The story of five Central Americans jailed in Cuba on charges of plotting to set off bombs to hurt the island's tourist industry paints a picture of ordinary people who got involved in international intrigue through the simple need for cash.

The picture was assembled from interviews in a Havana prison and the accounts of the defendants' relatives, associates and others in Central America.

``These do not appear to be militants or activists or doctrinaire fanatics,'' said Guatemalan Foreign Minister Eduardo Stein, who has studied the case. ``They seem to be something like what, in the drug-trafficking world, one would call mules.''

All of the defendants needed cash and were struggling with debts on everything from cellular telephones to children's schools, according to their accounts.

One of the participants, a 28-year-old Salvadoran who needed money for car payments, said he earned $2,500 for his participation. Another, an executive at El Salvador's biggest car dealership who was struggling to support two children he had fathered out of wedlock, said he agreed to make the trip for $1,000.

Exactly who paid the bills is unclear.

Luis Posada Carriles, an aging Cuban veteran of the CIA's crusades against Cuban President Fidel Castro, acknowledged organizing the attacks, suggesting that he did so with money provided by Cuban exiles in the United States. But he declined to identify them.

U.S. officials said federal prosecutors are looking at the bombings as part of a grand jury investigation into what they say was a plot to kill Castro during a regional summit meeting in the Caribbean last May. They have filed conspiracy charges against eight men, including three with ties to the most prominent exile political group in the United States, the Cuban American National Foundation.

`I was drowning' in debt

Interviews with the prisoners were conducted at the Interior Ministry's Villa Marista prison in Havana, in a room that appeared to be monitored by security agents. All five of the prisoners admitted the crimes of which they have been accused and denied having been mistreated or coerced to confess.

Setting bombs was out of character for Raul Cruz Leon, 28, of El Salvador, but he said his finances were getting desperate. His main job, driving Latin pop singers around as the ``security chief'' for a Salvadoran promoter, rarely paid more than $500 a month. Between car payments, credit-card bills and his cellular phone, he owed nearly $6,000, and relatives said his mother finally mortgaged her small jewelry store to help him pay off the debt.

``I was drowning in the interest payments,'' he recalled.

``I thought of that movie The Specialist, with Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone,'' Cruz Leon recalled, looking pale and tired in a blue-polyester prison uniform. ``That guy planted a bomb, and he ended up a hero.''

Cruz Leon became the most able of the accused mercenaries, learning to assemble his bombs -- a small wad of plastic explosive, a detonator, a thin Casio alarm clock and a nine-volt battery -- in little more than a minute.

Cruz Leon got past a strip search at the Havana airport in July 1997 to bomb two hotels for $2,500, he said. He was arrested during a second trip in September, after another of his bombs killed a 32-year-old Italian businessman.

Wanted to visit Cuba again

Two other recruits were Maria Elena Gonzalez, a 54-year-old former schoolteacher who read tarot cards on the side at her house in Guatemala City, and one of the visitors to her home, Nader Musalam, a 28-year-old Guatemalan who had previously owned a small store where, he said, he had done a modest business in stolen clothing.

Musalam had gone to Cuba on vacation years earlier; although the bombs seemed like ``not such a good idea,'' he was eager to get back.

``I liked it a lot,'' he said of Cuba. ``It wasn't like they made it sound in Guatemala.''

Musalam said he was to receive $1,300 for each bomb he planted, enough for a down payment on a Hyundai sedan that he could drive as a taxi back in Guatemala.

Gonzalez said she agreed to carry two toothpaste tubes filled with plastic explosives and two small alarm clocks for $800. But she also had to pay for her own plane ticket, which she bought on credit.

``It was the end of the month,'' she said. ``I had to pay the water bill, the electricity bill. I thought this would be some quick money.''

Musalam was arrested at the airport, and Gonzalez was picked up as she waited for him at his hotel. Gonzalez's husband, Jazid Ivan Fernandez, 28, a data processor in Guatemala City, said he had opposed the trip but helped pack the explosives. He was detained three weeks later when he traveled to Cuba to try to locate her.

Planted bomb, had quick affair

Otto Rene Rodriguez, 40, the nephew of one of El Salvador's most respected centrist politicians and the son of a prosperous businessman, earned just under $1,000 a month as the security supervisor for a Salvadoran company that includes the country's biggest car dealership. But along with his two children by his estranged wife, he said, he was trying to support two more by other women with whom he had become involved.

``With $1,000 I could solve my problem,'' he said. ``And I thought I could keep some of the expense money they gave me.''

He arrived at the Havana airport in August 1997, carrying explosives in a back pocket, transistor batteries in a front pocket. He planted a bomb at the Melia Cohiba tourist hotel in Havana, had a brief affair with a young Cuban woman and returned home to pay off his older children's school tuition, he said.

After agreeing to try again, he was arrested at the Havana airport last June. This time he was supposed to meet a Cuban conspirator, identified to him only as Juan. Instead, Rodriguez was arrested and has spent the last months wondering why he ever agreed to join the bombing campaign.

``This really doesn't have anything to do with us,'' he said of the plot to destabilize the Cuban government. ``Sometimes, it takes a long time to figure out how lost you are.''