MADRID -- Cuban intelligence agents assisted members of the Basque group ETA wanted for terrorist attacks in Spain as recently as 1995, according to computer files seized in an ETA hideout in France.

Havana may even have allowed ETA commandos to leave the island, stage attacks in Spain and then return to the safety of Cuba, say French and Spanish police officials quoted in the Spanish media.

The captured files indicate that eight to 10 ETA members sought refuge in Cuba after Madrid tried to extradite them on terrorism charges from other Latin American countries where they had been living.

One top Interior Ministry official said the cold relations between Spain and Cuba since President Fidel Castro vetoed Madrid's ambassador to Havana last year have complicated Spanish efforts to pursue ETA fugitives who seek refuge on the island.

``We are not in a position to apply the same type of diplomatic influence on Cuba as in the other countries,'' said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

As the media reports began surfacing last month, Cuban Foreign Ministry spokesman Alejandro Gonzalez told reporters in Havana that the reports ``lacked all foundation and do not merit our consideration at all.''

ETA, the Basque-language acronym for Basque Homeland and Liberty, has long waged a bloody terror campaign for independence from Madrid. Every year, its commandos kill a few dozen people in assassinations and car bombs.

Files found in a computer in the house of two ETA members arrested by French police during the summer revealed a string of contacts between ETA members and Cuban intelligence officials on the island from 1992 to as late as 1995.

`Delegation' in Havana

ETA established a semiofficial ``delegation'' in Havana after discussions in 1992 between its representative, Jose Ramon Antuxia Celaya, and two Cubans identified as Esteban Rivero and Denys Guzman, the files showed.

Cuba's Communist Party considers its relations with ETA to be ``fraternal, sustained, strategic and increasingly deep,'' according to ETA computer files published in the Spanish and French media.

The files indicate that two Cuban intelligence colonels and several Communist Party officials in 1993 offered to help six leading ETA members escape from the Dominican Republic, where they were awaiting court hearings on a Spanish extradition request.

Two of the ETA members managed to slip their Dominican watchers and reach the safety of Cuba, although it is not clear whether they did so with Cuban intelligence assistance.

ETA's computer files also indicated that Cuban intelligence officers asked ETA members in April 1993 to gather information on European border controls so that Cuba could help the Basques with their operations.

At least one ETA member caught crossing the French-Spanish border last year had ``rested'' in Cuba before returning to operate in Europe, according to the computer files.

Cuba's help was not entirely enthusiastic because Havana feared angering its allies in the Socialist government of then-Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez.

`A complicated matter'

``For Cuba, this is a complicated matter. They want to help us but need to carefully assess the situation for it to come out well,'' wrote arrested ETA leader Jose Maria Dorronsoro in one of the computer files.

ETA's presence in Cuba goes back, at least publicly, to March 2, 1984, when Gonzalez and Castro negotiated an agreement under which seven ETA members then living in Panama would move to Cuba.

The deal: The ETA members would abandon all political activity and the Spanish government would not try to extradite them to face terrorism charges.

Later arrivals brought the number of ``legitimate'' ETA members in Cuba to 15. They are forbidden to leave the island but live comfortably and some run small import-export firms, the Mexican magazine Proceso reported recently.

Under Castro, Cuba has welcomed Marxist groups from Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia, although its training of foreign guerrillas appears to have dropped off in recent years.

The eight to 10 ETA members in Cuba now worrying Spanish authorities are fugitives who sought refuge there after Madrid launched a campaign to extradite them from other Latin American countries.

An estimated 30 ETA fugitives remain in the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Mexico.

Evidence on the new ETA members in Cuba came from the computer files recently presented before Laurence Lever, a Paris judge investigating international terrorism cases. Reports on the files' contents have been confirmed by the Spanish Interior Ministry.

Although ETA's relations with Cuba were believed to have cooled at the beginning of the 1990s, the most recent revelations appear to show the contrary.

The recorded contacts between ETA and Cuban intelligence coincide with a period in which the Basque group was under serious pressure as a result of upgraded international intelligence cooperation.

Group strikes back

More than a dozen top ETA leaders were arrested in a French border town and much of the group's infrastructure was dismantled in 1992 after U.S. and Spanish officials cooperated in tracking stolen weapons to an ETA hideout.

ETA lashed back a year later with a series of kidnappings and assassinations that culminated in a 1995 car bombing against Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, then head of the opposition conservative Popular Party.

ETA's presence in Latin America has been evident since the early 1980s, when several members arrived in Nicaragua to help the Marxist-led Sandinista Front guerrillas who seized power in 1979.

An unknown number of ETA members wound up working for Sandinista state security under the chief Cuban intelligence adviser to the Sandinistas, a secretive man who used the name of Renan Montero.

Montero arranged military training for some of the ETA members in Cuba and put them in touch with Salvadoran and other leftist guerrillas in Latin America, arrested ETA members have testified.