between the Committee of 75, a group of Cuban exiles, and the Cuban government.

At the Cuernavaca meeting, and in return for Cuba's concession on political prisoners, the United States offered to prosecute Cubans who hijacked boats to escape the island -- a sore point with Castro, who consistently complained that the United States was harboring hijackers.

Hijacking 'heroes'

Castro's negotiators argued that while the United states expected Cuba to prosecute Americans who hijacked planes to Cuba, those Cubans who hijacked boats to come to the United States were treated like heroes.

Some months later, after a study by U.S. Justice Department officials, Cubans who commandeered boats to come to the United States found themselves jailed and prosecuted -- the first time in 20 years that this had happened to Cubans fleeing Castro.

Despite these "reciprocal gestures" to improve the negotiating atmosphere, progress on the substantive issues was never achieved.

U.S. officials with knowledge of the talks said that the release of political prisoners and other humanitarian gestures could not overcome the basic fact that Cuba refused to moderate its behavior in Africa. They added that Carter's concerns over human rights were not sufficiently strong to agree to actions that, he believed, would "compromise American security."

"We [the U.S. delegation] told them that Cubans were bleeding and dying in Africa and the Soviets were getting the credit; that this was not serving their national interests; that their activities in Angola were an instrument of oppression and their criticism of American atrocities in the Vietnam War applied to them doubly," one source said.

In the end, "they [the Cubans] talked as if they were tempted, but they couldn't bring themselves to do it [back out of their Africa commitment]," the official said.

They added that a "party man" was sent by Castro to participate in the Cuernavaca meeting, apparently to make sure the negotiators didn't deviate from ideological policy.

Aaron, according to the sources, realized at Cuernavaca that there was little chance of the two governments reaching any substantive agreement.

Intense meeting

The impasse led the United States to downgrade the level of its representatives. Peter Tarnoff, executive secretariat at the State Department, replaced Newsom. And Robert Pastor, the chief Latin American expert at the National Security Council, took over Aaron's seat in the talks.

Tarnoff and Pastor went to Havana in December 1978, a month after Castro initiated the prisoner release and family reunification program. In what U.S. officials described as an "extremely confrontational, long and difficult meeting," they told Castro that his gesture on behalf of human rights was insufficient to overcome U.S. opposition to Cuba's interference in Africa and the Caribbean.

"Very harsh words were used by both sides," said a source familiar with the talks. "It was clear at that meeting that we had reached a real impasse."

Indeed, no meetings were held throughout 1979, and improved relations between the two countries appeared unlikely.

But by January of 1980, Cuba again indicated to Tarnoff it wanted to talk. Although the sources said they didn't know Cuba's motive in re-establishing contact, it came shortly after the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan on Dec. 26, 1979.

The invasion put Cuba in an embarrassing position. As head of the nonaligned nations movement, Cuba was expected to vote with other Third World countries for a United Nations resolution condemning the invasion of Afghanistan.

Cuba, however, broke with the bloc and supported the Soviet move -- a vote that subsequently cost Castro a seat on the U.N. Security Council and undermined his insistence that he wasn't a Soviet puppet.

Tarnoff and Pastor went to Havana in January 1980, under the impression that Castro was looking for a way to diminish his dependence on the Soviets. But while the language was "less confrontational" than that of their December 1978 meeting, no progress was made.

Ironic Challenge

Four months later, whatever chance there may have been to develop closer ties was dashed by Mariel and its impact on both Castro and presidential politics.

As 125,000 Cubans poured into the United States, President Carter was involved in a bitter presidential primary against Sen. Edward Kennedy. Ironically, Kennedy said that if he were president, he would negotiate an end to the Mariel exodus directly with the Cubans.

Carter never answered Kennedy's criticism, creating the impression that he would not negotiate directly with Cuba. In fact, according to sources, Tarnoff traveled to Havana in June trying to do precisely what Kennedy was suggesting. The mission failed.

"The Cubans were irrational," one official said. In return for closing Mariel, Cubans were making the same impossible demands in private that they were in public: an end to the trade embargo, cessation of spy overflights and the return to Cuba of the Guantanamo Naval Base.

There was, however, one final secret session. By September, the Cubans, now worried about Carter's election campaign, went to Washington to talk to Tarnoff.

The U.S. delegates offered to discuss an air-transport agreement and lifting the embargo on medicines if the boatlift were stopped. Tarnoff also emphasized to the Cubans that Mariel had possibly crippled Carter's reelection efforts.

Unless Mariel was closed, there was no doubt that Reagan would be elected, Tarnoff told the Cubans. The Cuban officials returned to Havana. On Sept. 26, Castro ordered the port of Mariel closed.