On the eve of two more guilty pleas in South Florida's celebrated Cuban spy case, Fidel Castro confirmed Tuesday that he sometimes sends spies to the United States. But Castro said his targets are Cuban exile groups -- not military bases -- and accused the United States of tolerating U.S.-launched terror attacks against his island.

In Washington, State Department spokesman James Rubin dismissed Castro's allegations as ``ridiculous,'' saying the United States does not sanction anti-Havana terror tactics.

``We've arrested people and are committed to vigorously enforce our laws,'' Rubin said. ``And those include laws against terrorism. We are committed to fighting terrorism here and in every country in the world. And unfortunately, again, Fidel Castro is wrong.''

The Cuban leader's comments were contained in an interview with CNN and conducted Monday night at the Ibero-American summit in Portugal. The interview was broadcast Tuesday evening, against a backdrop of increasingly aggressive U.S. prosecutions of pro- and anti-Castro agents.

Most recently, U.S. federal prosecutors in Puerto Rico charged seven Cuban exiles, including an official with the respected Cuban American National Foundation, with plotting to kill Castro.
In Miami, meanwhile, accused pro-Castro spies Joseph Santos, 37, and his wife, Amarylis Silverio Santos, 37, have court hearings this afternoon on their offers to plead guilty in the case unveiled by the FBI last month as the largest-ever pro-Castro spy ring exposed in the United States.

The Santoses have already agreed to join three other members of the alleged 10-member ring in confessing to the lesser crime of acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, Cuba. Punishment could bring five years in prison.
Court papers filed in the case suggest that federal prosecutors will call those who plead guilty to testify against the accused spymasters. The spy case reflects a turnabout in U.S. counterespionage policy: Federal agents in the past simply shadowed Castro spies and eavesdropped on their activities, rather than arrest them.

``Yes, we have sometimes dispatched Cuban citizens to the United States to infiltrate counter-revolutionary organizations,'' Castro told CNN's Havana correspondent Lucia Newman in Oporto, Portugal. ``And I think we have the right to do this, as long as the United States tolerates those who organize sabotage.''

Episodes of sabotage, he said, include ``armed incursions'' on his island, attacks on tourist installations and the smuggling of weapons and explosives there to carry out attacks that damage his country's economy.

Castro declined to tell CNN whether in fact those accused by the Miami-based prosecutors were working for him. ``It would be disloyal to inform'' on people whom he described as ``friends of ours in the United States.''

``Let them -- those who are accusing them -- be the ones to prove it. For that, they will get no cooperation from us,'' he said.

Cuban exiles in Miami were disgusted with the Cuban leader's remarks.

``That's typical Fidel Castro, always trying to distract attention from the real issue,'' said Ninoska Perez-Castellon, spokeswoman for the Cuban American Foundation and a radio talk show host.

She accused the Cuban leader of trying to shift the focus of the spy scandal to smearing the exile community and away from ``the fact that there is evidence that they were involved in spying on military bases.''

Spies working for Castro, according to the case being prosecuted in Miami, allegedly tried to infiltrate U.S. military bases in South Florida, notably the Southern Command, the Miami-based U.S. military headquarters for Latin America and the Caribbean known as SouthCom.

They also were allegedly assigned to snoop on celebrated exile organizations, including Alpha 66, the aging militia of once-CIA funded anti-Castro counterrevolutionaries who train in the Everglades; the Brothers to the Rescue civilian pilot search-and-rescue group; the Democracia Movement, organizer of protest flotillas; and CAMACOL, the Latin American Chamber of Commerce.

But Castro said in the CNN interview that the only monitoring of U.S. military activity that interested him was at the Guantanamo Naval Base on the eastern tip of his island. But spying is unnecessary, he said, because Cuba can see inside ``with large binoculars . . . We can observe them and they can observe us.''

The Cuban leader defended his spy activities in the United States, saying Washington similarly engaged in espionage against his regime.

``The United States has spies in industrial quantities,'' Castro said. ``It has people from the CIA dedicated to that, and to subversion, at the United States Interest Section in Havana.''

He charged that U.S. intelligence intercepts were so sophisticated that American spies ``can listen to all of Cuba's phone calls. I cannot make a single phone call to any Latin American leader, to any politician, without the United States listening to it.''