By Andrew Cawthorne
HAVANA, March 3 (Reuters) - Cuba's biggest crackdown on dissidents in years has served as a tough warning to internal opponents of Fidel Castro's government and a defiant response to foreign pressure on Havana for political change.
In a meticulously coordinated show of strength, the ruling Communist Party this week put on trial Cuba's four best-known dissidents, blocked foreign observers from the court, and temporarily rounded up scores of its most active opponents.
The detentions, intended to prevent trouble at Cuba's trial for sedition of the so-called "Group of Four," were considered the widest crackdown since the 1996 break-up of an umbrella dissident movement called Concilio Cubano.
The events in Cuba brought predictable outrage from its traditional political arch-enemy, the United States, but also drew condemnation from the island's chief commercial allies, Canada and Spain, as well as foreign human rights groups.
Most of the 100 or so dissidents held in detention centers or their homes in a state security and police operation beginning last Friday, were released by Wednesday. But they were in no doubt over the clarity of the government's message.
"'Oppose us at your peril!' is what they are saying. I think it's clear they took advantage of the circumstances around the trial of the four to mount a strong-arm show to the internal opposition," dissident poet and journalist Raul Rivero told Reuters soon after his release from a Havana jail.
Rivero is the most prominent of several dozen dissident journalists in Cuba, whose criticisms of Castro's government and unauthorized work outside the state-controlled media has increasingly irked Havana in recent times.
The Communist Party, in power since soon after Castro's rebel army toppled dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, regards all internal opponents as "counter-revolutionaries" backed by the United States in its "imperialist war" on Cuba.
The Caribbean nation's numerous, but normally tiny, opposition groups were still reeling Wednesday from the week's round-up, which included virtually all of their most active members. But various dissidents, interviewed after their release, insisted they would not be intimidated into giving up their struggle to reform Castro's one-party system.
"All this repression is getting more and more archaic and obsolete, and out of touch with the will of the Cuban people," Oswaldo Paya, a well-known dissident who leads a small and moderate Christian opposition group, told Reuters after his release. "But I have seen firmness from the dissidents after these tough moments. It's not the dissidents who are inventing the need for change here -- just ask the Cuban people."
In contrast with the more extreme groups in the Cuban exile community abroad, most notably in Florida, local opposition groups are generally more moderate, calling for political plurality and dialogue rather than anti-Castro revolt.
"It's not enough to criticize and denounce. You have to look for alternatives and participation," Paya said.
That, say diplomats and dissidents, is just what the four members of the "Working Group of the Internal Dissidence were doing before their July 1997 imprisonment and trial on Monday.
The four, Vladimiro Roca, 56, a former fighter pilot in Castro's Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) and son of deceased Cuban communist hero Blas Roca, economist Marta Beatriz Roque, 53, academic Felix Bonne, 59, and lawyer Rene Gomez Manzano, 55, had criticized Cuba's Communist Party and urged reforms.
But the government said Tuesday that during the trial, Cuba's biggest political case of the decade, "the prosecutor showed the link between activities by the defendants and the aggressive measures toward Cuba adopted by U.S. policy."
For that, the state wants six years' imprisonment for Roca, and five for the other three. A verdict is due by March 17.
The handling of the trial underscored a new militant mood in Cuba, which has just cut off most U.S. phone links due to unpaid bills and also passed tough new anti-subversion laws.
Western nations, some of whom had been flaunting their growing relations with Cuba since Pope John Paul II's historic visit in January 1998, have reacted strongly.
Canada, for example, whose "constructive engagement" policy with Havana has been at odds with Washington's long-standing economic embargo, quickly condemned this week's events in Cuba as "unacceptable" and "a major step backward."
By midday Wednesday, there was still no Cuban response to the chorus of criticism. "They've braved world opinion many times in the past, and I don't expect them to make an exception and bend this time," said a Latin American diplomat here.
21:20 03-03-99
Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited