U.S. Says Cubans Have Shifted From Advising to Combat in Nicaragua

Cuban soldiers have moved from an advisory role into a combat role helping Nicaragua’s Sandinista soldiers fight American-supported contra rebels, a top State Department official told a House panel today.

Elliott Abrams, the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, told a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing on contra aid that there are about 2,500 Cuban military personnel in Nicaragua.

“They aren’t just advisers,” Abrams said. “They seem to be in combat, too.”

Abrams said the United States is getting “more and more reports of Cubans involved in combat” against the U.S.-backed contra forces fighting Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.

“We may be seeing Cubans move into a combat role on the mainland of North America,” Abrams said.

He also confirmed a report that Cubans were among the dead when the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, the largest contra group, shot down a Sandinista helicopter Monday during a battle in north central Nicaragua.

There were “Cubans who were among the casualties,” Abrams said. He did not indicate how many Cubans he believed were among the 14 who died in the crash.

The rebel group NDF claimed in radio broadcasts from Honduras Wednesday that it had shot down the helicopter and that two Cuban advisers were among the dead.

Abrams said the helicopter, believed to be a Soviet-built MI-8, was shot down by a SAM-7 sur-face-to-air missile.

In other testimony, Abrams admitted that contra forces have committed human rights abuses but that the rebels have been conducting trials and punishing guilty soldiers.

“Yes, there have been human rights abuses and they have established a system to cope with it,” Abrams said.

Subcommittee Chairman Michael D. Barnes (D-Md.) also released a letter from the General Accounting Office in which the agency said it has repeatedly failed to win State Department cooperation in its attempts to audit the way in which $27 million in humanitarian aid to the contras is being spent.

Abrams admitted there “is a problem” in getting together with the GAO because some of the material requested may be intelligence of a sensitive nature and the department has not yet decided whether it wants to release the material to the GAO.

Robert Duemling, director of the department’s Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office, which is coordinating distribution of the aid, told the subcommittee that he has “every intention of cooperating fully” with the GAO.

Barnes reminded the State Department witnesses that the humanitarian aid “is an overt program. This is not one in which you should spend a lot of time worrying about the intelligence aspects of it.”