BY ANITA SNOW
 Associated Press

 HAVANA -- Singing Christmas carols along Havana's bay-front Malecon
 boulevard, thousands of Roman Catholics on Saturday held the largest religious
 procession of its kind since the early years of the Cuban Revolution of 1959.

 Fully sanctioned by Cuba's Communist government, the peaceful religious march
 included a tractor that pulled a float with people playing the roles of Mary, Joseph
 and the infant Jesus, and three men on horseback representing the Three Wise
 Men.

 Starting in the late afternoon, the procession wound its way through Old Havana's
 narrow streets, where hundreds of people waved and smiled from the windows of
 their homes in dilapidated buildings of wood and stone.

 ``Merry Christmas,'' several cried out. ``Thank you!''

 ``We are very excited because we have been allowed to demonstrate our faith so
 publicly,'' said Raquel Requeny, a 53-year-old Catholic. Requeny said there had
 been no religious procession along Havana's Malecon since she was a young girl
 in the early 1960s, in the first years after Fidel Castro took power.

 ``This is marvelous,'' said Carlos Rodriguez, 61, a retired military man who said he
 stopped going to church soon after the revolution but began attending Mass in
 recent years as relations warmed between church and state.

 Cuba was officially atheist from the early 1960s until 1992, and religious believers
 were banned from the party, the military and several professions.

 Since the collapse of Cuba's Soviet bloc allies, however, officials have softened
 their approach toward organized religion. In 1991, Catholics and other believers
 were granted permission to join the Communist Party.

 Saturday's procession was another victory for Cuba's Roman Catholic Church,
 which has made steady but modest gains in extending its reach since Pope John
 Paul II visited the island in January 1998.

 The government also granted church leaders' request to transmit the Pope's
 annual Christmas Day message from the Vatican on state television.

 Religious processions, once common before the revolution, were banned in the
 early 1960s after political opponents used them to speak out against the new
 government. Some turned violent.

 But there were no problems Saturday.