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Castro's Useful Idiot***One often hears news on short-wave radio not to be found elsewhere. Such is the case of Fr. Geoffrey Dennis Bottoms, a Roman Catholic priest from Lancaster, England. On June 20, Fidel Castro's Radio Havana Cuba (6000 kHz) reported that the British priest was awarded Cuba's highest honor. Fr. Bottoms received the Friendship Medal from Cuban Parliament President Ricardo Alarcón. The 58-year-old priest, a zealous member of the National Executive Committee of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign in Great Britain, said that receiving the Friendship Medal was the highest honor of his life. And why? Says he: "…because working for Cuba is one of the noblest causes that one can imagine."

Castro's Cuba, one of the noblest causes?***

Amid fear, dissidents' kin in Cuba pray*** Dressed in white clothes with black trim or a black scarf, as many as two dozen women of all ages walk softly into the modern, vaulted church on any given Sunday. They neither carry posters nor chant slogans. Waving fans to disperse the suffocating summer heat, they simply pray. For many months, the women then marched silently along Fifth Avenue, an elegant street lined with foreign embassies, to protest their relatives' imprisonment.

Many of the dissidents are serving terms of up to 28 years. The women stopped the Fifth Avenue marches in May after state authorities threatened to throw them all in prison, they said. That capitulation reduced, but didn't stop, the alleged threats. ''The authorities came seven or eight times to visit me and told me to stop attending the church or they'd make me disappear,'' said Dolia Leal, 58. Her husband, Nelson Aguiar Ramirez, who heads the illegal Cuban Orthodox Party, was imprisoned in March.

In addition, Leal said, when she tried to visit her husband last month to give him medicine and vitamins, prison officials ''told me they wouldn't give them to him as long as I went to the Church of St. Rita.'' Yolanda Huerga -- whose husband, writer and journalist Manuel Vazquez, also was arrested in March -- said security agents told her if she didn't stop attending the Mass they'd take away her 9-year-old son, Gabriel, who is recovering from spinal surgery, and make him a ward of the state. ''They also visited Gabriel's school to ask if he was doing anything bad'' and stood nearby during her son's surgery in July, ''just so we'd always know they're watching us,'' Huerga said.

Asked about the alleged threats, Luis Fernandez, a Cuban foreign ministry liaison to US media, said only that ''no one here is personally persecuted for their ideas.'' ''When their relatives are taken away, sometimes people react emotionally,'' he continued. Fearing reprisals, a few dissidents' relatives have stopped attending Mass as well as the marches. But most still go to church.***