By Laurie Goering
Tribune foreign correspondent

HAVANA -- Like Fidel Castro himself, Owaldo Paya has a defiant streak.

As a young man, he served three years at hard labor in Cuba's sugar cane fields and a marble mine rather than turn up for compulsory service in socialist Cuba's
military.

With his family, he endured mobs of stone-throwing activists at the door as the family stuck with its fervent Catholic faith after Castro's revolution.

Now Paya, one of the island's most active political dissidents, is trying a radical new experiment to change Cuba: Harnessing the country's constitution to bring about
political change.

Over the last three years, Paya and opposition colleagues across the country have been gathering signatures asking Cuba's National Assembly to call a nationwide
referendum on sweeping reform of the nation's political structure, from instituting freedom of speech and assembly to revamping electoral rules.

Under Cuba's 1976 constitution, any citizen who gathers 10,000 signatures can petition the National Assembly for a referendum.

Paya, 49, who expects to collect the last of those needed names within weeks, will be the first to put the measure to the test with his Varela Project, named for a
19th Century Cuban priest and freedom advocate.

"The constitution gives us the right to demand this," said Paya, who leads Cuba's opposition Christian Liberation Movement.

"The first source of rights is the people's voice expressed at the ballot box."

Since 1998, when the drive began, organizers from a coalition of 119 dissident groups, including the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and the Democratic
Solidarity Party, have been gathering names, signatures and Cuban identity numbers on petitions handed around the island.

Group's manifesto

"Cuba needs changes at every level. It is up to Cubans to define what the changes should be," the group's manifesto says.

The effort has been anything but secret. Organizers have sent letters describing the campaign to every Cuban state radio and television station, as well as the island's
state newspapers and magazines, asking for publicity. Paya also has sought 20 minutes to present the project on Cuba's nightly television roundtable--all without
success, he said.

"Cuba's constitution says the media belong to the people, but they haven't even mentioned it," he said, except as a "counterrevolutionary project,"the Cuban
government's term for virtually all activity by the island's small opposition groups.

Asked about the project, government officials suggest it is an uninteresting effort by opposition groups they say are funded by a hostile U.S. government. Paya and
his colleagues deny taking any U.S. money.

The project, which seeks amnesty for political prisoners, freedom to launch private businesses, freedoms of speech and assembly, and an overhaul of electoral laws,
puts Cuba's government in a difficult position.

"By calling for a plebiscite guaranteed by the 1976 constitution, the Varela Project is legal, moderate and thus almost impossible to disqualify," Sebastian Arcos, one
of the project's supporters from the Cuban Committee for Human Rights, wrote earlier this year.

"For the regime [there's] the uncomfortable dilemma of accepting the plebiscite, or admitting it ignores its own laws," he said.

Paya said Cubans have been remarkably willing to sign their names and identification numbers to the project, actions he believes signal a growing weariness with the
regime's numerous restrictions.

By law, Cubans must seek government permission to trade houses, buy a car or raise a calf. Bans on unauthorized meetings also chafe.

The sense of fatalism that pervades Cuban society, Paya said, "needs to be replaced with citizen action and civic change." Cubans have spent years waiting for
change brought by [Pope John Paul II's] visit, the help of foreign governments or even Castro's death," Paya said, but with the petition, "we tell them, `You can be
the protagonist of your own story.'"

Paya admitted that signing the petition has risks.

In a nation where many political opposition leaders have lost prominent posts and the best jobs are reserved for those who stick with the party line, signers almost
surely will come under political suspicion.

Paya noted that while police have in some places seized petitions, official interference has been relatively light.

Paya, an intense but kindly man, has managed to hold on to a state job as a medical equipment technician, one of the few opposition leaders to keep such a post, but
has been briefly detained several times by the government, never expressly in connection with the Varela Project, he said.

He was among a handful of dissidents who met with Illinois Gov. George Ryan during his groundbreaking visit to the island in 1999.

Hurdles predicted

His project has the backing of more than 100 Roman Catholic bishops, including many in the United States, and solidarity committees or legislators from Romania,
Poland, Czech Republic, Mexico, Argentina, Chile and other nations, Paya said.

Analysts say the campaign still faces numerous hurdles. Once it is presented to the National Assembly, the government almost certainly will attempt to challenge and
disqualify signatures. The National Assembly also could simply raise and immediately reject the idea of a referendum, without publishing any notice.

Paya, though, remains confident. Simply putting the project in motion, he said, has already changed Cuba.

"The reaction has been hope," he said, "We want self-determination for Cuba, and we're working within legal means to get it."

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