Inside Camp Cuba-Nicaragua

A fly-by-night "training site "for counterrevolutionaries

The first press reports made it seem plausible: another Bay of Pigs was in the offing. Amid the forests of the Florida Everglades, where Cuban exiles had plotted to oust Fidel Castro, a new counterrevolutionary army had been born. This time the rebels were Nicaraguan expatriates mobilizing to overthrow their country's quasi-Marxist regime.

For Florida's growing colony of exiles from Central America, the dream was almost too good to be true. As indeed it is. The largest such U.S.-based operation is a fly-by-night encampment run by Jorge Gonzalez, 50, a Cuban exile who is the head of something called the Inter-American Defense Force. Gonzalez, whose Spanish nickname Bombillo translates as light bulb, boasts that he is training "thousands" of anti-Sandinista Nicaraguans in South Florida. But that claim is more wishfulness than military threat, as TIME Caribbean Bureau Chief William McWhirter discovered on a tour of Gonzalez's training center.

About half an hour west of Miami on the scrubby fringes of the Everglades, not far from a strip of shopping centers, a housing tract is under construction. The construction foreman, asked for directions to the guerrilla camp, shrugs and points across the road. Sunday is the day that Gonzalez sets aside for press visits, and lately reporters and camera crews have come in droves past the No Paso (No Trespassing) sign posted outside the 18-month-old Camp Cuba-Nicaragua. The show varies little from week to week: target practice, men running an obstacle course, simulated assaults through mud and underbrush. No automatic weapons or explosives are used; they are illegal. Finally, Bombillo Gonzalez climbs atop a tiny wooden podium and explains what these maneuvers portend for the hated leftist governments of Cuba and Nicaragua.

Gonzalez evades pointed questions with a conspiratorial wink. Will he disclose the locations of two other training camps that he purportedly runs in Florida? Wink. Can he provide the names of any of the former U.S. Army Special Forces officers he allegedly employs as instructors? Wink. How about a visit to Gonzalez's putative paratrooper school in Fort Myers, Fla.? He would like to oblige, but... Wink.

After the American and European television crews leave, life at Camp Cuba-Nicaragua returns to its normal desolation and languor. The 68-acre site, a leased former sunflower farm, resembles a vacated M*A*S*H stage set or a jerry-built guerrilla dude ranch. Gonzalez says his intention is both to train Latin American counterrevolutionaries for six weeks, at a cost of $600 to $700 each, and to rekindle the belligerent anti-Castro spirit of Florida's Cuban community. By Gonzalez's own admission, that second goal has been something of a dud, since would-be Cuban-American patrons have been slow in rallying to his cause. Complains Gonzalez: "They are too comfortable."

The shoestring nature of the operation is obvious. Colorful pennants are draped over thin log poles at the camp's entrance. A padlocked mobile home, 30 years old and with broken windows, serves as the "officers' quarters." A single canvas field tent is used mainly to house a bulletin board covered with press clippings about Gonzalez and his "army," patriotic slogans signed by Gonzalez, and a framed portrait of a young Jesus under the English inscription GO TO CHURCH SUNDAY. Not far away is a firing range with plastic, human-shaped targets that Gonzalez calls "Russian soldiers." A few camouflage-painted jeeps and trucks (one missing a wheel) are parked in a clearing, and rubber tires are stacked everywhere.

On one typical weekday recently, a Cuban-American, dressed in designer blue jeans, was alone on the firing range with a .30-06 Winchester rifle, missing one Russian soldier after another, while his two children held their ears. Gonzalez's wife stirred soup in a pot on the grill. His aide-de-camp, whom Gonzalez calls Camaleon, served coffee. After being forced into exile by Castro, Gonzalez says he worked in Florida as a car dealer, florist, plumber, electrician, carpenter and painter. He claims that he has been a spy too, as certified by an old photo-ID card that says "secret agent" on one side and "international bureau anti-Communist legion (incorporated in California)" on the other.

As it happens, Gonzalez has also served time in prison, from 1971 to 1975, for shooting at a Polish merchant ship from a Miami Beach causeway. In 1978 he was stopped by U.S. authorities as he put out to sea to attack a Cuban ship. He jokes about the incident: "I told the FBI I was going to North Korea to rescue the Pueblo." There are, naturally, lots of winking allusions to--and no details of--his other anti-Communist adventures.

After the collapse of the Somoza regime, Gonzalez decided that training Nicaraguan freedom fighters would be newsworthy. "My special forces call me the Fox of the Everglades," he insists. More than 300 of those forces, he claims, have already been sent to "battle zones." How many have been killed in action? "Four," he answers. Where? Wink.

There are authentic counterrevolutionary groups waging guerrilla combat against the Sandinista regime. Pedro Ortega, who leads the Honduras-based National Liberation Army, denies any connection with Gonzalez. "These people really hurt us," says Ortega. "The only training they receive [in Florida] is possibly to go to work in Hollywood." Robert Boyer, a Florida attorney who represents anti-Sandinista Nicaraguan exiles, worries about the self-delusion of groups like Gonzalez's. Says Boyer: "The danger is that they are getting into a Bay of Pigs mentality, believing that the U.S. will give them the luz verde--the green light--when the right time comes."

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