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."