When he said this on the phone from a Southwest Miami storefront office, his comrades in the Free Cuba cause broke into laughter. Their ages alone add up to 333 years.

But that's not the important math. Add the years these men spent in Cuban political prisons and it boggles the free mind: 127 years, all served within the last four decades.

Even more telling than the years of languishing in prison and torture is what came before. For the most part, these were Castro's comrades-in-arms, men who played important parts in the 1959 revolution.

Take Mario Chanes de Armas, who was instrumental in just about every major event of the early revolution. He was one of the founders of the July 26 movement born of the 1953 attack on the Moncada army barracks. He was there at the landing of the Granma, in the rebel treks through the Sierra Maestra.

Consider Eusebio Penalver. In his early 20s, he was a distinguished soldier in Che Guevara's guerrilla force.

But both these guerrilleros landed in political prison when they dared to oppose the veering course of the revolution. Each spent at least as much time in prison as did Nelson Mandela. Chanes served 30 years, more than any other Cuban political prisoner. Penalver served 28 years.

Diaz, who was captured during an anti-Castro operation in western Cuba in 1968, served 22 1/2 years. He was the second-to-last of the plantados, the so-named ``immovable'' prisoners who rejected the regime's ``reeducation'' program, to be released.

Last Tuesday, during a news conference with Venezuelan journalists in Havana, Castro denounced an alleged Miami-hatched plot to send a ``terrorist commando'' to Caracas to kill Chavez later this month.

In his paranoid and provincial tirade, Castro not only named names. He also gave out the telephone number and address to the Southwest Miami storefront office of Plantados Until Liberation and Democracy in Cuba, the ex-prisoner group.

That Castro would even make such an accusation is a joke on several levels. There he is, blaming the same guys who hoisted him into power. There he is, lambasting the same kind of guerrilla operation he once led.

If Castro were to apply retroactively the same charges against himself, he'd have to throw away the key. After all, does he actually expect the world to believe he was democratically elected? Does he expect the world to believe that he has never committed murder in his interminable tenure? The murder charges alone would be enough to keep him locked away for several lifetimes.

But, suddenly, he wants there to be Law.

``Castro saves his most visceral hatred for those who were his allies,'' Diaz concluded.

Financed by one of the group's nephews, Leopoldo Fernandez Pujals, a wealthy Spain-based Cuban exile who made millions in a pizza chain business, Diaz and his fellow ex-prisoners travel the globe denouncing human-rights abuses on the island.

This week, in fact, they do plan to fly to Venezuela, he said. In fact, they plan to ask Chavez for a meeting.

``We had planned to go anyway. We have nothing to prove, nothing to defend,'' Diaz said. ``The only one who needs to defend himself is Castro.''