BY CAROL ROSENBERG

 Polita Grau, the former first lady of Cuba who later served 14 years in Cuban
 prisons for conspiring with the CIA to topple Fidel Castro, died Wednesday at the
 Villa Maria Nursing Center in Miami. She was 84.

 For many in Miami, she was revered as the godmother of Pedro Pan -- the
 Catholic Church-sponsored movement that encouraged Cuban parents to send
 their children to U.S. families and spare them communist re-education.

 With her brother, Ramon, the Graus secretly distributed U.S. letterhead
 invitations from their Havana home that allowed 14,000 children to come here in
 the early 1960s. Among them were her own daughter and son, whom she sent to
 friends in Miami while she stayed behind to care for elderly relatives.

 But Polita Grau's Pedro Pan activities were just a small slice of a lifetime of
 activism and advocacy that spanned both sides of the Florida Straits -- with four
 separate periods of exile in Miami.

 ``It is the end of an era. Polita Grau was a piece of Cuban history,'' said DePaul
 University political scientist Maria de los Angeles Torres, who interviewed Grau
 many times in Miami.

 Her passing, Torres said, was ``particularly significant in terms of women's
 involvement in Cuban politics.''

 As a college student, she was involved in radical campus movements to
 undermine the Gen. Gerardo Machado regime. Later, she was a supporter of
 Cuba's 1959 revolution -- but turned against it soon after Castro started
 nationalizing industries.

 Born in Havana on Nov. 19, 1915, Grau was probably destined for political and
 human rights activism. Her uncle was Ramon Grau San Martin, Cuba's president
 from 1933 to 1934 and from 1944 to 1948 -- and conferred upon his niece the
 ceremonial title of first lady during his first term.

 ``She has been much involved in democratic movements and later on became
 involved in supporting the revolution and then in the opposition of the revolution,''
 Torres said.

 So active was her disenchantment with the revolution that she plotted to topple
 the communist leader.

 In 1965, she and her brother Ramon were arrested and charged with being CIA
 agents and allegedly forming an international espionage ring in Cuba.

 She spent 14 years in jail, until Castro authorized a major release of political
 prisoners in 1978 -- as part of a later abandoned dialogue with Miami exiles
 encouraged by Jimmy Carter.

 Her brother, who died in 1998, was freed eight years later.

 ``She was a brave woman. She wasn't afraid of anything. She felt very Cuban,''
 said Miami businessman Bernardo Benes, who took part in the 1978 dialogue
 between exiles and Castro that resulted in her early release from a 30-year
 sentence.

 Grau, who had suffered from congestive heart disease, had failing health in recent
 years, said her daughter Hilda ``Chury'' Aguero.

 She described four periods of exile in Miami -- starting with her senior year in high
 school, when she graduated from St. Patrick's Academy on Miami Beach.

 Although Grau was known widely as Polita, that name never appeared on any
 official identification document. She was born Maria Leopoldina Grau. In her
 post-prison arrival in the United States, her documents bore the name Maria
 Aguero, taken from her second husband.

 When she became a U.S. citizen, she adopted yet another name: Pola Grau, the
 name on her naturalization certificate.

 In addition to her daughter, survivors include six grandchildren and a
 great-granddaughter.

 Visitation will be held until noon today at the Rivero Funeral Home, 8200 Bird
 Road. Monsignor Bryan O. Walsh will officiate at a 1 p.m. Mass today at St.
 Dominic's Catholic Church, 5909 NW Seventh St.

 No cemetery service will be held. At her request, a cremation will take place, and
 her ashes will eventually be interred in Cuba.

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald