Brothers to the Rescue founder Jose Basulto said Monday that he had intended to drop leaflets on last month's Baltimore Orioles exhibition game in Cuba -- but the Federal Aviation Administration stopped him by staging a snap inspection.

``The FAA showed up at the airport arguing that they wanted to do an inspection; they delayed us for two, two-and-a-half hours,'' Basulto said. The Bay of Pigs veteran called the inspection ``extremely unusual -- they had never done it before,'' and said his lawyer was preparing a protest.

The FAA in Atlanta, whose region covers South Florida, disagreed. ``All flights south of the Straits of Florida are monitored closely,'' said spokeswoman Tanya Wagner. ``The March 28 ramp inspection was not out of the ordinary.''

Fearing another attempt, Major League Baseball has asked the FAA to restrict air traffic over the May 3 rematch between the Cuban national team and the Orioles. FAA spokesman Jim Peters said the agency does not have the power to shut down airspace and has referred Major League Baseball executives to the U.S. Secret Service, which does have the power.

The Secret Service in Washington, D.C., did not return a call placed by The Herald's Miami office on Monday.

Basulto, meanwhile, said he was undecided on whether he would try to drop the tens of thousands of unused leaflets on Camden Yards. They say ``La Patria es de Todos'' (``The homeland belongs to all'') on one side and reprint Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the other with the exhortation, ``Cubano ¡lucha por tus derechos!'' (``Cuban: Fight for your rights!'') Article 14 grants people ``in the event of persecution . . . the right to seek asylum . . . in any country.''

The Brothers have released leaflets that fell over Havana at least twice before.

The latest was Feb. 24, the third anniversary of Cuba's downing of two Brothers to the Rescue airplanes.

On that day, Havana residents said, they picked up hundreds of anti-Castro fliers dropped by Basulto.

The Cuban government claimed the leaflets came from an unmanned balloon, but Basulto said he dropped 500,000 pamphlets by hand out the door of his single-engine Cessna 337 at an altitude of 10,000 feet as he flew 20 miles off the Cuban coast -- well within international air space.