By Anita Snow
Associated Press Writer
Thursday, February 25, 1999; 4:30 a.m. EST

HAVANA (AP) -- Telephone service between Cuba and the United States was cut early today because of lack of payment by American companies to Cuba's phone company.

The American firms have been withholding funds since December pending a federal court case against the communist nation involving relatives of four Cuban-Americans whose two unarmed aircraft were shot down by MiG jets north of the island in February 1996.

Service was cut off just after midnight. Cellular telephone service was also interrupted.

Callers attempting to reach the United States instead got a recorded message saying that lines were congested and asking them to call back later.

Some calls did get through after the deadline passed, apparently because they were rerouted through third countries or onto Sprint telephone service, which was not affected.

Nevertheless, some delays or disruptions were expected to continue.

Cuba's Foreign Ministry announced last week that it supported the decision by Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba S.A., known as ETECSA, to cut service to the American phone companies AT&T, MCI, LDDS, IDB and YWILTEL.

Service to Sprint and TLDI of Puerto Rico was maintained because both have continued to pay their bills, the government said last week.

In 1997, a federal judge in Miami awarded a $187 million judgment to the relatives of the Cubans who were shot down. Since then, they have tried unsuccessfully to collect the money from the Cuban government.

They were spurned in an effort to recover the funds from Cuban assets frozen in the United States. They then sought to tap into the money being paid to ETECSA by the U.S. telephone companies for long-distance calls from the United States to Cuba. That amounted to an estimated $60 million to $70 million in 1997.

The State Department has opposed the families' case.

State Department spokesman James Foley said this week that the telecommunications payments cannot be seized because the Cuban telephone company is a separate entity from the government and is not legally responsible for the debts of the two defendants in the case -- the Republic of Cuba and the Cuban Air Force.

The families' request to garnish the telephone payments is being considered by U.S. District Court Judge James Lawrence King. The judge said he would rule after Friday, the deadline for attorneys to file additional motions.