Tales of Cuban espionage:

Cash flowed to guerrilla movements in Central America. Food deliveries to the Peruvian Embassy in Havana were controlled as 10,000 Cubans sought asylum there in 1980. A private, warehouse-size stash of food and drink was reserved for Cuban President Fidel Castro.

Those secrets and others will be revealed Saturday at Miami-Dade Community College's downtown Wolfson Campus when it presents the film Secretos de Castro.

The 47-minute video examines Cuba's international undercover espionage operations -- many led personally by Castro, according to those interviewed.

``Through the testimony of an occult and sinister universe, the documentary reveals the obsession of a totalitarian and paranoid system where anyone can fall under suspicion of being against the revolution and the so-called `maximum leader,' '' said Alejandro Rios, coordinator of the Cycle of Cuban Cinema.

The film is being shown on the heels of a U.S. federal indictment May 7 that charged one alleged Cuban spy with conspiracy to commit murder. Four other suspects were accused in connection with the downing of two Brothers to the Rescue planes in 1996.

Director Jorge Sotolongo, who began taping interviews for the video about 18 months ago and finished in January, originally wanted to show the documentary on television. But so far, nobody has shown interest in airing it, he said.

Sotolongo, 50, made documentaries at the Cuban Institute of Cinema Arts and Industry, known as ICAIC, and was a screenwriter and assistant director on various fictional movies until he left Cuba in 1985, defecting in Spain. He is now executive producer of Polos Opuestos, a debate program -- much like CNN's Crossfire -- on the CBS Telenoticias network.

Some of the interviews were done after subjects appeared on the debate show, he said. One segment features Dariel Alarcon, former colonel of Cuba's Ministry of the Interior and a survivor of Ernesto ``Che'' Guevara's Bolivia campaign, who talks about the smuggling of cocaine to the United States to fund the exportation of the Cuban Revolution.

``Impossible for Castro not to have known about it,'' he says.

Drug dumping

Norberto Fuentes, a writer and journalist who broke with the government and became a dissident until he left in 1994, said exporting drugs here also had a second objective: ``It corresponds to their strategic reasoning that the United States is the garbage can of the world.''

Another anecdote comes from a man who said he supervised Castro's private food stash.

``It was a warehouse just for him,'' said Maximo Garcia, who received calls from Castro's secretaries telling him to send rice, rum, fish and onions, for example, ``from the chief's reserve,'' to such-and-such company.

The object, Garcia said: ``To be a good guy. To win people over.''

He also tells how he once had to hunt down a carey, or tortoise, to cook -- and stuff with fresh strawberries -- for an African diplomat visiting the island. It had to be alive. He went to Pinar del Rio to get it. Then the diplomat postponed his trip and Garcia had to care for the creature for a month.

``Every day I prayed so that turtle wouldn't die,'' Garcia said.

Carlos Cajaraville, former analyst with Cuban counterintelligence, says agents not only watch journalists and intellectuals, as expected, they also spy on investors to learn their top offers.

``For Cuban Security, every foreigner is a potential enemy and as such should be penetrated,'' Cajaraville says. ``All the hotels in Cuba are filled with Cuban personnel. And 10 or 20 percent of those work for Cuban Security.''

Bugged hotels

He says floors 20 through 23 or 24 at the Havana Libre Hotel, formerly the Havana Hilton -- and the 14th floor of the Riviera Hotel -- are bugged and reserved for counterintelligence operations.

``It is not a coincidence that CNN is on the 20th floor of [the Havana Hilton] or that Dan Rather and Peter Jennings stayed there when they visited Cuba.''

In the video, Cajaraville also talks about operations Inca 1 -- controlling the food that was delivered to the Peruvian Embassy in 1980 in order to foment unrest -- and Inca 2, the loading of ``undesirables,'' or criminals and the mentally insane, on boats leaving the Mariel port for South Florida.

Another Cuban spy, Jorge Pantoja, talks about his 15 years infiltrating the Baptist Church on the island. One of his tasks: to get dirt -- mostly sexual information, real or created -- on religious leaders.

Pantoja said all religious institutions, including the Catholic Church, were penetrated by Cuban Security. ``At the highest level, middle and lowest level.''

But, as Cajaraville said, the biggest target of Cuban security was the exile community.

``The exile has been a tremendous priority for the work of intelligence and counterintelligence,'' he says. ``From the beginning of the Revolution, there were agents sent to Miami to infiltrate the groups.''

Early organizations that were penetrated were Brigade 2506 -- which was involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion -- Commandos L and Alpha 66, he says.

The indictment earlier this month indicates that Cuba's intelligence is still infiltrating current organizations, like Brothers and Movimiento Democracia.

And possibly, Sotolongo said, his audience will also have some spies among them.