The broadcast late Friday was apparently aimed at rallying public support and deflecting international criticism. The tape of fuzzy images showed the prosecutor delivering her final arguments.
Standing behind a table piled with stacks of papers, the woman lashed out at the dissidents for ``counterrevolutionary'' acts. Fidgeting in a front-row bench were the four defendants: three men in blue prison uniforms and a woman in a white blouse and dark skirt.
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 pending.
On Thursday, the Communist Party daily Granma published a three-page editorial accusing critics of the trial of receiving financial and political support from the U.S. government and Miami-based exile groups.
On Saturday, Granma published an attack on the U.S. State Department's newly released human rights report on various countries including Cuba. ``Universal Judge of Human Rights?'' the headline asked.
The article called the report ``one of the biggest jokes of so-called representative democracy in the United States.''
Many Cubans who watched the transmission didn't fully understand what the case was about. Others said that the dissidents should have been more cautious.
``Here, I don't talk about politics, not even in my own house,'' said a carpenter who gave his name only as Ernesto. ``Everyone knows what can happen.''
As part of its new crackdown on attacks on the communist system, the government on Monday will try a Salvadoran man accused of terrorism in a string of bombings at hotels and other tourist sites in 1997 that killed an Italian. The prosecution is seeking the death penalty.
The government accused the four dissidents of promoting aggressive U.S. policies toward the communist nation and trying to harm the economy by discouraging foreign investment.
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 reject the characterization of the four as prisoners of conscience.
© Copyright 1999 The Associated Press