The Cuban government Friday threatened to cut off the bulk of U.S.-Cuba telephone communications by Thursday unless five U.S. telephone companies pay their debts to Havana.

The deadline comes shortly before one set by U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King for final arguments in a Miami court battle by relatives of victims of the Brothers to the Rescue shootdown to garnishee the telephone payments.

The court battle already has held up payment of up to $19 million owed by the five U.S. telephone companies to Cuba's ETECSA phone company for its share of the costs of U.S.-Cuba service, industry sources said.

``The Cubans are making a business decision. You don't pay us, we don't serve you,'' said Enrique Lopez of the Miami-based AKL Group International, a consultancy on the international communications business.

A statement issued by the Cuban Foreign Ministry on Friday said that unless Havana receives payment by Thursday, it will shut off the lines now operated by the long-distance carriers AT&T, MCI, LDDS, IDB and WILTEL.

Other firms paying

The Cuban statement said two other U.S. firms, Sprint and the Puerto Rico-based TLDI, would be allowed to continue providing service to Cuba because they have continued to make their payments to Cuba despite the court case.

Cuba has been warning for weeks that it would cut off all telephone links to the United States unless it was paid quickly.

``The Cuban government considers this a totally reasonable position, especially when the lack of payment is to satisfy the opportunistic appetites of a group of immoral exiles who are taking advantage of the manipulable nature of the judicial system in that country,'' the Foreign Ministry statement said.

AT&T and MCI now handle the lion's share of the estimated 120 million to 135 million minutes of U.S.-Cuba telephone communications each year, most of it originated in the United States, according to industry experts.

Sprint is a distant third but provides Cuba's high-speed Internet connections to the outside world, the experts added. TLDI does minor business with Cuba, all through Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

Lopez said that if Cuba carried out its threat, the Sprint and TLDI circuits would immediately become overloaded, resulting in constant busy signals to most U.S. residents trying to call Cuba.

U.S., Cuba on same side

The U.S. State Department has sided with Cuba in arguing against the garnishment of the U.S. payments owed to Havana, saying that it's in the national interest to maintain open lines of communication.

But Havana's announcement showed impatience with the legal battle under way since shortly after Cuban MiGs shot down two unarmed Brothers planes over international waters Feb. 24, 1996, killing all four people aboard.

Relatives of three of the victims sued -- the fourth was not a U.S. citizen -- and in 1997 Judge King awarded them $187.6 million in damages against the Cuban government and air force.

At a hearing Tuesday before King, lawyers for the U.S. government, ETECSA and three of the U.S. telephone companies argued that such a seizure would violate diplomatic conventions and damage the claims of U.S. citizens whose Cuban properties were seized by President Fidel Castro's government in the 1960s.

They also argued that seizing the money would be illegal because the U.S. embargo requires the Department of the Treasury to license any financial dealings with Cuba, including the garnishment of assets.

The lawyers also argued that King's judgment against the Cuban government and air force could not be legally enforced against ETECSA, a joint venture between foreign and foreign and Cuban telephone companies.

King gave all parties 10 days to submit last-minute arguments before he makes a ruling. Cuba's Thursday deadline falls one day before King's deadline.

King has not said when he will issue his ruling.