The Salvadoran accused of bombing hotels in Cuba went on trial in Havana on Monday. The timing is no accident. Cuba's regime wants the world to forget about Los Cuatro, ``The Four'' respected dissidents tried in secret exactly a week earlier. Forget nothing.

Vladimiro Roca, Felix Bonne Carcases, Rene Gomez Manzano and Marta Beatriz Roque have given names and faces to human-rights defenders in Cuba. The Four's astonishingly brave manifesto, The Homeland Belongs to Us All, calls for an end to the regime's totalitarian ways.

``The Cuban government ignores the word opposition: Those who do not share its policies or simply don't offer support are considered enemies,'' they wrote. ``It has also tried to give new meaning to the word Homeland, twisting it by association with Revolution, Socialism and Nation. It pretends to ignore that, by definition, Homeland is the country in which you are born.''

Subversive words and ideas, these. The document and a meeting with foreign journalists got Ms. Roque and Messrs. Roca, Bonne and Gomez charged with sedition. The regime's allegations that they are agents of U.S. imperialism are absurd. They are of Cuba and for Cuba, raised in the revolution that they now disavow. Nearly 20 months in jail, they steadfastly refuse any offer of freedom contingent on their abandoning the homeland. The Four have a legitimacy that the regime can only imagine.

Their trial came amid the government's latest and most vicious crackdown on crime and dissent. Now the regime trots out Raul Ernesto Cruz Leon, confessed mercenary bomber, as if this show trial is supposed to justify the regime's unconscionable human-rights abuses. Of course, bombing public buildings and killing innocent people is contemptible. Both intellectual authors of these crimes and their agents deserve condemnation. Yet these abuses do not justify others.

Repressive crackdowns, moreover, do not merit applause. That's why the planned baseball game between the Baltimore Orioles and Cuba's national team on March 28 in Havana is most unfortunate. The idea of a baseball exchange is fine, which is in the spirit of people-to-people contact, as the U.S. State Department says. But the timing and arrangements for this game couldn't be more insensitive.

What happened to the State Department's insistence that no money go to the Cuban regime? Now it says profits will be ``small'' and mainly will go to ``baseball and sports-related programs in both countries.'' What does that mean? And why set the first game in Havana, without even a date for the game in Baltimore?

Worst of all is the spectacle of American players celebrating this baseball lovefest while Cuban dissidents sit in jail for simply speaking out their truth -- as if the United States found repression acceptable. That kind of baseball diplomacy is simply foul.