Cuban officials could not be reached for comment, but they have long denounced U.S. government-funded programs as violations of Cuban sovereignty.
Some of the 75 dissidents imprisoned in 2003 were charged with accepting cash and other support from the U.S. government.
Cuban authorities track the aid closely, sometimes infiltrating the U.S.-funded programs in an effort to monitor, disrupt and control opposition activities, activists on the island say.
The debate over U.S. efforts in Cuba is intensifying in Washington and Havana as officials solicit proposals for up to $29 million in projects envisioned by the President's Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba.
Since the passage in 1996 of the Helms-Burton Act, the vast majority of funding to support political change in Cuba has been managed by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has distributed more than $35 million in funds related to Cuba since then.
Projects vary
The USAID assistance has primarily gone to U.S.-based groups for projects ranging from producing and sending pro-democracy literature to Cuba to providing computers, fax machines and other equipment to Cuba's dissident journalists.
USAID officials say their policy prohibits the agency and its grant recipients from sending cash to individuals or groups on the island.
But the decision to prohibit cash payments to the Cuban opposition does not apply to the NED, which describes itself as a private, nonprofit group but is funded largely by the U.S. Congress.***
As Cuban leader Fidel Castro put it recently, the revolution will no longer allow any blandenguería -- wimpiness -- at home to go unpunished.
More and more, the Cuban government is tightening its political and economic controls -- from ordering tourism workers to spy on clients to canceling foreign companies' checkbooks -- in what analysts believe is a campaign largely designed to prepare the island for Castro's eventual death.
''This is a very well thought-out policy. In the long term, it sets up the state for succession,'' said Hans de Salas del Valle, a researcher at the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies.
''It works like this: They tighten the screws politically, improve the economic situation slightly and, thereby, ensure control'' when Castro passes on, de Salas added. The 78-year-old Castro, who has ruled Cuba for 46 years, has suffered a couple of fainting spells in recent years and a fall in which he shattered a kneecap and broke an arm.
The new restrictions hark back to the Cuba of the 1960s, '70s and '80s, when the central government controlled virtually everything, took a dim view of foreign tourists and investors and outlawed the holding of U.S. dollars.
The end of the Soviet Union's massive subsidies forced Havana to open its economy somewhat in the early 1990s, legalizing the dollar, encouraging foreigners to visit and invest and giving managers of state enterprises more leeway to grow profits.
BENT ON CONTROL
But now Castro is bent on regaining control of a population and government agencies that grew accustomed to a measure of independence -- and on cracking down on the widespread corruption and black-market activities that the economic reforms fueled.
Castro emphasized those points in a recent six-hour speech to economists in which he asserted that the Cuban economy had finally come out of its post-Soviet abyss -- in essence arguing that the 1990s reforms were no longer needed.
The U.S. dollar had been recently ''dishonorably discharged'' from circulation -- shops no longer accept them from Cubans -- and control of the economy was shifting back to the the hands of central government planners where it belongs, Castro said.
Cuba's economic ''motor,'' he added, would be revved up not by open-market reforms but by deals with China and Venezuela -- the former ruled by the Communist Party, the latter by President Hugo Chávez, Castro's top ally and a regional economic powerhouse while oil prices remain high. ...***