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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 Camaleón, 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."