Cuban spies? No surprise

When FBI agents busted a ring of 10 alleged Cuban spies over the weekend, they may have exposed more than a detachment of loathed enemies masquerading as blue-collar exile workers. They may have exposed some embarrassing potholes along Fidel Castro's disinformation highway.

Here were international spies who couldn't even afford a decent martini.

Yes, FBI agents say they uncovered a potentially disastrous plot to infiltrate U.S. military installations. In fact, one of the accused spies, 29-year-old Antonio Guerrero Jr., had landed a job at the Boca Chica Naval Air Station near Key West.

The FBI says it was Guerrero's mission to tattle about ``unusual exercises, maneuvers and other activity related to combat readiness.''

But while the idea of a public-works employee feeding sensitive military details to Havana may sound ominous, it is the expected course of an enemy government. And there is ample terrain for Cuban spies in a society as fluctuating and porous and easily manipulated as this one.

No shocker

Likewise, it's no shocker that the Castro government would dispatch agents to infiltrate exile groups. The big shock would be if Cuba didn't  take advantage of wide-open, popular organizations. Infiltrating Brothers to the Rescue is not Mission: Impossible, and it doesn't take a 007 to join the Democracia Movement's protest flotillas.

What I find most baffling is not Cuba's interest in U.S. military operations or big, mainstream exile groups. What is most amazing is Cuba's apparent fascination with the inconsequential.

Accused spy Nilo Hernandez had this dubious mission: to infiltrate CAMACOL, the old, largely inert Latin Chamber of Commerce.

CAMACOL?  Is Cuba so desperately out-of-touch that it would consider a business banquet brigade worthy of infiltration?

I can just imagine Hernandez's coded messages to Havana: ``Have confiscated rubber chicken, comrades. Am forwarding the rest of the menu . . .''

If all of this is true, it sure seems as if Cuba is lavishing great importance on some groups otherwise considered just part of the blur. After all, when was the last time anybody who's anybody in this town took the National Democratic Unified Party, El PUND, seriously?

War, head games

But I'm convinced Cuba's strategy involves more than an interest in war games. It involves head games.

The FBI affidavit suggests one of Cuba's espionage coups could be its manipulation of exile groups. It confirms what a lot of us believe -- sometimes it takes more than indignant exiles to create a Miami protest mob.

What a better way to give exiles a bad image than to sprinkle the demonstrations with crass, low-rent, threatening ``picketers?''

It certainly might explain why some demonstrations seem to be lifted right off a street corner in Havana, right out of a scene from a Castro-sponsored mob rally. Maybe it's because they were.

Granted, some exile groups play into the hands of the manipulators. They jump at the right trigger words, remain silent in the face of threats and potential violence.

Hopefully, this FBI bust will be their wake-up call to venture beyond rhetoric and cover stories.

And for those quick to judge us as a rabid, bomb-happy community, perhaps this will be their wake-up call to look more closely at the people they condemn.

You can e-mail Liz at lbalmaseda@herald.com