By ELAINE DE VALLE
 Herald Staff Writer

 Seven Cuban dissidents were taken into government custody as they prepared to
 give a class on nonviolent ways to promote social change, the wives of two of the
 men and other dissidents said Wednesday from Havana.

 Angela Salinas, who is married to independent journalist Angel Pablo Polanco,
 said the activists were taken away about 1:30 p.m. Tuesday and were being
 detained at a State Security Department of Investigation center in Havana.

 The others are Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, Alejandro Chang Cantillo, Marcel
 Valenzuela, Marlon Carrero, Joaquin Rafael Martinez and Esteban Perez del
 Castillo. Biscet, perhaps the best known of the group, this summer led a highly
 publicized 40-day fast -- a day for each year of Fidel Castro's rule -- to demand
 the release of all political prisoners.

 ``They told me he was under investigation,'' said Biscet's wife, Elsa Morejon
 Hernandez.

 Morejon, 31, took her husband clothes, deodorant, soap, towels and sheets
 Wednesday morning but she could not see him or learn the charges against him.
 The 38-year-old physician has been arrested at least 22 times since July 1998,
 his wife said. The last time, a month ago, he was one of 22 dissidents jailed
 during a weekend crackdown to keep them from participating in two planned
 anti-government protests.

 Ileana Someillan Fleitas, another dissident, said Tuesday's arrests are tied to the
 nonviolence classes.

 ``The reason is the school they created to teach civic disobedience,'' she said.
 ``And Biscet is one of the teachers.''

 Biscet had been detained Friday as well as he left his home to go to the school,
 Someillan said. ``But they let him out later that night.''

 Elizardo Sanchez, head of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National
 Reconciliation, blasted the detentions from his home in Havana's Santos Suarez
 neighborhood.

 ``It is disturbing for us in the Commission for Human Rights that there are so
 many repeated detentions in the case of Biscet and his friends and colleagues,''
 Sanchez said. ``We have to qualify them as arbitrary detentions. They are
 arbitrary because none have committed a crime, and they are arbitrary because,
 in many cases, they are detained without due process.

 ``They are almost always immediately released, which shows they are innocent.''

 But the short detentions are also a government tactic, he said.

 ``These short detentions characterize the principal element of this type of
 low-intensity repression that Cuba has maintained in the past several years,''
 Sanchez said.

 Rather than sentence the dissidents, they are held for short spurts so that it does
 not appear to the outside world that opposition in Cuba has risen and so that the
 number of political prisoners does not swell, he explained.

 e-mail: edevalle@herald.com
 

                     Copyright 1999 Miami Herald