By JUAN O. TAMAYO
             Herald Staff Writer

             Cuba's crackdown on dissent this week has raised several major questions about
             the island's current political stability:

               Did the government act because it felt strong enough to ignore foreign pleas for
             a political opening, or out of fear that its control of society was being eroded by
             the growing corruption, street crime and people's defiance?

               Is President Fidel Castro determined to create a crisis with the United States so
             that he can retrench even further?

               Or did President Clinton's Jan. 5 changes in the U.S. embargo push him to
             crack down on the revolution's opponents?

             Ricardo Alarcon, head of the Cuban legislature, espoused the last argument for
             reporters Wednesday, one day after lawmakers created a new class of
             ``counterrevolutionary crimes and stiffened jail terms on common crimes.

             He called the Jan. 5 measures -- increasing U.S. aid and contacts with
             nongovernmental groups in Cuba -- the latest chapter in Washington's ``systematic
             aggression against Havana. And he said the new law would stop subversion.

             ``We know of no opposition other than the one fabricated by the United States,
             Alarcon added, in effect arguing that since all Castro opponents are U.S. puppets,
             Havana needed a law to treat them all as criminals.

             Alarcon seemed to answer one question: Why Cuba had resorted to such a harsh
             measure when the many foreign friends it gained after Pope John Paul II visited 13
             months ago have been calling for a political opening.

             But Alarcon's answer did not convince a number of U.S. experts on Cuba who
             offered myriad explanations and agreed only on this: Havana had enough laws on
             the books before Tuesday to silence all opponents.

             ``The government doesn't really need a pretext from the U.S. to crack down on
             internal dissent. They've been doing that since the day they rode into Havana, said
             Richard Nuccio, White House point man on Cuba in the mid-1990s.

             Street crime increasing

             One group of Cuba-watchers argues that the Cuban government was essentially
             concerned about the rising tide of street crime, and decided to garnish a
             get-tough-on-crime bill with a gratuitous warning to dissidents.

             ``Officials cast dissident political behavior as criminal, so from their point of view
             this is a crackdown on criminality, said Lisandro Perez, head of the Cuban
             Research Institute at Florida International University.

             Nuccio sees it differently. Castro, he argues, may well be trying to spark a crisis in
             Havana relations with a Clinton administration bent on promoting more U.S.
             people-to-people contacts with Cuba.

             ``Cuba prefers a great deal of hostility in its relations with the United States. That's
             the kind of situation it can manage most easily, by simply tightening controls, he
             said.

             Crises with United States

             Proponents of that argument can point to the past. Castro instigated crises in
             bilateral relations after receiving friendly advances from Presidents Ford in 1976,
             Carter in 1980 and Clinton in 1994.

             None of the above arguments focuses, however, on what it is that Cuba fears.

             The dissident movement remains small and deeply fractured, and the so-called
             independent journalists, targeted by many of the law's provisions, total an
             estimated 40 people in a nation of 11 million.

             ``If these people make the government scared, you have to wonder why, said
             Ruth Montaner, a Miamian who receives U.S. government aid to publish the
             reports of several dissidents in Cuba.

             That is perhaps the hardest question to answer in a country where the Communist
             Party rules and censors the media. Yet there have been some hints, increasing over
             the past six months or so, of what Cuba fears:

               The economy stagnated in 1998, ending many Cubans' hopes for a rapid
             recovery after the 1990-94 crisis and accounting for at least part of the increase in
             the number of Cubans fleeing to U.S. shores.

               Official corruption is rampant. Since government and party officials are among
             the least likely to receive dollars from relatives in Miami, they are the ones most
             driven to corruption to make ends meet.

               Crime is soaring, not only because of the grinding economy but because of what
             Cardinal Jaime Ortega, archbishop of Havana, has described as a rent in the moral
             fabric of the island.

               Cubans' widespread resignation that little is likely to change until Castro dies
             appears to be edging toward criticism of the hardships they face every day.

             ``There's a sense of erosion, said one U.S. government official in Washington who
             watches Cuban developments. ``It's a sense of a slow slide, of little movements of
             the mechanism that are always going backward.
 

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