c. 1998 Religion News Service

SAN MIGUEL del PADRON, Cuba _ Maritza Lugo is under the surveillance of government agents. Her husband, Rafael Ibarro Roque, is serving a 20-year sentence on what she says is a trumped-up charge.

But in the wake of Pope John Paul II’s history-making five-day tour of Cuba, during which he called for greater religious and civil liberties, Lugo is giddy with optimism as she sits with fellow dissidents in her small home on the outskirts of Havana.

“It’s been so hard, but nothing has influenced me to give up _ I feel stimulated,” said Lugo, 34, a member of the 30th of November group, which calls itself an opposition party in a country where only the Communist Party is legal. “I am optimistic because I have to be. God has given me that optimism.”

Buoyed by word the Vatican asked for the release of political prisoners, Lugo and several other Havana-area dissidents said they believed there is a good chance Fidel Castro’s regime will issue a blanket amnesty for an undisclosed number of political prisoners. Lugo and her colleagues are hoping her husband, who is being held in a prison in Camaguey, will be among those freed.

So far, the government has not issued an official declaration. National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon, when asked early this week on CNN if the government would release political prisoners, said, “We will consider it seriously.”

The Rev. Fernando de la Vega, a church spokesman, said in a phone interview that a list of 200 prisoners was presented to the government. De la Vega said church officials feel confident at least a few will be released.

“I think there will be a positive response from the government,” said Elizardo Sanchez, 53, one of Cuba’s foremost dissidents and head of the Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation.

Sanchez, who served eight years as a prisoner of conscience, said about 500 prisoners are being held because of their political ideas or because they committed politically motivated acts, some of them violent.

Two years ago, Cuba’s prisons held more than 1,000 of these prisoners, he said. But the government has released hundreds _ and will continue to release others _ to improve Havana’s world image, he said, knowing it can continue to control dissidents even when they’re free.

After a crackdown in early 1996 when Cuban fighter jets downed two U.S. private planes off Cuba’s coast, the government has become less repressive, said dissidents and journalists who work outside the state-run news media. There are fewer jailings, fewer interrogations. Many prisoners have been released, they report.

But the intimidation continues: They are often watched by agents. Dissidents said their phones are tapped and their mail is read.

“The repression has gone down,” said Jorge Olivera Castillo, 36, editor of Havana Press, an independent news organization that operates illegally in Cuba. “What continues is the surveillance, the visits to people’s homes. … The repression has gone down but maybe takes a different form.”

Lugo and other members of the 30th of November group said they continue to feel the pressure. The group, run largely out of Lugo’s home, sends petitions to government officials, complains about the treatment of political prisoners and collects reports on human rights abuses that are forwarded to U.S. officials and anti-Castro groups in the United States.

As she spoke to a reporter in her home, Lugo noted several men lurking outside.

“They’re often out there, or they follow me around,” Lugo said. “They wear street clothes, but they work for the government.”

Lugo said she is already under government restraints. In August, she said, the government put her under a form of house arrest, meaning she cannot leave greater Havana without state permission. This was because she tape-recorded an interview with a political prisoner whose case she had taken up, she said.

Four years ago, she said, a government tribunal handed her husband a 20-year sentence after finding him guilty of setting off a bomb. She insists he is innocent and said he was instead imprisoned for his work leading the 30th of November, named for the date on which a revolutionary martyr died. As many as 30 other members in the group, she said, are also in prison.

Still, members said they feel emboldened about operating, in large part because of Pope John Paul’s call for individual rights to be respected.

“When he comes here and tells us all these things, when he says we need to unite and to have liberty, all this gives us a great hope that these things will happen,” said Mario Lazaro Torres, 35, one of the members.

DEA END FORERO