HAVANA -- Prime Minister Jean Chretien set modest goals for his first visit to Cuba this week: further Canada's substantial business interests here and prod Cuba into doing something about human rights.

After meeting for several hours with President Fidel Castro on Monday, Chretien had a commitment from Cuba to negotiate a foreign investment protection agreement with Canada. Havana also agreed to pay $10 million to a Canadian insurance company that lost its business in Cuba after the 1959 revolution.

But on human rights, Chretien failed to win any concession.

At one point during his meeting Monday with Castro at the Palace of the Revolution, Chretien said he handed Castro a list of political prisoners that Canada wants released. The dissidents -- Marta Beatriz Roque, Vladimiro Roca, Felix Bonne and Rene Gomez Manzano -- were detained on July 16, 1997, for the ``counterrevolutionary'' activity of calling for democratic reforms.

``He defended his legal system,'' Chretien said, ``but he took the list and said he was to consider it.''

Chretien refused to meet with Elizardo Sanchez, one of Cuba's leading dissidents. But his chief foreign policy advisor and other officials met with Sanchez and other dissidents for more than an hour.

A delicate moment

Chretien's 41-hour visit to Havana, the first by a Canadian prime minister since Pierre Trudeau came to skin dive with Castro in 1976, comes at a delicate moment. Against the wishes of some Cuban Americans and hard-line opponents to the Castro government in the United States, the Clinton administration has moved to ease the 36-year-old economic embargo against Cuba slightly.

Last month President Clinton agreed to lift bans on direct flights to Cuba and cash remittances that allow families to send dollars to Cuba. The President also said he would make it easier for medicine to be shipped to Cuba.

At the same time, Castro has been more bellicose than ever in his condemnation of the United States embargo, going so far this week as to use the occasion of Chretien's visit to compare the embargo to ``a new version of the Holocaust,'' and suggest that United States officials should be tried as war criminals before an international court.

Monday the White House spokesman, Mike McCurry, called Castro's comments ``ample evidence of what an `outlier' he is in the world community.'' He also criticized Canada's position toward Cuba.

``We certainly understand their desire to achieve change through engagement,'' McCurry said. ``We do not believe there is evidence that engagement with Cuba has produced any change.''

Muted criticism

Until now there had been only muted criticism from Washington about Chretien's trip, mostly from the Cuban-American members of Congress who fiercely oppose Castro.

Chretien called Clinton two weeks ago to advise him of the trip, and said Monday that Clinton had only asked him to bring up the question of Cuba's record on human rights. ``The only comment he made to me was `I hope, Jean, that you will raise human rights,' '' Chretien told reporters. ``And it was the first item of the presentation I made this morning.''

From the moment Chretien arrived Sunday night to dedicate a new airport terminal in Havana that was financed, designed and built by Canadians, it was clear that the prime minister's modest goals for the trip would be overshadowed by Castro's attempts to defy the United States.

While Chretien gently outlined Canada's desire to see Cuba move more closely into ``a more dynamic, more democratic, more prosperous hemisphere,'' Castro lambasted the United States.

``No state should pretend to have the right to starve another people to death,'' Castro said as Chretien stood stiffly behind him. ``That is turning a nation into a ghetto and imposing on it a new version of the Holocaust.''