Castro spies used profiles, court told

 BY ALFONSO CHARDY

 The Cuban government stole the identities of two South Florida men -- a truck
 driver and a valet -- and used them to provide false documents for two Cubans
 now on trial as spies, according to court testimony Thursday.

 Osvaldo Reyna, a truck driver from Broward, and Daniel Cabrera, a condominium
 valet from West Palm Beach, told jurors their U.S. passports and driver licenses
 were duplicated and copies assigned to defendants Fernando González and
 Gerardo Hernández. The duplication, Reyna and Cabrera testified, occurred after
 they submitted their original documents to the Cuban government to obtain visas
 to visit Cuba.

 While federal investigators had previously acknowledged that some of the
 accused Cuban spies on trial used altered or fake documents, it was the first time
 the government documented how Havana may have procured those papers.

 According to testimony, the method was simple: copying legitimate documents.
 What neither prosecution witnesses Reyna and Cabrera nor the prosecutors
 explained was how Cuba managed to copy the documents so precisely.

 SIMILAR APPEARANCE

 The duplicated documents, shown in court, looked like the originals except that
 the pictures of Reyna and Cabrera had been replaced by those of González and
 Hernández.

 Hernández is considered the lead defendant in the trial. He is accused of being
 the ringleader among a group of secret agents ostensibly assigned to infiltrate
 U.S. military installations and Cuban exile organizations.

 He is also specifically charged with conspiring to help ``bring about the murders''
 of four people who died Feb. 24, 1996, when Cuban MiGs shot down two Brothers
 to the Rescue aircraft in the Florida Straits.

 González is charged with being an unregistered foreign agent, one of five Cubans
 allegedly sent to South Florida in the 1990s.

 Attorneys for the defendants do not dispute that their clients worked for the Cuban
 government. Their defense is that their clients kept an eye on exiles plotting
 ``terrorist'' attacks against Cuba.

 But government prosecutors have said the accused spies had fake documents to
 harm U.S. national security.

 Reyna, 40, said that in the mid-1990s he supplied his U.S. passport and Florida
 driver license to a travel agency in Miami to secure a Cuban visa to visit his family
 for the first time since leaving the island in 1980.

 After Cuba approved his visa, Reyna said, his documents were returned in an
 envelope bearing the name and address of the Cuban Interests Section in
 Washington.

 Reyna said that on arrival in Havana, a Cuban official awaited him to obtain
 additional information.

 ``He asked me for all the addresses where I had ever lived in the United States,''
 Reyna testified. ``He also wanted all telephone numbers, ZIP Codes and names of
 family members.''

 FAKE STAMPS ENTERED

 The duplicated passport contained arrival and departure stamps from Spain,
 Jamaica and Venezuela -- countries Reyna said he had never visited.

 Cabrera, 39, told a somewhat similar story except that his duplicated passport
 was not signed.

 In cross-examination, Paul McKenna -- Hernández's lawyer -- got Cabrera to
 acknowledge he had no direct knowledge that Hernández had used the
 documents.

 ``I mean, it wasn't even signed,'' McKena said, referring to the passport that also
 bore stamps from countries Cabrera said he had never visited.

 ``No, sir,'' Cabrera said. ``No signature on it.''

 In other trial developments, McKenna complained to Judge Joan Lenard that
 Brothers to the Rescue leader José Basulto, a potential witness, has violated
 court orders not to talk to reporters because he gave a news conference
 Wednesday.

 Basulto, reached by phone, said his news conference was not related to the trial.
 He said it was to announce plans to drop leaflets Feb. 24 over the Florida Straits
 to mark the anniversary of the 1996 shootdown.