By JUAN O. TAMAYO and GERARDO REYES
             Herald Staff Writers 

             SAN SALVADOR -- The idealized Cuban landscapes that Luis Posada Carriles
             paints are nothing like the world he inhabits -- a world of conspiracies to murder
             Fidel Castro, bomb his hotels and blow up his freighters.

             The 68-year-old Posada is already known as a Bay of Pigs veteran, former CIA
             operative, accused bomber of a jetliner in which 73 people died and alleged
             mastermind of a streak of bombings in Cuba last summer.
 

             Now a Herald investigation has uncovered a string of other recent conspiracies.
             Among them:
               He led a team of six exiles that tried to assassinate Castro in Colombia four
             years ago.

               He plotted to smuggle plastic explosives from Guatemala to Cuba last fall, hiding
             them in diapers, shampoo bottles and the shoes of Guatemalans posing as tourists.

               He planned to blow up a Cuban freighter in Honduras in 1993 and to establish a
             secret base in Honduras the next year from which Cuban exiles could launch
             commando raids against the island.

             None of those plots succeeded. Yet their number and daring confirm Posada's
             reputation as the one exile currently most active in attempts to overthrow the
             Cuban president -- almost 40 years after he seized power.

             ``He's a full-time patriot,'' said Ramon Font, 76, a friend since both belonged to
             Comandos L, a Miami paramilitary group, in the 1960s. ``He works anywhere . . .
             because he has no ideology, only a goal: to finish Castro.''

             And he's not about to retire, either.

             ``What choice do I have but to continue doing what I have been doing for so
             long?'' one acquaintance quoted him as saying last month. ``The airplane took off a
             long time ago, and now it's flown beyond the point of no return.''

             Posada declined Herald attempts to interview him in El Salvador, where he has
             lived most of the time since escaping from a Venezuelan jail in 1985. A court had
             found him innocent in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people,
             yet Caracas officials refused to free him.

             An activist role

             But dozens of other interviews in El Salvador, Miami, Guatemala, Honduras and
             Costa Rica turned up a trail of conspiracies that intensified after Posada recovered
             from a 1990 murder attempt in Guatemala that he blames on Castro's agents.

             The best known of the plots was the summer bombing spree by Salvadoran
             mercenaries hired by Posada to smuggle bombs into Cuba and detonate them in
             tourism centers such as hotels and restaurants, according to several people
             involved.

             But even as Cuban police were arresting one of the Salvadorans, Raul Ernesto
             Cruz Leon, last September, Posada and two other conspirators in Guatemala
             were trying to smuggle more explosives into Havana, according to two people with
             firsthand knowledge of the plot.

             Posada first offered Guatemalans money to fly to Cuba as tourists with C-4
             explosives hidden in their shoes, sources said. That's the same method Cruz Leon
             allegedly used to smuggle C-4 explosives into Havana.

             Posada later tried to hide a water-based explosive in shampoo bottles and within
             layers of diaper tissues that were to be smuggled into Cuba, according to the two
             sources.

             The explosive, which is white and has the consistency of mayonnaise, was
             originally packaged in plastic tubes eight inches long and one inch thick, marked
             ``Mexican Military Industries. Highly Explosive.''

             Something went wrong

             But the plan was a bust. The explosive was apparently old and failed to explode in
             tests. And the Guatemalans hired to go to Cuba as tourists either failed to set off
             any bombs or refused to fly to Cuba after Cruz Leon was arrested, one plotter
             said.

             Cuban police charged Cruz Leon with setting off six of the 12 to 15 bombs that
             rocked tourist centers; no suspects were named in the others. Police found two
             unexploded bombs several weeks after Cruz Leon was arrested, Havana sources
             have reported.

             Posada's co-conspirators in Guatemala were identified by the two sources as Jose
             Alvarez, 70, a Cuban exile, and Jose Burgos, 50, a Guatemalan army veteran
             turned businessman.

             Alvarez and Burgos were officers of three Guatemala City subsidiaries of WRB
             Enterprises, a Tampa firm engaged in 1997 in a failed project to lay electrical lines
             to the eastern town of Chiquimulas.

             Both denied involvement in any plot against Cuba.

             ``I don't agree with the attacks on the Cuban hotels because it's bad to destroy
             something,'' Burgos said. ``This [the accusation] . . . makes me laugh.''

             The man who headed WRB operations in Guatemala until last fall, Antonio
             Alvarez, 62, a Cuban exile from Greenville, S.C., who is no relation to Jose
             Alvarez, also denied any knowledge of a plot. He and Jose Alvarez only
             confirmed that they knew Posada.

             Records tell a tale

             The Herald obtained a copy of a fax from Posada to Jose Alvarez and Burgos
             detailing part of the plot's finances. And telephone records of the WRB offices in
             Guatemala show several calls to offices Posada is known to use in El Salvador and
             Honduras.

             One person with knowledge of the plot later wrote a detailed report on the
             conspiracy and sent it to Guatemala's version of the CIA, the Presidential Strategic
             Analysis Agency, saying he wanted to prevent ``some barbaric act.''

             The Herald obtained a copy of the report and spoke at length to its author, who
             like most of the other sources interviewed asked for anonymity out of fear of legal
             prosecution as well as retaliatory attacks.

             Officials of the Guatemalan agency declined to talk to The Herald, but a diplomat
             said the agency had investigated some of the report's allegations, found them
             ``credible'' and alerted U.S. officials. The FBI, which is known to have a copy of
             the report, declined to comment.

             Posada went into virtual hiding after his name began appearing on the list of
             suspects in the Havana bombings. A Herald story Nov. 16 reported his
             connections to the Salvadorans and sparked many tips to the newspaper regarding
             his other plots.

             One of the most ambitious appears to have been a plot to assassinate Castro at a
             1994 summit of Ibero-American heads of government in the Colombian port city
             of Cartagena.

             They couldn't get close

             Posada and five other exiles managed to smuggle guns into Cartagena, but
             Colombian security cordons kept them too far away to take a good shot at
             Castro, said three people knowledgeable about the attempt.

             ``I stood behind some journalists . . . and saw [Colombian writer and Castro
             friend Gabriel] Garcia Marquez, but I only got to see Castro from a long
             distance,'' one of the would-be assassins said.

             Posada also staged several operations out of Honduras, where he lived on and off
             for four years as he recuperated from the attempt to kill him in Guatemala. One
             bullet shattered his jaw, and another barely missed his heart.

             In 1993, he found a port captain in Honduras who promised to tip him on the next
             docking of a Cuban freighter that was making monthly runs from the southern port
             of Cienfuegos to Central America's Caribbean coast.

             The plan was to attack the ship with a small mine that would not sink it but ``make
             a lot of noise,'' said one exile involved in the plot. But word of the conspiracy got
             out in Miami, said one of the exiles who tried to line up financing for the plot, and
             ``we started getting so many people volunteering that we had to call it off.''

             Perhaps the most quixotic of Posada's plots was a deal that a half-dozen exiles in
             Miami, Costa Rica and Honduras say he tried to arrange in 1994 with Col.
             Guillermo Pinel Calix, then head of Honduran military intelligence.

             Purported plan described

             Pinel Calix was to provide a secret base in Honduras where groups of six to eight
             exiles would learn commando tactics under Honduran experts and then launch
             attacks on Cuba, exiles said.

             The cost: a $100,000 payoff to Honduran military officers, plus upward of
             $250,000 for operational costs including weapons, explosives, fast attack boats
             and even small airplanes, one exile involved in the talks said.

             Pinel Calix met in Miami with four exiles to discuss the base, but the deal fell
             through, all the sources said. The Cubans felt they could not trust the notoriously
             corrupt Honduran military, and Pinel Calix was said to be unimpressed with the
             exiles he met.

             Pinel Calix, now inspector general of the Honduran armed forces, did not respond
             to Herald requests for an interview.

             Perhaps the biggest mystery surrounding Posada is how he makes a living and
             manages to finance his conspiracies.

             One version circulating in Central America is that he is protected by the CIA, a
             rumor fueled by his role as a coordinator in Col. Oliver North's Iran-contra
             scheme to supply CIA-backed Nicaraguan rebels from El Salvador in the late
             1980s.

             U.S. connection denied

             Knowledgeable U.S. officials deny that Posada enjoys CIA protection and say
             they, in fact, warned the Honduran government when he was first spotted there in
             1990.

             ``We were worried the Hondurans would think he was one of our people, that he
             would do something bad or stupid and then we'd get the blame,'' said a U.S.
             official involved in notifying the Hondurans.

             Instead, Posada manages to carry on because his unvarnished brand of
             anti-communism has won him powerful friends and protectors among Central
             American conservatives -- especially in the security forces.

             Neither the Salvadoran nor Guatemalan police moved against him after they
             learned of his role in the Havana bombing campaign. He has boasted to
             acquaintances that he counts senior Honduran and Salvadoran military officers
             among his friends.

             In El Salvador, he is known to be friends with former Air Force Gen. Juan Rafael
             Bustillo, several right-wing politicians and Guillermo Sol, one of the country's
             richest men. In Honduras, he is close to Mario Delamico, a Cuban-born arms
             dealer, and several ranking members of the conservative National Party.

             Oddly, Venezuela never issued an international warrant for his arrest. So Posada
             now lives in semi-hiding, using his real identity among friends but carrying a
             half-dozen false passports to avoid detection by Castro's agents.

             ``He and Billy Sol go hunting all the time. If he's a fugitive, he certainly doesn't hide
             much,'' said Lillian Diaz Sol, a Salvadoran businesswoman who has known
             Posada for more than a decade.

             How he sustains himself

             How does Posada earn a living?

             An expert on kidnapping investigations since his work with the Venezuelan police
             in the 1960s, he has worked as a consultant to Central American businessmen and
             occasionally trains bodyguards, friends say.

             He has also joined Delamico in some weapons deals with Latin American
             governments, the friends add, and once sold 5,000 boxes of fake Cohiba cigars,
             Cuba's most famous brand.

             Posada also has painted landscapes of Cuba and sold them to fellow exiles for
             $200 to $300 -- what friends call ``patriotic prices'' that are determined more by
             the political resoluteness of the author than the quality of the art.

             But in times of need, he has received direct help from wealthy Miami exiles, as he
             recalled in an autobiography he published in Honduras in 1994, The Ways of the
             Warrior. His $22,000 hospital bill from the assassination attempt, he wrote, was
             paid by friends who included two officials of the Cuban American National
             Foundation: Dr. Alberto Hernandez, who succeeded the late Jorge Mas Canosa
             as chairman last year; and treasurer Feliciano Foyo. Hernandez and Foyo declined
             to comment on their relationship with Posada.

             More intriguing is how Posada finances paramilitary operations that can be
             tremendously expensive -- about $50,000 just to get the six-man hit team to
             Cartagena, said one of the gunmen involved.

             Posada prefers to rely on a single trusted friend in Miami to collect donations from
             exiles, then uses a courier to get the cash, several knowledgeable sources said.
             They declined to identify the friend.

             ``That way the donors can deny any involvement in the operation, Posada can
             claim he doesn't know who gave the money, and there's no paper trail on the
             cash,'' said one person with firsthand knowledge of the system.

             The money trail

             Sometimes the money is sent in different ways, as shown by a fax that Posada sent
             from his El Salvador office to Jose Alvarez and Jose Burgos in Guatemala City last
             August.

             ``This afternoon you will receive via Western Union four transfers of $800 each
             . . . from New Jersey,'' said the fax, going on to do a little accounting: ``Cash paid
             by me as a down payment to tourists -- $600, Cash paid by you -- $400. . . . Still
             to be paid -- $2,500.''

             The fax is signed SOLO, one of Posada's code names, after Napoleon Solo, hero
             of the television spy series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Known to friends as
             Bambi, he also signs paintings with the name Lupo, which is Italian for wolf.

             The fax also shows that Posada worried that the Cuban government was hushing
             up many of the summer bombings -- Cuba has confirmed only seven of the blasts
             -- to avoid creating panic in its booming tourism industry.

             ``If there is no publicity, the work is not useful. The U.S. newspapers don't publish
             anything unless it's confirmed,'' he wrote to the other conspirators in Guatemala.

             Cuban tourism officials eventually admitted that the bombings had scared off many
             tourists, although the island still finished 1997 with a record number of foreign
             visitors. But the bombings had an impact that Posada had not anticipated.

             As the bombs and rumors of others shook Havana, some Cubans, including
             government officials and Castro supporters, began speculating the blasts had to be
             the work of radical dissidents in Cuba's own security forces.

             No exile group had succeeded in striking so effectively inside Cuba since the
             1960s, they reasoned. So the blasts had to be the work of insiders using local
             explosives and their knowledge of hotel security precautions.

             ``Of course, the arrest of [Cruz Leon] ended all that speculation,'' said a foreign
             journalist living in Havana. ``But for a while there, Posada . . . really shook things
             up. . . . We were on the edge of hysteria.''

             El Nuevo Herald staff writer Pablo Alfonso contributed to this report.