Pounding away at allegations that Cuba abets drug traffickers, a U.S. congressional committee came to Sweetwater on Monday to hear from a Cuban intelligence defector and the daughter of a general executed on drug charges.

President Fidel Castro ``is allowing drug traffickers to use Cuba as a syringe for injecting drugs into American streets and schoolyards, charged Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ill., chairman of the House Government Reform Committee.

Yet the Clinton administration is ``covering up Cuba's crimes in a wrongheaded effort to improve relations with Havana, Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, R-Miami, told the all-Republican panel.

The State Department informed Congress last week that a U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant commander now based in Miami will soon be stationed in Havana to act as a liaison on drug-trafficking matters, Burton revealed.

U.S. officials in Washington later confirmed that the officer, an expert in equipment that detects hidden smuggling compartments in ships and freight containers, will help Cuban authorities on a ``when asked basis.

Castro's longstanding efforts to improve interdiction cooperation with U.S. drug authorities have run into strong opposition in Washington and South Florida because of charges that the Cuban government has repeatedly aided smugglers as a way of undermining the United States' moral fiber.

CASES REVIEWED

The hearing in the Sweetwater City Council chambers drew little testimony that was not public already, instead going over cases from the 1970s and the 1989 drug-smuggling trial of Cuban Gens. Arnaldo Ochoa and Antonio de la Guardia.

Jorge Masetti, an Argentine-born Cuban intelligence agent who defected in the early 1990s, testified Castro used Colombian drug traffickers to deliver weapons to Colombian guerrillas in the 1970s and, in exchange, allowed the smugglers to use Cuba to transship drugs bound for the U.S. market.

Cuba is even now sheltering Carlos Antonio Luslo, a Colombian guerrilla-turned-politician who is wanted in Bogota on drug-smuggling charges, Masetti added.

Masetti also testified Luslo asked him during a visit to Havana in the late 1980s to arrange for a Cuban company to buy chemicals needed for a cocaine refinery in Colombia. The deal never went through, he added later.

Masetti, the son of an Argentine leftist raised in Cuba, also repeated his previous allegations that he helped leftist Puerto Rican radicals arrange the 1983 theft of $7.2 million from a Wells Fargo truck in Connecticut.

He delivered Cuban funds used to finance the robbery by the pro-independence Macheteros group, Masetti testified, and helped to smuggle one of the holdup men into Cuba after the robbery.

DID CASTRO KNOW?

Masetti's wife, Ileana, daughter of de la Guardia, testified that Castro ``certainly knew about the drug-smuggling operations that landed her father, Ochoa and two others before a Cuban firing squad in 1989.

Castro has always insisted those were rogue operations, although a Miami-based federal grand jury nearly indicted his brother, Armed Forces Chief Raul Castro, for those same operations in 1993.

Castro has never explained where the money from the de la Guardia drug operations wound up, said Ileana de la Guardia. Masetti testified that half the money, in small-denomination U.S. dollars, was regularly sent to Castro's private office.