Seven Cuban dissidents were taken into government custody as they prepared to give a class on nonviolent ways to promote social change, the wives of two of the men and other dissidents said Wednesday from Havana.

Angela Salinas, who is married to independent journalist Angel Pablo Polanco, said the activists were taken away about 1:30 p.m. Tuesday and were being detained at a State Security Department of Investigation center in Havana.

The others are Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, Alejandro Chang Cantillo, Marcel Valenzuela, Marlon Carrero, Joaquin Rafael Martinez and Esteban Perez del Castillo. Biscet, perhaps the best known of the group, this summer led a highly publicized 40-day fast -- a day for each year of Fidel Castro's rule -- to demand the release of all political prisoners.

``They told me he was under investigation,'' said Biscet's wife, Elsa Morejon Hernandez.

Morejon, 31, took her husband clothes, deodorant, soap, towels and sheets Wednesday morning but she could not see him or learn the charges against him. The 38-year-old physician has been arrested at least 22 times since July 1998, his wife said. The last time, a month ago, he was one of 22 dissidents jailed during a weekend crackdown to keep them from participating in two planned anti-government protests.

Ileana Someillan Fleitas, another dissident, said Tuesday's arrests are tied to the nonviolence classes.

``The reason is the school they created to teach civic disobedience,'' she said. ``And Biscet is one of the teachers.''

Biscet had been detained Friday as well as he left his home to go to the school, Someillan said. ``But they let him out later that night.''

Elizardo Sanchez, head of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, blasted the detentions from his home in Havana's Santos Suarez neighborhood.

``It is disturbing for us in the Commission for Human Rights that there are so many repeated detentions in the case of Biscet and his friends and colleagues,'' Sanchez said. ``We have to qualify them as arbitrary detentions. They are arbitrary because none have committed a crime, and they are arbitrary because, in many cases, they are detained without due process.

``They are almost always immediately released, which shows they are innocent.''

But the short detentions are also a government tactic, he said.

``These short detentions characterize the principal element of this type of low-intensity repression that Cuba has maintained in the past several years,'' Sanchez said.

Rather than sentence the dissidents, they are held for short spurts so that it does not appear to the outside world that opposition in Cuba has risen and so that the number of political prisoners does not swell, he explained.