U.S. Rarely Prosecutes Castro Foes

On most weekends, middle-aged men, young boys and occasionally women crawl through the palmetto scrub and grasslands of the Everglades, clad in camouflage fatigues and face paint, honing the military skills they intend to use to wrest Cuba from Fidel Castro’s dictatorship.

Although the Cuban exiles often use plastic replicas of assault rifles to keep on the right side of gun control laws, they are rehearsing, in violation of U.S. law and international standards, for a possible invasion of Cuba.

In recent years, U.S. authorities have documented cases in which Cuban exile groups have hoarded weapons, conducted private spy missions in Cuba, planned--and sometimes carried out--sabotage on the island and generally ignored U.S. neutrality laws prohibiting civilians from military action against countries with which the United States is not at war.

But prosecutions have been rare, convictions even rarer. U.S. officials concede that it is almost impossible to convince a jury to punish anti-Castro activity.

Although officials are reluctant to admit it, no recent administration has been willing to risk the wrath of Florida’s politically potent Cuban community by seeming to take the side of the dictator.

“Everything about U.S. Cuba policy has to do with domestic politics,” said Geoff Thale, a Cuban expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, a private group concerned with economic, political and human rights issues in the region.

Last weekend’s shoot-down of two light planes flown by anti-Castro militants dramatized the life-and-death struggle going on in the twilight of U.S. law.

A State Department official said the Brothers to the Rescue organization had been warned at least four times since last summer to stay away from Cuba but that the organization continued to taunt Castro by flying close to, and sometimes directly over, the island.

After the planes were destroyed, the Federal Aviation Administration said it sought last August to suspend the pilot license of Jose Basulto, a co-founder of the Brothers group, for flying into Cuban airspace without permission. The FAA also noted that it had suspended the license of another Brothers pilot, Carlos Ernesto Gartner, for clipping the mast of a ship off Cuba’s coast in 1994.

U.S. officials believe anti-Castro paramilitary activity has increased in recent years as the dictator’s advancing age has pointed to an eventual change in power in Havana. But exile groups have been plotting the overthrow of Castro since the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Alpha 66, a component of the Bay of Pigs brigade, still trains commandos.

Over the years, dozens of Cuban Americans have been arrested at sea in boats laden with arms, radio equipment and maps of Cuba and charged with violating the U.S. neutrality act. But there has been virtually no punishment.

“Though it may sound like a violation of federal law when they return from Cuba and say they did X, Y and Z, the problem with these scenarios is that they are hard to prove,” said Wilfredo Fernandez, an assistant U.S. attorney in Florida. “Where are the weapons, where are the people?”

But there often are weapons by the boatload.

In 1993 Ivan Leon Rojas, 56, a well-known anti-Castro zealot, was caught red-handed on his way to Cuba in a fishing boat loaded to the gunwales with machine guns, assault rifles and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. A year earlier, Rojas was tried and acquitted in the Bahamas after he was found grounded on an island there with a cache of homemade bombs and hand grenades.

After his 1993 arrest, Rojas was charged with possessing unregistered firearms and could have faced 10 years in prison. But a judge, accepting Rojas’ guilty plea to a single firearms violation, put him on probation.

Ellis Rubin, a Miami attorney who has defended several anti-Castro militants, said: “I think I’ve had five or six trials about violation of neutrality laws and lost one.

“This community from which the jury is selected has been thoroughly propagandized that Cuban freedom fighters should be granted a special dispensation. . . . This community is very sympathetic to the plight of anti-Castro exiles.”

Peter Hakim, head of Inter-American Dialogue--which works with the Washington Office on Latin America--said it is shortsighted of the administration to allow concern about Cuban-American votes to cloud its judgment.

“I can’t imagine that if these people were buzzing Mexico or flying into Canada, the United States wouldn’t put a stop to it immediately,” he said.

Not all anti-Castro militants are in Miami. Last December three Cuban Americans from Los Angeles were arrested after the FBI seized a stockpile of assault rifles, body armor and other military equipment from a warehouse.

Rene Cruz, 68, his son, Rene Cruz Jr., 47, and Rafael Garcia, 45, were charged with conspiracy and with mounting an expedition against a friendly nation (defined as any country with which the United States is not at war). But the charges were dismissed.

Special correspondent Clary reported from Miami and Times staff writer Kempster reported from Washington.