HAVANA, June 20 (Reuters) - Cuba said on Wednesday it had captured three heavily armed Cuban-Americans in a boat who allegedly planned to launch sabotage attacks including one on the world-famous Tropicana nightclub.
The men were detected by Cuba's Coast Guard on April 26 off the northern coast and tried to flee in their boat after firing some shots, state security official Manuel Heyvia said on state TV.
But the alleged infiltrators, whom Cuba said were members of militant Florida-based anti-Castro groups called Alpha 66 and Commando F4, were later captured on a nearby island.
They had with them four Romanian-made AK-47 combat rifles, a long-range telescopic rifle with a silencer, three pistols, a stash of bullets, and $3,000 in cash, Heyvia said.
The official, who was speaking in the presence of President Fidel Castro in the TV studio, said the men were linked to the powerful Miami-based Cuban American National Foundation and were known to U.S. authorities for their plotting of violent attacks.
"This interminable sequence of plans and violent aggressions plotted from the United States constitutes irrefutable proof of the tolerance and complicity of the U.S. authorities with these criminal acts," Heyvia said.Cuba named the three alleged plotters as Hihosvanni Suris de la Torre, Maximo Pradera Valdes, and Santiago Padron Quintero, all born in Cuba but living in the United States.
They were recruited and financed, Heyvia said, by Santiago Alvarez, a member of the Miami-based Partido del Pueblo (People's Party) and the Cuban American National Foundation, which is the strongest anti-Castro group in Florida.
State TV showed a filmed and recorded May 3 telephone conversation between De la Torre in Havana's Villa Marista detention center and Alvarez in Miami. The captured man -- presumably as part of a deal with Cuban state security -- pretends to be okay, and Alvarez gives him instructions.
The mission plans, Heyvia said, included an attack on Havana's Tropicana nightclub, a favorite spot for tourists wanting to see Cuba's famous cabaret dancers, and the recruitment of peasants in the central Escambray mountains. In Washington, the State Department said it had no comment on the Cuban statement.
Cuba announced the capture as part of a political campaign to defend five of its agents jailed in Miami earlier in June on spy-related charges. The revelation was intended to demonstrate that the five agents had, according to Cuba, been working undercover in Florida to defuse violent plots.
In a statement earlier Wednesday entitled "Heroic Conduct in the Entrails of the Monster," Havana said the five, who infiltrated military installations and Cuban American groups, were heroic patriots and victims of injustice.
Castro's government also published a letter written from jail by the men arguing they received an unfair trial and defending their work as legitimate self-defense by Cuba.
"What we have certainly done is contribute to exposing terrorist plans and actions against our people, thus preventing the death of innocent Cubans and Americans," wrote the five alleged members of the "Wasp Network" of spies bust in 1998.
Since taking power in 1959, Castro's government has been the target of near-constant plotting from its enemies, ranging from numerous botched plans to assassinate him in the 1960s to a 1997 bombing campaign on the island.
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