Sandinistas Exhibit 2 Captured ‘Contras’

The Sandinista government Wednesday paraded before the press two captured Cuban refugees who said they were recruited in Miami to work for U.S.-backed Nicaraguan rebels and were trained for the insurgency in Miami, El Salvador and Costa Rica.

One of the Cubans, Mario Eugenio Rejas Lavas, 33, said that Salvadoran military officers trained him at the Ilopongo air base in San Salvador. The other, Uvaldo Hernandez Perez, 27, said a Costa Rican colonel helped him enter that country illegally to work with the rebels, called contras.

The Cubans were captured separately in Nicaragua earlier this month. Still wearing their worn and torn fatigues, they were presented at a press conference under heavy guard at the Interior Ministry.

Without U.S. Passports

Both prisoners said they were Cuban refugees who went to the United States during the Mariel boat-lift that brought more than 125,000 Cubans to Florida in 1980. They said they did not have U.S. passports.

They said they had been recruited separately by a Cuban American whom they identified as Rene Corbo. They said Corbo was a former CIA agent who had served in a brigade of Cuban Americans that participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

Rejas told reporters that he was recruited by Corbo in 1985 and offered $300 to $400 to fight with the contras. Rejas said that in June 1985 he entered a training camp in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. run by Cuban American veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

After a month in the Florida camp, Rejas said, he was flown in a private plane full of arms and supplies for the contras to Ilopongo military airport in San Salvador, where he spent a month being trained in artillery by Salvadoran officers. He identified the officers as “Maj. Brito, Maj. Arevalo, and Lt. Castellon,” but did not give their full names.

A Salvadoran military spokesman said in a telephone interview that he had not heard of the allegations and could not comment further.

Cash Payment Offered

Hernandez Perez, who was brought out separately, said Corbo offered him $500 “to go fight in Nicaragua,” but that he only received $450.

“I was one of the Marielitos (Cubans who went to Florida in the boat lift) that lived in the worst conditions. . . . I came to fight for the $500 because I needed it, because I didn’t have anything to eat, sincerely,” said Hernandez.

Hernandez said he left Miami for Costa Rica in February on a “tourist card” under a false name that Corbo gave him. He said his sponsors paid a bribe to get him past immigration officials in the United States. He did not explain what the “tourist card” was, nor why any bribe was thought to be necessary to enable him to leave the United States.

Hernandez said he was met at the San Jose, Costa Rica, airport by a civil guard officer whom he identified as “Col. Paniagua.”

He said five other Cubans were at a contras training camp on the Costa Rica-Nicaragua border where he was trained. He said one was a CIA agent named Pedro Gil.

The two did not make it clear who they supposedly worked for in the contras army. They were captured in the south, where rebels commanded by Fernando (El Negro) Chamorro of the United Nicaraguan Opposition operate and where former contras leader Eden Pastora of the Revolutionary Democratic Alliance operated until he gave up the fight last month.

A spokesman for Pastora, however, denied that his group had ever employed Cuban mercenaries and alleged that the two must have belonged to Chamorro’s organization. Sandinista special forces on patrol for contras. Page 12.