Cuba Strikes Democracy Movement : Repression: At least 60 activists have been seized since Soviet unraveling began. Havana says the dissidents conspire with U.S. against regime.

MEXICO CITY —  Isolated by the fall of their Soviet protectors, Communist leaders in Cuba have launched an unusually violent attack on the island’s small but growing pro-democracy movement, accusing it of conspiring with the United States to destroy the Cuban revolution.

At least 60 activists, including five of the 11 co-presidents of the Cuban Democratic Convergence, the largest dissident alliance, have been arrested in the months since the Soviet Union started unraveling, and 24 of them remain in jail, according to human rights monitors in Havana.

Many of the accused were beaten or jostled by government-sanctioned mobs on the way to face such charges as “illicit association,” “clandestine printing” and “defamation.” The 14 tried so far have been sentenced to prison for up to three years.

Among the most prominent behind bars are Yndamiro Restano, a former journalist arrested Dec. 20 after his social democratic Harmony Movement tried to foster independent labor unions, and Maria Elena Cruz Varela, a prize-winning poet. Cruz was dragged by the hair from her Havana apartment Nov. 19, while a crowd of 200 chanted insults, and was forced to eat some of her political writings.

Cuban dissidents call this the most sweeping campaign against the nonviolent opposition groups that have proliferated on the island since the mid-1980s. It comes as they are starting to unify and work with well-funded Cuban exile movements.

The arrests are also unusual because they are carried out by newly created paramilitary gangs known as “rapid reaction brigades,” apparently under police guidance.

“They are breaking into homes and detaining people,” Elizardo Sanchez, a human rights activist arrested twice in November, said in a telephone interview from Havana last Sunday, four days before brigade members wielding steel bars entered his garage and ransacked files kept there. “Every time they take action, they break the law.”

President Fidel Castro has portrayed the dissidents, who favor a peaceful changeover to multi-party politics, as CIA collaborators.

The nationalist campaign to rally Cubans behind their government, sapped by a severe economic crisis and a U.S. trade embargo, has intensified in recent days, fueled by two uncommon incidents.

On Jan. 7, amid renewed clamor by hard-line Cuban exiles for a U.S. green light to launch raids on the island, Cuba announced that it had captured three Miami Cubans who landed by boat with small arms and explosives. Then it arrested Gustavo Arcos, Cuba’s best-known dissident, after alleging that his name had been found in one of the invaders’ notebooks. Arcos was freed, but the Miami men have been convicted of plotting sabotage, two of them sentenced to death and the third to 30 years in prison.

On Jan. 9, a group of would-be defectors fatally shot three policemen in a bungled attempt to commandeer a boat to Florida.

Speaking at the officers’ funeral, Gen. Raul Castro, the president’s brother and armed forces minister, cast equal blame for their deaths on the Bush Administration, Cuban exile leaders and “the minuscule groups inside our country that assume different tasks in the imperialist strategy.” He threatened to reinstate “revolutionary tribunals” that sent hundreds of Fidel Castro’s enemies before firing squads after his 1959 guerrilla takeover.

“Our enemies are wrong,” Gen. Castro declared, “if they think that, just because others have abandoned us, they can bend us to their will.”

Some Cuba watchers say the Castro government is reliving the siege atmosphere that followed the October, 1962, missile crisis, when the Soviet Union backed away from a showdown with the United States and withdrew nuclear warheads from Cuba. At the time, the CIA was still trying to assassinate Fidel Castro, and anti-Castro rebels were fighting in Cuba’s Escambray mountains, an insurgency defeated in 1966.

“There is that same feeling today (in the Cuban leadership) that they have been abandoned,” said Philip Brenner, chairman of the Department of International Politics and Foreign Policy at American University in Washington, who visited Cuba this month. “They feel they are at the brink, that there is no room to tolerate dissent.”

Non-Communist political and human rights groups, while illegal, had relative freedom to operate in Cuba during a liberalization from 1985 to 1989. But as communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and Cuba’s economy began its free fall, the regime moved to isolate those groups, made up mostly of intellectuals, from an increasingly discontented population.

Despite sporadic arrests of pro-democracy leaders over the past two years, their movement appears to have become bolder and better organized.

Money and advice have flowed from abroad to two alliances formed in Cuba since last August--the Cuban Democratic Coalition of six groups linked to the right-wing Cuban American National Foundation, which is headquartered in Miami and has close ties to the Bush Administration, and the more moderate Cuban Democratic Convergence of 11 groups, supported by the Madrid-based Democratic Platform of exiled liberals, social democrats and Christian democrats.

The Convergence has organized labor unions and held press conferences in Havana, while the Coalition staged a small demonstration outside Cuba’s security police headquarters--an act that landed four of its members in prison.

By favoring “dialogue” with the government to achieve change, the Convergence has managed to attract some prominent former revolutionaries, the poet Cruz among them.

In an open letter two months before her arrest, Cruz wrote: “No, Senor Fidel Castro, the Cuban opposition isn’t from or in the United States, regardless of that country’s questionable positions. Your opposition is yourself and your own contradictions . . . the economic, political and social failure of 32 years of revolution.”

She was sentenced to two years in prison for holding illegal meetings and distributing leaflets challenging the government’s legitimacy.

The crackdown has drawn condemnation from international human rights organizations and expressions of concern by Western governments from which Cuba is seeking badly needed investment.

“There is no indication that the pro-democracy advocates targeted by the Cuban authorities are guilty of anything other than peacefully exercising their internationally guaranteed civil and political rights,” wrote Juan E. Mendez, executive director of Americas Watch, in a recent letter to Castro.

More unusual are the veiled objections from Cuba’s Roman Catholic hierarchy. One pastoral letter, referring to the infamous “rapid reaction brigades,” said: “Love is the only rapid reaction of Jesus. . . . The church disagrees with reactions to the contrary.”

Castro has brushed off the criticism and refused to allow a special observer appointed by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights to enter Cuba.

“We do not see these (dissidents) as defenders of human rights but as groups which act with the United States and which have one purpose--to destroy the revolution,” Castro said in a recent interview with Gillian Gunn, an American Cuba-watcher with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “When they violate the law, when they carry out activities against the revolution, then we simply cannot tolerate them.”

A more revealing glimpse of official concern about dissent came in a long speech last month by Carlos Aldana, the Communist Party chief of ideology and a member of Castro’s inner circle.

After deriding the dissidents as “mediocre, frustrated and resentful,” Aldana acknowledged that their ranks had swollen with the demise of Soviet and European communism. He put their number at 1,000 activists in 50 organizations, 10 times higher than previous official estimates.

Aldana lashed back at the Catholic hierarchy, accusing it of “applauding the counterrevolution and giving it a certain ethical justification.”

But what most worries the leadership, he said, are the “soft parts” of the revolutionary elite, which are “weakening in the face of the hardships we are living, the challenges we face and the dangers we are passing through and who constitute potential recruits for counterrevolutionary activity.”

Sanchez, the human rights activist in Havana, said Aldana had a point.

“The people who want democratic change in Cuba are a majority, and this includes people in the Communist Party,” he said. “The type of repression we are feeling can never contain this unorganized opposition. . . . Unfortunately, the government is closing the door to a nonviolent solution to the crisis.”