An article in state-run newspaper Trabajadores outlined the government
                  position that Western reporters gave the four an inflated importance and
                  presented them as simple opponents of Fidel Castro's communist system
                  without regard to their "counter-revolutionary" crimes.

                  The media ignored how the four matched Washington's policy, since the
                  presidency of Jimmy Carter, of promoting internal opposition in a bid to
                  destabilise Cuba, the article said.

                  "The media turned them into a permanent theme of information promotion,
                  given them disproportionate relevance," wrote Trabajadores columnist and
                  Cuban legislator Lazaro Barredo Medina, in the latest of his series of articles
                  criticising Western media coverage of Cuba.

                  "They always presented them as 'the most important dissident leaders in the
                  country' when in reality none of them has any specific weight in the national
                  life," he added.

                  The four, Vladimiro Roca, 56, a former Cuban fighter pilot and son of the
                  island's deceased communist hero Blas Roca, academic Felix Bonne, 59,
                  lawyer Rene Gomez Manzano, 55, and economist Marta Beatriz Roque, 53,
                  were tried March 1.

                  Convicted of inciting sedition, they received jail terms of between 3-1/2 and
                  five years.

                  Havana rejects the word dissident. It says the four were proved guilty of
                  receiving material backing from Cuba's arch- enemy, the United States,
                  urging a boycott of elections, intimidating foreign investors, making contacts
                  with anti- Castro Cuban exile groups and encouraging Cubans abroad to
                  make financial remittances conditional on change.

                  The four were detained in July 1997, soon after they issued documents and
                  held news conferences criticising the ruling Communist Party and urging
                  reforms. They claim to represent peaceful opposition to Castro's one-party
                  system.

                  Their jailing drew a wave of international criticism -- including from Cuba's
                  biggest commercial partners Canada, Spain and Italy, but also from some
                  major Asian and Latin American nations like Brazil and Japan.

                  That, say Cuban officials, was the Western media's fault for distorting the
                  case.

                  Trabajadores said some left-leaning or progressive sectors in Latin America
                  and Europe "are joining the colossal anti- Cuban campaign" by supporting
                  the dissidents whose "mercenary actions have been camouflaged with the
                  rhetoric that they are 'leftists and socialists misunderstood by the Cuban
                  regime."'

                  The newspaper said the four were directed by conservative elements of the
                  U.S. right, were visited by foreign officials in Cuba trying to show "a
                  supposed image of 'impartiality,"' and were a source of information for
                  foreign reporters.

                  The Trabajadores article followed other pieces in Cuba's state-run media
                  denouncing the four as mercenaries and traitors, and attacking some
                  Havana-based foreign correspondents for telling "lies" over the case.

                  The strong foreign response to the dissidents' case has threatened to
                  undermine some of the diplomatic gains and foreign rapprochement Cuba
                  achieved after the historic visit of Pope John Paul II in January 1998.