By Karen DeYoung
                  Washington Post Staff Writer

                  HAVANA—Something unprecedented happened last Nov. 1 that Cuba's
                  small community of political dissidents still talks about with amazement. In
                  a televised appearance before a panel of local journalists, President Fidel
                  Castro mentioned their names.

                  He ridiculed them, called them "counterrevolutionary ringleaders" and
                  accused them of conspiring with U.S. diplomats. But amid a torrent of
                  accusations against the United States that went on for hours, more than
                  three dozen dissidents were publicly identified by name--most for the first
                  time--to the Cuban people.

                  November was a high point for dissent here. In addition to the
                  denunciation by Castro, delegates to an international summit infuriated the
                  government by insisting publicly on meeting with some of its opponents.

                  But there has been an inevitable price to pay. Since then, short-term
                  political detentions are up--more than 200 people were arrested between
                  November and February, according to a dissident tally. Permission to
                  travel abroad has been withheld and the police presence in the streets has
                  increased. University professors and other government workers are being
                  told to limit outside contacts and to make new professions of faith in the
                  revolution.

                  After four decades of opposing Cuban communism, the dissident
                  movement acknowledges it has little to show for its efforts. While there
                  have been economic openings and a nascent shift in U.S. political opinion
                  toward Cuba on the outside, these developments have brought no
                  discernible movement inside Cuba. It remains a country where it is illegal,
                  and costly, to speak, write or gather freely.

                  And now that the government appears to have been ideologically
                  rejuvenated by the Elian Gonzalez case, "it's clear they are going to take it
                  even further," said human rights activist Elizardo Sanchez, dean of the
                  dissidents. "I think it's going to be like the Chinese Cultural Revolution,
                  tropical style."

                  Many of Cuba's leading dissidents are considered heroes outside their
                  country. Resolutions are adopted in their names, and awards are bestowed
                  in absentia. Yet here at home, they live a precarious and insular
                  existence--deprived of jobs, and under constant surveillance and threat of
                  arrest. But the government's most effective tools against them are a system
                  of social isolation and control over the ability of Cubans to communicate
                  with each other.

                  "This is a scientific dictatorship," said independent journalist Raul Rivero
                  "They don't kill people on the streets like [former dictator Fulgencio]
                  Batista; they don't 'disappear' people like [former Chilean president
                  Augusto] Pinochet."

                  In a country where neighbor is expected to inform on neighbor, and risk
                  avoidance is a highly developed science, an opposition gathering of a
                  half-dozen people constitutes a major protest. Unlike countries in the
                  former Soviet Bloc, Cuba encourages such troublemakers to leave, and
                  thousands are granted political refugee status each year by the United
                  States.

                  There is no Democracy Wall in Cuba, no clandestine press. Without
                  explicit government approval, no Cuban--let alone a declared dissident--is
                  allowed to have a cell phone or a direct-dial overseas line, or access to a
                  photocopying machine, an Internet connection or a satellite dish.

                  In a dozen interviews, political dissidents, other Cubans estranged from the
                  state system and diplomats said they believe that as many as three-quarters
                  of those who join opposition organizations are government agents or
                  opportunists looking for a quick arrest so they can obtain refugee status
                  from the United States as a "persecuted" person. According to one
                  long-term dissident leader, there may be no more than 500 genuine
                  opposition activists.

                  So effective is the government's system for isolating them from their fellow
                  Cubans that dissident politicians and human rights activists agree that the
                  vast majority of the island's 11 million people has never heard of them.

                  'A Line You Can't Cross'

                  At midday, when the Caribbean summer heat is most brutal, Marta Beatriz
                  Roque's Havana street is deserted. There are no playing children, no
                  parked cars, no obvious police surveillance.

                  Inside the dim coolness of her ground floor apartment, Roque is alone. A
                  small, middle-aged economist with a faded blond ponytail, she moved with
                  the caution of poor health. But she has gotten stronger since her nearly
                  three years in prison ended last spring, and she brushed off expressions of
                  concern to speculate about the state of Cuban dissent.

                  "There is a line you can't cross, and the opposition goes that far and no
                  further," she said. Roque and three other dissidents crossed it in 1997
                  when they wrote a treatise called "La Patria es de Todos"--"The Country
                  is for Everyone"--questioning the Communist Party's accomplishments and
                  proposing political and economic liberalization. All four were sentenced to
                  several years in prison for sedition. One of them, Vladimiro Roca, is still
                  there, serving six years after a closed-door trial in which one of his own
                  Social Democratic Party colleagues was a government witness against him.

                  On Saturday, Roque and the two other dissidents who were imprisoned
                  and released earlier this year, Felix Bonne and Rene Gomez Manzano,
                  appealed to the government to release Roca. On Friday, they met with a
                  group of U.S. senators, led by Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.).

                  Roque, Bonne, Gomez Manzano and Roca became famous internationally
                  as political prisoners. Several dozen East European democracy activists,
                  including Czech President Vaclav Havel and former Polish president Lech
                  Walesa, published an open letter last year in many Western newspapers
                  telling them to keep hope alive and recalling that "we lived to see something
                  that many of us did not dare to hope for."

                  But the end of East European totalitarianism came with the disintegration of
                  the Soviet Union, a cataclysm that Cuba managed to survive. The answers
                  to Cuba's problems, Roque said, will not come from outside.

                  Roque's organization, the Institute of Independent Cuban Economists,
                  "consisted of 17 people when I went into prison," she said, "and none of
                  them is left in the country now." Like a number of long-term dissidents, she
                  is dismissive of those who are less committed. "If somebody comes to me
                  now and says, 'I want to join, but eventually I want to leave the country,' I
                  don't want them."

                  Her work consists largely of trying to decipher economic reality from
                  official government statistics, and Roque spends her days searching for
                  larger truths in dry public pronouncements on such subjects as sugar
                  production and energy use. Her income is sporadic, including modest fees
                  for selling economic articles overseas. But Roque said she would much
                  rather talk to her own people.

                  "My dream is to be published in Granma," the Communist Party
                  newspaper, she said. "To talk over government radio."

                  Journalists Under Fire

                  When Rivero's daughter was born, he wrote a poem for her. "You know
                  how when you have a new child, you're all emotional," he recalled
                  sheepishly. "It was all about this beautiful country, this beautiful system.
                  When she was about 16, a friend of hers told me she said she hated me
                  because I had written such garbage."

                  Both their lives are different now. His daughter, 25, lives in the United
                  States, and Rivero, 56, once a senior foreign correspondent for the official
                  Cuban news agency Prensa Latina, is a leading "independent" journalist.
                  This means that he does not have a job and is not published in his own
                  country, that his telephone is tapped and his family is harassed.

                  "Last Mother's Day, my brother was flying in to visit from Canada," he
                  said. "He had a visa, and he called the day before to tell us what time his
                  plane was arriving. My mother and I went to the airport, but he didn't
                  show. Finally, we got a call at home saying he was being held by the
                  immigration police. I said at least let his 80-year-old mother see him, so
                  they let her visit him for an hour, but they wouldn't let him give her the
                  medicine he had brought for her. After 24 hours, they put him on a plane
                  back home."

                  In 1995--four years after he lost his job for signing a letter to Castro
                  asking for the release of political prisoners--Rivero founded CubaPress, an
                  agency to provide independent news about Cuba. Last fall, when he was
                  awarded a special journalism citation by Columbia University, the
                  government refused to allow him to pick it up. In his Nov. 1 talk, Castro
                  called Rivero a drunk.

                  CubaPress is one of about 15 self-declared independent news agencies on
                  the island, some with as few as two or three journalists. But Rivero worries
                  about the quality of the work they turn out. "There are only five or six 'real'
                  journalists here, who get published in 'real' journals outside," he said. "Lots
                  are in anti-Castro bulletins on the Internet, but I say that's not journalism."

                  "The problem is, we're only used to journalism as propaganda here. We
                  try to have little classes, and get books on journalism theory for them to
                  learn. I tell them, 'Look, as a journalist, you have to write about a lot of
                  things you don't agree with,' " including some things the government says.

                  The government makes what he calls real journalism difficult. "You have no
                  car. No Internet. No access to official sources. Investigative journalism is
                  impossible. So, we're left with descriptive journalism . . . trying to get
                  people to talk."

                  Transmitting information can be as difficult as getting it. Articles are sent
                  outside the country via dictation on telephones belonging to friends or
                  individuals who charge for their use. A story might earn $20 or $30,
                  deposited in an overseas account. The Inter American Press Association,
                  which last spring started a Cuba page on its Web site (www.sipiapa.org),
                  has agreed to give CubaPress $400 a month to divide among its eight
                  journalists.

                  Readers outside the country can be difficult to please. "Sometimes the
                  Miami groups attack us for not being sufficiently anti-government," Rivero
                  said. "It's hard to do journalism in an atmosphere of fanaticism on both
                  sides."

                  But publications sympathetic to Cuban exiles are their primary outlet,
                  which makes it possible for the government to label the journalists tools of
                  Miami. On rare occasions, such as when Pope John Paul II was here in
                  1998, Madrid's El Pais or Le Monde in Paris might ask Rivero for a story.
                  Most Latin American publications, although they might be critical of Cuba,
                  are uninterested in the work of the independents. "They think it's only
                  anti-government propaganda," Rivero said.

                  "The government calls El Nuevo Herald a tool of the [Cuban American]
                  mafia," he laughed, referring to the Spanish-language sister of the Miami
                  Herald that is heavily weighted toward exile views. "But who else is going
                  to publish us? Does The Washington Post want me to write a column?"

                  A Cuban Moderate

                  While some in Miami find Cuba's internal dissidents insufficiently
                  anti-government, Castro claims to see no difference at all between the
                  opposition here and there.

                  "They are exactly the same thing," he told an interviewer last month. "They
                  both have the same origin and the same leadership. Both are instruments of
                  the U.S. policy against Cuba, both are pro-imperialist, anti-socialist and in
                  favor of annexation."

                  These attitudes pain Adolfo Fernandez Sainz, another dissident. "Of
                  course, at the bottom of it all, it's the government's fault. . . . But sometimes
                  [the exiles] take a position that is so extreme that they assume anybody of
                  good faith here must be on the side of the government. I don't like any
                  extremes. We're trying to look for an answer. We're not trying to topple
                  the government, especially from one day to the next. It would be
                  dangerous for the U.S., dangerous for Cuba, dangerous for everyone."

                  It is an oft-heard refrain in Cuba, even among those publicly at odds with
                  the government. A survey of 1,000 newly arrived Cuban immigrants
                  commissioned by the U.S. government last year found that "the perception
                  of respondents is that the number one fear of a majority [on the island] is
                  that chaos and violence may prevail" after a precipitous change of
                  government. "For a large minority, the fear is that exiles may return to claim
                  the homes where they live; then, there are fears expressed in relation to
                  losing free health care, jobs and free education."

                  Fernandez belongs to what, in another country, might be called the political
                  center, favoring definite but gradual change. Opposition parties are tiny
                  groups claiming alliance with the world's large, democratic political
                  groupings such as Christian democrats, social democrats and the
                  international liberalism with which Fernandez's Democratic Solidarity Party
                  is allied. All of them are illegal in Cuba.

                  A slight man of 51, with close-cropped graying hair and a serious
                  demeanor, Fernandez lives with his wife in two small, seventh-floor rooms.
                  There is a television set--ubiquitous in all but the most destitute of Cuban
                  homes--a 1940s-vintage refrigerator, an oilcloth-covered table, and a
                  bookcase with a few Nat King Cole albums and a small collection of
                  books.

                  Once a government interpreter, Fernandez started to question official
                  policies openly. "I walked up to the edge a million times," he recalled. "And
                  then I walked back. I said to myself, 'I don't want my children to live the
                  way I live.' So I'd go back to the edge again, but I'd tell myself, 'No, this is
                  going to be a disaster,' and I'd walk back again.

                  "When that happens to you so many times, you become a psychological
                  disaster yourself," he said. "And finally you break through. For me, it was
                  when I saw a Communist Party member, a woman, speaking on TV. She
                  was talking about a poet, a woman whose work they didn't approve of,
                  who had been taken by a mob. She said they had made the poet swallow
                  her poems. I thought, how many people does it take to do something like
                  that? One to hold each arm, one to hold each leg, one to hold her nose,
                  and another to stuff it in her mouth? I said, 'That's it, I'm finished.' "

                  In 1994, he received a note from his workplace saying he was fired. "It
                  didn't say it was for anything political. It said I had had 'relations with third
                  parties.' " For a while, he gave private English lessons, but now he and his
                  wife survive on help from friends inside and outside the country, and, like
                  other dissidents, on payment for occasional articles published abroad.

                  The government sees little threat from mini-parties like the one Fernandez
                  belongs to, and usually does not bother with them. Although Democratic
                  Solidarity claims a few thousand supporters, others say most such groups
                  have a core of a few people, surrounded by a dozen or so militants, and an
                  unknown number of sympathizers. Recruitment is difficult, Fernandez
                  agreed. "People say, 'I like your programs, but I don't want to have any
                  problems.' Or, 'It sounds good, but it's not for me.' "

                  Two years ago, several like-minded parties put aside their differences and
                  jointly composed a document extolling democracy. Their main focus now
                  is "trying to form a political class," Fernandez said. "It's more intelligent to .
                  . . get ready for the change when it comes, than to try to provoke it now,"
                  he said.

                  The group tries to publish a monthly State of the Country bulletin, "but we
                  can't really reproduce it." Paper is worth its weight in gold, and "not having
                  a copy machine is a big problem."

                  Role of the Church

                  On a recent Sunday morning at St. Agustin's, a Roman Catholic church in
                  west-central Havana, the Rev. Carlos Manuel de Cespedes is celebrating
                  Mass for about 200 people. The subject of the homily was Christian
                  charity, and a donation box at the front of the church is half full of slightly
                  used shoes and clothing to share with those who do not get regular
                  shipments from overseas Cubans.

                  After the Mass, a foreign reporter tried to introduce herself and engage the
                  priest in conversation. He shook hands even as he backed away, turned
                  around and left. Earlier in the week, his aide had declined an interview on
                  his behalf, saying it was "inconvenient."

                  The church keeps the dissidents at arms' length. But many said the Catholic
                  church is the only institution with enough power and resources to pose a
                  serious challenge. Unlike the dissident community, it has a wide
                  membership, a direct way of regularly communicating with people and
                  places to meet.

                  During the worst of the economic "special period"--the early 1990s, when
                  Soviet subsidies ended and Cuba's economy shrunk 35 percent practically
                  overnight--the government allowed the church to help fill a vast social
                  services gap. As the economy has improved, however, its maneuvering
                  room has narrowed. The government has turned down requests to
                  broadcast Masses on state radio, to establish permanent feeding sites for
                  the poor or to purchase food or supplies wholesale. Some requests to
                  bring in more priests from abroad have been denied.

                  But even as the government tries to keep it under control, the church is
                  systematically preparing a role for itself in a post-Castro Cuba. Over the
                  years, it has slowly "Cubanized" itself from the foreign-dominated institution
                  of the years before Castro's revolution. More recently, it has stepped up
                  training of religious and lay personnel throughout the country, putting
                  special emphasis on youth membership. Christian Life, a weekly bulletin
                  with thinly veiled defenses of religious freedom, is perhaps the most widely
                  distributed nongovernment publication in the country. Special Masses for
                  prisoners are frequently held and announced openly.

                  The church's immediate agenda is fairly modest--expansion of its social
                  program, access to the media, freedom to bring any priests it wishes into
                  the country. Some inside the hierarchy--particularly among the more
                  activist clergy in Pinar del Rio, to the west, and the southeastern city of
                  Santiago--believe it should be more aggressive.

                  But for now, the church is playing a waiting game, pushing when it can,
                  retreating when it seems prudent. "The government sees the church as the
                  only real opposition party in the country," said a source close to the
                  hierarchy who refused to be identified. "It's the only dangerous one."

                  A 'Man of the Left'

                  Elizardo Sanchez is surely the dissident who is best known outside Cuba,
                  and is considered by many to be among the bravest after long years of
                  imprisonment and many arrests. His Cuban Commission for Human Rights
                  and National Reconciliation is the most informed, organized and articulate
                  source of information about political prisoners and the domestic
                  opposition.

                  While the government denounces him as a right-wing extremist, Sanchez
                  described himself as a "man of the left . . . all my life." He is a socialist who
                  broke with the government in 1967, and says Cuba's best chance for
                  positive change is under the leadership of the 73-year-old Castro.

                  "Cuba needs democratic reforms to modernize, and . . . a weak
                  government can't do it," he said. Castro "is a symbol of respect and fear
                  for the population. . . . There is no one to replace him, no number two,
                  number three. All of them together don't engender the same combination of
                  respect and fear."

                  While it would lose free elections, Sanchez said, the government "has an
                  important level of support. . . . I estimate they'd get about 30 percent,
                  something like the Sandinistas got in Nicaragua. But it would be an
                  important political base."

                  Such speculation, he acknowledged, is useless because there is no
                  evidence that free elections are about to happen. Castro "doesn't want to
                  substitute reality for his ideological vision," even though "he knows the
                  [ideological] model ends with him."

                  Change is inevitable, Sanchez said. "Over the medium or the long term, the
                  totalitarian regime will end and we will have a country of free rights. But
                  from now until then, a lot of negative things are going to happen here."

                  "In Miami, they say this government will fall any week now. But it could
                  last five more years, 10 more years. . . . The opposition is small, weak and
                  isolated, and no internal force is capable of pushing for change. This is not
                  Mexico or Chile, or even China. No outside forces can influence it, either."