Cuba Crisis Grows as Castro Tries to Crack Down on Growing Dissent : Caribbean: Some analysts fear tension could erupt in violence. Secret opposition cells reported throughout country.

Facing intensified popular discontent bordering on resistance, and caught between conflicting demands by hard-liners and reformers, Fidel Castro is falling deeper into a crisis likely to leave Cuba either more repressive than ever or in the agony of civil violence, foreign experts and Cuban sources say.

The country appears placid at the moment, with superficial signs of a slightly improved life style resulting from more electricity and gasoline and a stronger peso. But interviews with diplomats, military experts and dozens of Cuban sources in Havana and the countryside indicate a society barely under control.

“One can never predict Cuba,” said a European diplomat from a country generally friendly to Castro, “but I think one can say with assurance that there will be dramatic changes here within two years. . . . If I have to predict, I would say that Castro will be able to keep his system only by increasing repression. If he doesn’t crack down I don’t see how he can keep control.”

Almost all the experts and observers say the problem, as it has been since Cuba entered crisis with the collapse of its patron Soviet Union in 1989, will be economic.

Castro continues to permit some reformist tinkering, including a minor expansion of Cuba’s tiny self-employed sector and creation of semi-private food and small goods markets. But almost every foreign economist here agrees it is a half-hearted patch that won’t work.

“Industrial capacity is about 20%,” said an economist with an international organization. “Real productivity doesn’t really exist. Even tourism is so inefficiently run that its profits are about 70% short of what they ought to be.”

Worse, others said, is the predicted failure of the next sugar crop, “which could drop to close to 3 million (metric tons), and that would be a crushing, even disastrous thing,” a European diplomat said.

In its best days, the sugar harvest was 8 million metric tons, even 10 million metric tons. But a combination of poor planning and horrid weather has left Cuba with less than half that. The last crop dropped to 4.3 million metric tons, severely restricting the country’s ability to obtain foreign currency.

“If all this continues and Castro continues blocking meaningful economic reform, the public won’t stand by, and neither will Castro,” the European diplomat said. “If there is another round of riots like last summer, you will see a far tougher reaction.”

To many dissidents, the added repression is already under way. Anti-Castro human rights groups report heavy harassment, including arbitrary arrests, constant surveillance and economic punishment.

“People who join us or attend our meetings are losing their jobs,” said a woman who leads a semi-clandestine dissident group. “When I tried to attend a meeting I was invited to by the Canadian Embassy, I was detained and kept in jail for a day. Even my friends and a nephew who are dissidents are being punished just because they know me or are related.”

Human rights officers in several embassies support the assessment of increased repression, with one diplomat saying at least 44 dissidents were arrested in October, with some held for up to three weeks without charge or hearings.

Worse, according to another diplomat, is the economic punishment. “It is difficult to live here in the best of times,” he said. “Now, if you are suspected of opposition, you will lose what little support you had, your job, your house. If you turn to family or friends, then they’ll be punished.

“It’s a quiet repression,” the diplomat said, “but it’s harsh and getting more so.”

A diplomat from another country with relatively good relations here agreed that Castro is cracking down hard but said an even heavier government hand isn’t likely to stop the crisis and may even backfire. If Castro “doesn’t tighten the screws and doesn’t really reform (the economy), what we saw last summer will be a frolic compared to the popular anger that is bound to occur,” the diplomat said.

He was referring to sometimes violent protests and demonstrations that began in April, were repeated throughout the summer and climaxed with more than 30,000 Cubans setting out for the United States in every imaginable sea-going conveyance.

Castro let them go then, even encouraging the departures in an effort to embarrass the United States and force negotiations on ending a three-decade economic embargo. Most experts now expect him to crack down on any renewed public dissent.

“But,” said the same diplomat, “if he really moves toward totalitarian control, he’s likely to set off an earthquake of discontent that could end in violent opposition.”

A former Communist Party leader in Santiago, the country’s second largest city and traditionally a focus of Castro support, observed: “I never thought I would see it and I never thought I wanted to see it, but Fidel is losing Cuba.”

This man, recently removed as a local party first secretary by the army, asked not to be named. But he said the discontent in his region is barely kept below the surface and is leading to the creation of dissident groups, including secret opposition cells.

A reporter who spent two days with members of such groups was taken to meetings in both cities and in the countryside.

One of the meetings occurred in a mountain village between Camaguey and Santiago. No weapons were evident and the six dissidents said they had no plans for an armed revolt, at least not in the near future.

“What we want right now is simply to create organizations,” said the former Communist.

“We are following Fidel’s pattern,” he said, explaining that the dissidents were building a popular following through creation of small, semi-secret cells. “As the people become more and more discontented, they know we will be here with a framework of opposition.”

He would not say how many people belonged to his group or how many cells existed. “We don’t even have a name right now,” he said. “We’re just people who think the revolution has been betrayed and Castro has failed.”

The leader, a man in his early 40s who did all the talking, nearly yelled when he denied being linked to older, Havana-based dissident groups, particularly those in contact with American diplomats.

“Look, those people are either fronts for the Americans or they have been infiltrated by Castro’s security,” he said. “Understand, we are not against the revolution and we don’t want American capitalism. But we are tired of no food, no work and we will not accept any more government terror.”

It is almost impossible to judge the strength of the groups, if they are true organizations or whether they present any threat to Castro.

But interviews with private Cuban citizens, as well as the assessments of several diplomats and experts, point to a serious increase in public frustration and anger.

In Cojimar, a beachside neighborhood near Havana of shabby, fallen-down workers’ houses and the site of several earlier violent protests, idle men and boys sit on door steps, grumbling.

“There is nothing here,” said Jacobo Alonso, an out-of-work electrician who is living on the money he charged to help build rafts for people who set out for the United States from Cojimar.

With several of his friends nodding in agreement and mumbling about getting even, Alonso said “there will be a next time when the police won’t be able to stop us. We used to believe Fidel that the (American) blockade was the problem and that he would repair things and that socialism would cure all, but that’s a lie.”

A greater sign of deepening public disillusion, according to some experts, has been the deterioration of the neighborhood defense committees established early on by Castro. These groups served multiple functions, ranging from outright spying on the neighborhood to dispensing ration books to ensuring streets were swept and yards were kept free of pigs.

“They’ve all but collapsed,” said a diplomat who lives next door to the chairman of his neighborhood committee. “There are even pigs in her yard. Nobody shows up to sweep the streets, and people are just staying away.”

More important in the deflating of the defense groups than dirty streets is their loss of authority and importance in the daily struggle for a decent life. “The committees are the grass roots of Castroism,” said a foreign businessman who has lived in Havana for two years. “You couldn’t get a (food) ration or keep a job if the committee thought you were unreliable.

“On the other hand, if you belonged and were active, you got privileges,” he recalled. “That people are no longer afraid or that they find the committees ineffective in making life easier means the failure of one of Castro’s major elements of control.”

A representative of a government that once backed Castro said he thinks that all of these developments are combining for disaster: “Castro may survive for another year or two or even three, but I don’t see how he can do it without either real reform or heavy pressure on the people. . . . In the past when he went after his opponents, the masses supported him. But now he will have lost that support. I think you are looking at disaster.”