The president of Cuba's national assembly was visibly angry. He had just emerged from a meeting with a U.S. congressman when he came face-to-face with Cuba's best-known dissidents.
The dissidents had been chauffeured to the hotel in U.S. government vans and were on their way in to see the same congressman.To Ricardo Alarcon and other top Cuban officials, it was another example of U.S. diplomats aiding and encouraging the dissidents under their very noses.
The incident, in January, revealed the tightrope U.S. diplomats walk in Havana as they try to maintain contacts with official and unofficial Cubans. The diplomats are there by agreement with the Cuban government, assigned mainly to maintain low-level relations between the two countries and to process applications of Cubans trying to move to the United States.
But the United States makes no secret of its sympathy for Cuban dissidents, and encourages contacts between them and American visitors.
Shortly after the dissidents showed up at Alarcon's meeting with the congressman, Rep. Joseph Moakley, D-Mass., the Cuban government grew more vocal in charging that the Concilio Cubano, the dissidents' coalition, had basically been invented by the United States. Its goal: to undermine Fidel Castro.
Concilio members and American officials deny the "Made in U.S.A." label, saying Cuban dissidents formed the group themselves.
U.S. officials here acknowledge that they transport dissidents to events such as U.S. government-sponsored cocktail parties, and that they offer visiting journalists lists of their addresses and telephone numbers.
They also acknowledge that they provide dissidents with reading matter - weeks-old copies of the Spanish language El Nuevo Herald from Miami and books such as "What is Democracy?" published by the U.S. Information Agency. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow offered similar publications to Soviet dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s, and sometimes invited them to embassy functions.
U.S. officials deny they are giving the Cuban dissidents any money.
"The assertion that the U.S. Interests Section or U.S. government is paying the bills of dissidents or groups supporting democracy or human rights inside Cuba is absurd," the U.S. State Department said recently.
Concilio members also deny receiving money from the U.S. government, though many are in frequent contact with U.S.-funded Radio Marti and exile groups, such as the right-wing Cuban American National Foundation.
Cuban Foreign Minister Roberto Robaina said recently that American officials here "are walking around freely and putting their noses in where they don't belong."