Once feared and admired as one of the world's top security forces, the Cuban Interior Ministry has seen its image decline as anti-Castro bombings escalate.

Even so, the ministry, known as MININT, remains a robust line of defense for President Fidel Castro's government, and on Wednesday announced the arrest in the bombings, saying a former Salvadoran soldier had confessed.

Still, analysts say, too many officers are demoralized and tainted by corruption. The ministry's coffers have dwindled and its most experienced officials, purged in 1989, have been replaced by less flexible army officers and junior operatives.

And it is so strained by the need to watch a growing wave of tourists that several U.S. intelligence veterans and Cuban defectors argued that Washington should ease restrictions on travel to Cuba, unleashing a flood of U.S. visitors that might overwhelm the ministry.

``The time when its officers were kings has passed. . . . The MININT has begun to lose effectiveness,'' said Lissette Bustamante, a Cuban journalist who had access to top ministry officials before she sought asylum in Spain in 1992.

Historically, the ministry was an awesome machine, with tens of thousands of agents in and out of uniform or undercover as journalists, academics and other professionals, and thousands more civilian collaborators.

Know-all ministry

No one moved and nothing happened in Cuba without the ministry knowing about it, and its prior approval was required for such seemingly simple matters as road construction projects and some housing assignments.

Most profitably, its officers were usually in charge of contacts with foreigners and controlled the many front companies that Havana established abroad to dodge the U.S. trade embargo.

U.S. experts were unanimous in their opinion that Cuba, under the tutelage of Soviet and Eastern European intelligence organizations, had constructed one of the world's top internal security systems.

``Cuba's been a nightmare to try to work against,'' said a retired CIA officer who spent more than a decade matching wits with Cuban intelligence throughout Latin America. ``Believe it or not, at the height of the Cold War, the Cubans were actually better than the Soviets. It was a case where the student becomes better than the tutor.''

Mass purge

But then came the mass purge of MININT following the execution of army Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa, Interior Ministry Col. Antonio de la Guardia and two other men in 1989, on charges of treason, drug trafficking and corruption.

Former Interior Minister Jose Abrantes and at least six aides were convicted shortly afterward on charges of failing to stop Ochoa, and dozens more top operatives were fired. Abrantes died of a heart attack in prison.

``Most of the publicity centered around Ochoa,'' said a U.S. military official who has studied Cuba's intelligence services and interrogated defectors. ``But the real story was what happened to the MININT. It was the MININT that paid the real price.''

Defense Minister Raul Castro assigned scores of army officers to take over top posts in MININT, whose foreign intelligence arm had once rivaled the military's, and named a top aide, Gen. Abelardo Colome Ibarra, as Abrantes' replacement.

``The first thing that happened was that the MININT, which had always had a lot more freedom to do all kinds of things, was put under military-style discipline that made everything more difficult,'' Bustamante said.

Problems persist

Colome has backed off some of that discipline in recent years, she added, and the ministry has recovered some freedom of action. But other problems persist.

``Because of this wholesale purge, you lost a lot of operatives at every level: senior, middle and low. The level of expertise is just not what it used to be,'' the U.S. military officer said.

Bustamante recalled that one ministry official who was little more than a security escort in 1989 turned up in the early 1990s as a chief of one of the ministry divisions, known as bureaus.

Ministry officials no longer have ready access to the large amounts of hard currencies that greased their work in the past, Bustamante added, and many were demoralized by the economic crisis that hit Cuba following the collapse of communism in 1989 and the legalization of the U.S. dollar in 1993.

``There's a strong level of corruption everywhere in Cuba now, and a U.S. dollar goes a long way,'' one former ministry official said. ``If a dollar can corrupt a Communist Party official, it can also corrupt a MININT officer.''

Bustamante recalled the recent case of a woman who was tipped off to her imminent arrest, and then helped to flee the country, by a friend in the ministry.

``That kind of loyalty to friend over country, you would not have seen in the past,'' she said.

Officers embittered

U.S. analysts said the 1989 purge also left the ministry's best and brightest intelligence officers so embittered that they could have been considered suspects in the current wave of bombings.

``I have to wonder about how, in a society . . . where the security presence is as pervasive as it is in Cuba, you could have these bombs going off all the time,'' one U.S. analyst said. ``You have to wonder if the bombers, at the very least, have the cooperation of the security forces.''

All the intelligence experts contacted by The Herald agreed that the influx of tourists, by stretching Cuban security forces thin, made it easier for the bombs to be planted unseen.

Over one million tourists visited Cuba last year, and the government hopes to double that by 2000. But security forces cannot possibly plant all the wiretaps and recruit all the informers necessary to watch so many people, said a former Cuban intelligence officer who defected.

``This is a vulnerable moment,'' said Duane Clarridge, who served 33 years in the CIA before his retirement in 1987. ``Ending the U.S. travel restrictions would be a huge step forward in terms of aiding dissident elements. I think if you ended the entire embargo, let people spill in there, Castro would fall in six months.''

But before the ministry announced the arrest, people contacted by The Herald disagreed sharply on the source of the bombs -- whether they were placed by Cubans who live on the island or by someone from outside.

Spymaster's view

The chief of intelligence in a Latin American country that spies on and is spied upon by Cuba said his agency did not believe the bombings could be the work of outsiders.

``If the bombs were being set by Colombians or Panamanians or someone like that, it would be easy to detect a pattern of who was present at which times,'' he said.

On the other hand, one Cuban intelligence defector said the bombings were ``more sophisticated, more elaborate, more resourceful, in terms of imagination and money,'' than anything a Cuba-based group would be able to manage.

Copyright © 1997 The Miami Herald