The three-page editorial in the Communist Party daily Granma leveled charges similar to those they faced in court: promoting aggressive U.S. policies toward the communist nation and trying to harm the economy by discouraging foreign investment.
After Monday's trial, prosecutors recommended a six-year sentence for Vladimiro Roca, a former military pilot and son of late Cuban Communist Party leader Blas Roca, and five years each for lawyer Rene Gomez Manzano, engineer Felix Bonne and economist Marta Beatriz Roque.
The verdicts are still pending.
The defendants were arrested in July 1997 for criticizing a Communist Party document that they said did not present solutions to Cuba's severe economic problems.
The charges also included encouraging Cubans not to vote, urging foreign businessmen not to invest in Cuba and asking Cuban exiles to encourage relatives on the island to undertake acts of civil disobedience.
Communist officials insist there are no political prisoners in this island nation of 11 million people, only those jailed for common crimes. They reject the characterization of the four as prisoners of conscience.
The Thursday editorial, carried by Cuba's Prensa Latina news agency, also accused the U.S. government of ``loaning material and political support'' to dissidents here for their ``destabilizing activities.''
And it criticized some unidentified foreign journalists here for ``distorting the reality of the country in their reports and becoming spokesmen'' for people who ``are interested in damaging the national economy and subverting the social order of the country.''
The dissidents' case has drawn expressions of concern from the United States, Europe and the Vatican about Cuba's human rights practices.
© Copyright 1999 The Associated Press