They see no changes as world woos isle

                   By Ginger Thompson
                   Tribune Staff Writer

                   GUIRA de MELENA, Cuba -- Nelson Mujica, a 44-year-old dental surgeon, got his life back.
                   Home again with his wife and teenage daughters, he has started work at a clinic in town.

                   Just five months ago, Mujica was in prison, convicted of rebellion. Police caught him
                   distributing fliers that criticized Cuban elections, he said, and he was sentenced to 10 years in
                   jail.

                   Mujica would probably still be serving time if not for the efforts of Pope John
                   Paul II, who visited Cuba in January and asked for clemency for hundreds of
                   political prisoners. Within days, Mujica and some 200 others were released,
                   140 of them political prisoners and 60 convicted of other crimes.

                   But Mujica feels no sense of triumph.

                   In talking about his release recently, he paced slowly around the room, his
                   back hunched and his slippers swishing against the tile floors. His voice barely
                   rose above a whisper. His eyes were bloodshot, and even when the
                   conversation turned to his daughter's upcoming 20th birthday, he forced a
                   smile only once.

                   He is grateful to the pope, and of course, he is glad to be out of jail. But,
                   Mujica said, he still does not feel free.

                   "It may seem like things for dissidents are better because I am home, because
                   I have my life back, just the same as it was before I went to jail," Mujica said.
                   "But I do not want things to be the same. That is why I went to jail. I wanted
                   change."

                   He was released because of an image-building campaign by the Cuban
                   government -- a stroke of sheer luck, Mujica said -- not because of any
                   reforms that would have guaranteed his freedom of expression and protected
                   him from going to jail in the first place. And despite continued international
                   pressure, especially from the Vatican, such reforms appear unlikely.

                   Five months have passed since Pope John Paul II ended his historic trip to
                   this island nation, issuing a plea for the world to open itself to Cuba, and for
                   Cuba to open itself to the world. One of the most dramatic results of that
                   five-day visit was the release of political prisoners like Mujica. It was the
                   largest single release of prisoners in years, and sent signals across this island
                   nation and around the world that perhaps the Cuban government was
                   prepared to adopt reforms that would give space for political opponents to
                   organize without fear of repression.

                   Human rights advocates in Cuba and the United States said the release was
                   part of the Cuban government's campaign to gain international credibility,
                   attract foreign investment and maintain peace at home as people endure dire
                   shortages of food, medicine and other supplies.

                   In the last four months, dozens of delegations, including several from the
                   United States, have visited Cuba to discuss business opportunities or to
                   explore ways to improve relations with Cuba.

                   An improvement in the Cuban government's human rights record -- marked
                   by a decrease in the number of political prisoners from an estimated 1,000 in
                   1996 to fewer than 400 today -- has helped ease tensions.

                   The Vatican hailed the prisoner release as "a notable step which represents a
                   concrete prospect of hope for the future."

                   Today, however, the climate for dissidents has changed from hopeful to
                   murky. On one hand, some dissident leaders say that police seem more
                   tolerant of their activities, and that incidents of harassment have dropped,
                   including overnight detentions, house searches, and seizures of equipment.

                   But at the same time, Cuban jails still hold hundreds of people arrested as
                   "counterrevolutionaries" because they criticized the government. Some have
                   been in jail for months without ever being tried in court or formally charged
                   with a crime.

                   In a press conference last week, Elizardo Sanchez, one of Cuba's most
                   prominent dissidents, released the names of some 381 prisoners in Cuban
                   jails for political crimes, a number he called "too high," considering that Cuba
                   is a country at peace.

                   Because the Cuban government refuses to give information about political
                   prisoners, it is almost impossible for anyone to know the real number of
                   detainees. However, foreign embassies which monitor the human rights
                   situation in Cuba regularly use data and information supplied by Sanchez and
                   his commission.

                   Sanchez lamented that the Cuban government refuses to adopt reforms to
                   guarantee, among other things, freedom of speech, freedom of the press,
                   freedom of association or the freedom to demonstrate peacefully. Without
                   such protections, he said, organizations -- including political parties, animal
                   rights groups, professional societies -- that are not sanctioned by the
                   government are considered illegal and their members can be imprisoned just
                   for gathering in groups of three or more.

                   "The authority of the Cuban government and its enormous capacity for social
                   control remains intact," Sanchez said.

                   "The government wouldn't do anything to someone like me because I am
                   known and they do not want an international scandal," he said. "But the
                   average Cuban can get arrested at any moment."

                   U.S. policies, especially the trade embargo and the Helms-Burton Act, are
                   aimed at forcing the Cuban government to change its practices. Sanchez said
                   it does more harm than good.

                   These policies, he said, allow the Cuban government to blame the United
                   States for the island's hardships. And, Sanchez has said, as long as there are
                   hostilities between Cuba and the United States, the Cuban government will
                   justify repression as an important measure of self-preservation.

                   Cuban officials do not acknowledge political prisoners, only
                   "counterrevolutionary prisoners."

                   Sanchez operates his organization, the Cuban Commission for Human Rights
                   and National Reconciliation, from his home. Most of his files are handwritten
                   reports because, he said, police confiscated his typewriters and computers. It
                   is against the law, he said, for him to own a fax machine or a copier. And he
                   believes his telephone is tapped.

                   Perusing copies of court documents that he said were provided to him by
                   attorneys for political prisoners, Sanchez cited several recent examples of
                   people who were arrested for criticizing the government.

                   In April, he said, a 23-year-old plumber was convicted of "Continuous
                   Disobedience" and sentenced to three years in jail for scribbling "Abajo
                   Fidel," (Down with Fidel) on walls, garbage bins and street signs in Santiago.

                   In November, Sanchez said, a 46-year-old restaurant manager was
                   sentenced to four years in jail for "enemy propaganda." Court documents
                   provided by Sanchez explain that police found that the manager possessed a
                   copy of the U.S. State Department's 1996 report on human rights in Cuba
                   and several books and magazines about Cuba published in Miami.

                   Also last winter, a 43-year-old doctor was convicted of "enemy
                   propaganda," sentenced to eight years in prison for speaking on
                   American-sponsored Radio Marti about an outbreak of dengue fever.

                   "In most places in the world these people would not be considered enemies
                   of the state," said Sanchez, "But in Cuba, for reading the wrong book you
                   could be sent to jail as a counterrevolutionary."

                   He added, "In all these cases, the intention of the government is intimidation."

                   A government spokesman dismissed the accusation.

                   "Dissidents have been speaking to reporters and their words are published in
                   newspapers around the world," said Edgardo Valdes Lopez, a spokesman
                   for the Cuban Foreign Ministry. "We read those stories here, and nothing
                   happens. No one is put in jail."

                   Human rights advocates around the world have petitioned unsuccessfully for
                   the release of four dissidents who were arrested almost a year ago after
                   criticizing the Cuban government's economic strategies in meetings with
                   foreign journalists. The activists -- Vladimiro Roca, Rene Gomez Manzano,
                   Felix Bonne and Marta Beatriz Roque -- have not been tried and no formal
                   charges have been filed against them.

                   Roca, the son of a revered Communist leader, was a high-level economist
                   until 1991 when he announced he could no longer live what Cubans call "a
                   double moral," carrying out the mandate of the government while despising its
                   policies. He was immediately fired, and for the last year he has been kept in
                   solitary confinement in a prison in the province of Cienfuegos.

                   Roca's wife nervously said the government has refused to tell her or her
                   husband's lawyer anything about their investigation. And so she tries to meet
                   with foreign dignitaries or journalists who visit Cuba, hoping they have heard
                   something from Cuban government officials.

                   "If they had done something bad, if they had committed some type of
                   sabotage, even I would say they deserve to be in jail," said Roca's wife,
                   Magalys de Armas, referring to her husband and the three other dissidents in
                   jail. "But they are peaceful people. They only expressed their beliefs.

                   "If they really committed a crime, then the government should put them on
                   trial and prove it in court."

                   Once a month, de Armas, visits her husband. They share a lunch and go over
                   the handwritten list of things she wants to make sure to tell him. She said that
                   while her husband seems thin, his health is good. And his spirit is strong.

                   Sometimes, she wishes she had his fortitude.

                   "It has been horrible," said de Armas. "Every day I am not with him, I imagine
                   the worst is happening, that he is being beaten or that he is hungry or sick. I
                   wake up every morning hoping that this will all be just a nightmare."

                   Despite numerous requests for information, Cuban officials refuse to talk
                   about the arrest of Roca and the three other dissidents, known in Cuba as
                   "the four."

                   "I don't have any details," said government spokesman Alejandro Gonzalez.
                   "These people are in jail for violating the laws against this country."

                   Asked to explain exactly what laws the suspects had violated, Gonzalez said,
                   "I cannot be precise, but I can assure you that in this country, there is not one
                   prisoner who has not violated the law."

                   Even though he is out of jail, Mujica says he will forever be haunted by the
                   experience. He struggles to overcome bouts of anger and depression and,
                   even though he has no real evidence, he says he feels police are watching him.

                   In 1992, he and four friends--a mechanic, a carpenter and two factory
                   workers -- were arrested after distributing fliers that urged people not to cast
                   votes in national elections. The protesters complained that opposition parties
                   are not allowed to participate in elections and with their fliers they urged
                   people to send a message of discontent to the government by marking their
                   ballots with a big "X," rather than voting for any of the candidates.

                   Mujica said that he and his friends saw communist regimes falling across
                   Eastern Europe and had high hopes that they could ignite the same kinds of
                   changes with just a little spark.

                   But the movement was extinguished before it ever really got started. A few
                   days after distributing the fliers, police went to the clinic where Mujica
                   worked and arrested him. At first, the government's charge against him was
                   "enemy propaganda." In the end, he and his four friends were convicted of
                   rebellion, a more serious charge.

                   "It was as if we had assaulted a military fort," Mujica said. "But we had done
                   nothing violent. There was no terrorism. We only expressed what we
                   believed."

                   On Feb. 13, four of the five convicts were released. One of them, a factory
                   worker, remains in jail. "He was convicted of the same crime as the rest of us,
                   so we don't know why they have not let him go," Mujica said. "I think part of
                   the reason they keep him in jail is to keep the rest of us quiet."

                   For his part, Mujica said, his days of protesting against the government are
                   over.

                   "Nothing came of it. All that happened was that it caused great pain for my
                   family."