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Castro's Imbeds Testify Against Dissidents at Circus Trial*** HAVANA - Two reporters who spent years working alongside Cuba's best-known independent journalist revealed at his trial Friday that they were undercover agents as they testified against him, the dissident's wife said. In another trial, of a dissident economist, a longtime secretary told a court that she also worked undercover and had been informing on her employer.

With such stunning courtroom revelations, Fidel Castro's government pressed ahead Friday the prosecution of 80 dissidents accused of working with U.S. diplomats to undermine Cuba's leadership. The well-known independent journalist Raul Rivero was among those being tried Friday in a second day of court proceedings aimed at crushing a small, but growing, opposition movement.

Rivero was being tried alongside Ricardo Gonzalez, the editor of De Cuba, a new general interest magazine publishing the works of Cuban journalists working outside state-controlled media. Prosecutors were seeking 20 years for Rivero and life for Gonzalez after being charged with working with a foreign power to undermine the government. Gonzalez is one of at least a dozen defendants who could face a life sentence. The trials are expected to end early next week with sentences issued days later. ***

Human rights for physicians in Cuba *** WHILE HUMAN RIGHTS groups in the United States rightly insist that the warring parties in Iraq take care to avoid harming hospitals and other medical facilities, closer to home in Cuba independent clinics and physicians have recently been deliberate targets of attack. The clampdown on dissidents across the island -- which coincided with the ground invasion of Iraq -- started with the dismantling of an independent medical clinic in the town of Pedro Betancourt, 150 kilometers east of Havana. More than 150 officers and paramilitaries searched and ransacked the private home of Miguel Sigler Amaya and his wife, Josefa Lopez Pena, where the clinic was housed, confiscating 90 pounds of medicines: antibiotics, pain killers, and vitamins. Police also seized a metered dose inhaler, an oxygen delivery system, a glucometer, some physiotherapy equipment, parental infusion appliances, and topical applications. The family's own medications were confiscated too. *** The operation was carried out in front of small children and their 71-year-old grandmother, Gloria Amaya, who was later hospitalized with a heart attack. Her two other sons (also dissidents) were detained as well.

While international attention is focused elsewhere, Cuba's leader Fidel Castro has ordered his state security to lock up almost 80 people: independent journalists, human rights activists, free trade union organizers, poets, economists, photographers, teachers, and physicians. Trials with harsh sentences for many may begin this weekend. In Cuba where achievements in health are the pride of the regime, dissent among physicians is particularly embarrassing. Yet some members of the medical community have complaints about the current system. They are concerned with the government's tendency to limit health facilities for Cubans, alleging that resources are shifted towards dollars-only ''health tourism,'' making medicines available only for people with foreign passports who can pay with hard currency. Irrespective of their political sympathies, physicians are worried that the extremely low professional salaries in Cuba are particularly dangerous for medical personnel, who must take extra jobs to make ends meet leading to absenteeism, overwork, or poor work ethics.

Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that an independent medical association started operating in November 2001. It is still awaiting legal registration. Physicians from across the island, some still in state jobs, others already ''separated'' from official medical institutions, joined forces to set up independent clinics and pharmacies where equipment and drugs prescribed by doctors from the state health system and sent from abroad, including from the Cuban Diaspora, are distributed free. The group's national coordinator is Dr. Marcelo Cano Rodriguez.***