COLUMN LEFT : Are Jingoists Savoring Next Morsel? : Cubans might be wise to check the location of the nearest bomb shelter.

At a conference in Washington earlier this month, I listened to an interminable speech about the Soviet role in Central America. The drift was familiar: The region had been destabilized in the 1980s by the aggressive expansionism of the Brezhnev clique; Cuba and Nicaragua--”totalitarian repressive regimes with no spiritual basis”--had fomented terrorism in El Salvador; but things were now on the heartening road to freedom and democracy

. The only curious thing about this message was that it came not from an Administration official or a member of some right-wing think tank, but from Vladimir Stanchenko of the Soviet Institute of World Economy and International Relations.

It may sound surprising that my first reaction was to think of George Bush’s betrayal of the Kurds in Iraq. Let me try to explain.

Many conservatives compare the abandonment of the Kurds to the desertion of anti-Castro Cubans at the Bay of Pigs. Some believe that the debacle in Kurdistan shows that the President was overhasty in declaring an end to the Vietnam syndrome. While one aspect--the restraint on the use of military force--is dead and buried, another--the fear of foreign quagmires--is very much alive.

Recent public-opinion polls support this line of argument. They indicate that a majority of Americans would have favored delaying the cease-fire to destroy the Iraqi army, but few would have had the stomach to intervene militarily on behalf of the Kurds.

The polls also show that the wartime surge in Bush’s approval rating has dipped sharply. Moral queasiness at the televised sufferings of the Kurds suggests that Saddam Hussein as a political asset and the afterglow of Bush’s splendid little war may not carry him through the 1992 election.

Given that those disgruntled conservatives are all in favor of punitive strikes against America’s enemies, and that the public has shown its enthusiasm for painless military expeditions--Grenada, Libya, Panama, Iraq--what other targets might present themselves over the next 18 months?

Since the Gulf War ended, we have heard a number of threatening growls from Washington. On a recent trip to Central America, Gen. Colin Powell dropped the ominous hint that he hoped a Persian Gulf-style outcome could be avoided if the current round of U.N.-sponsored peace talks over El Salvador should fail. Intelligence officials have also been telling journalists of their anxiety over recent developments in Libya and North Korea. Libya, they say, has stepped up its production of nerve and mustard gases at its Rabta chemical plant. North Korea is said to be on the verge of producing nuclear weapons, and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney says that this is the place where he most fears an unprovoked attack on U.S. forces.

There are, of course, practical objections to an attack on any of these countries. El Salvador would be the epitome of a political quagmire. Libya, in Washington’s official mythology, is a closed book, thanks to the success of the 1986 bombing of Tripoli. And why on earth would North Korea be foolish enough to launch a suicidal attack on the south after 40 years?

That leaves one obvious candidate, which is where we return to Stanchenko’s little speech. No enemy has burned more darkly, nor for longer, in the hearts of U.S. conservatives than Fidel Castro.

The rhetorical temperature around Cuba rises and falls all the time, but the heat has been turned up again of late. In an April 1 column, former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick mused on the recent defection of a Cuban fighter pilot to Florida, who was undetected until he came in, waggling his wings in a gesture of surrender, over a Key West air base.

What if this was not a defection at all, she asked, but a deliberate probe of U.S. air defenses? And how could such an incident make sense unless it was placed in the context of Cuba’s nuclear energy program, which might soon be able to produce weapons-grade plutonium?

The idea of a strike against Cuba depends on two hopes that beat in conservative breasts. One is that Castro’s talk of popular resistance would evaporate, like Saddam Hussein’s, when it came to a fight. The other is that people like Vladimir Stanchenko are gaining influence in Moscow, and that the Soviet Union--perhaps led not by Mikhail Gorbachev but by Boris Yeltsin--would simply stand by with its arms folded.

If I were a Cuban, watching TV images of the heart-rending scenes in the snowy mountains of southern Turkey, I think I might be inclined to cast a nervous eye in the direction of the nearest bomb shelter.