BY CAROL ROSENBERG

 To the prosecution, they were criminals who invaded U.S. soil to steal military secrets. And to the defense, they were spies who simply sought to protect Cuba from
 attacks by Miami exile groups.

 With those portrayals Friday, both sides ended their closing arguments on the 102nd day of the U.S. District Court trial of five intelligence agents from Havana who were captured by the FBI in September 1998 for posing as ordinary Cuban Americans in South Florida.

 ``They are spies bent on the destruction of the United States of America. They are conspirators, three of them, in espionage, and Gerardo Hernández has the blood of four people on his hands,'' Assistant U.S. Attorney John Kastrenakes told jurors.

 Defense attorney Paul McKenna countered that the government did not prove its conspiracy case and begged jurors not to convict his client Hernández ``because you think he's a Communist creep. In this country, Communist creeps have the same rights as everyone else.''

 Jurors are expected to get the case Monday, after U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard instructs them on the law. Deliberations could last for days.

 Hernández, who lived in South Florida as the cartoonist Manuel Viramontes, faces the most serious charge -- conspiring to commit murder in the deaths of four members of José Basulto's Brothers to the Rescue group. A Cuban MiG shot down two planes carrying them over the Florida Straits in February 1996.

 But McKenna said the government provided no proof -- testimony, a wiretap intercept or a shortwave message -- of its theory that Hernández abetted the attack by telling fellow spies, posing as pilots, to stay off the doomed flights.

 DEFENSE FIGHTS

 ``Lost in all the hoopla of where the plane was shot down and why the plane was shot down was what Gerardo Hernández had to do with it. Did he somehow trick Basulto into flying that day? Did he send a message to Cuba? Where is that message? There is no message,'' he said.

 ``There was no conspiracy. They built their case on a fallacy,'' McKenna added, arguing that FBI agents misinterpreted cables congratulating Hernández on a successful mission after the shoot-down.

 Kastrenakes called the kudos and Hernández's subsequent elevation to a Cuban military intelligence captain the spy's ``blood promotion'' for the deaths of the four
 Brothers volunteers -- Armando Alejandre Jr., Carlos Costa, Pablo Morales and Mario de la Peña.

 VIEW OF INTERCEPTS

 But McKenna said the intercepts actually were about the double defection back to Havana of Juan Pablo Roque, a once celebrated Brothers pilot who renounced Basulto and his group amid the international firestorm over the killings.

 Besides Hernández, U.S. citizens René González and Antonio Guerrero and Cubans Ramón Labañino and Fernando González also are on trial. Charges range from
 conspiring to steal national defense information to using false documents and failing to register with the attorney general as agents. Only the Cubans who are U.S.
 citizens used their real names while living in South Florida.

 But a significant chunk of the case has focused on the deadly clash between the Brothers Cessnas and Cuban MiGs. Until the final hour of the trial, Kastrenakes and
 McKenna dueled over conflicting U.S. and Cuban interpretations of whether the Brothers had invaded Cuban airspace before the shoot-down.

 The prosecution has cast the clash as emblematic of the spies' sinister motives. Defense lawyers characterized the clash as symbolic of decades of acrimony between
 Cubans on the island and exiles.

 ``Nobody here is dancing on anybody's grave,'' McKenna said of the victims, whose families have sat vigil in the courtroom through six months of testimony and argument. He urged jurors not to make Hernández ``a scapegoat for the tragic murder of these four guys by Basulto's idiotic behavior.''

 McKenna called Cuban spy craft an extension of the cross-straits feud. ``It's this endless war. After 40 years, these people who come from the same country can't see eye-to-eye on anything. They hate each other,'' he said.

 That's no excuse, countered Kastrenakes: `` There is no moral righteousness to being spies in the United States, even if you attach the good motive of spying on exile
 groups. That is not a defense for the crime.''

 'RIDICULOUS'

 The prosecutor also dismissed as ``patently ridiculous,'' the ``Disney World defense'' that the accused were not guilty of failing to register as foreign agents. Defense
 lawyers say the registration requirement is for permanently based foreign agents but said the Cuban agents were only temporarily on U.S. soil, and traveled home for
 holidays.

 ``We do not allow spies in our country for one minute, one day, one month or one year,'' Kastrenakes said. ``This case is about consequences and responsibility. They took the decision to join a hostile intelligence bureau. Nobody forced them.''

                                    © 2001