Vanessa Bauza

HAVANA · Laura Pollan remembers the days when rocks were thrown at Havana's churches and priests were expelled. After Cuba's 1959 revolution the government closed her Catholic school and she, like many practicing Catholics, began a tenuous relationship with the church, rarely speaking of her faith in public.

As the church gradually regained some ground, so too Pollan, 55, found her place back in its pews.

Today, she is one of a group of wives of Cuba's political prisoners who attend church every Sunday to pray for their husbands' release.

Like others, she was heartened last week by a document issued by Cuba's 13 bishops calling for clemency for the 75 dissidents jailed in the April crackdown.

"For the first time I feel the church has made a strong impact," Pollan said. "At other times it has been very lukewarm. Now it talks about the dissidents. Whether or not [the bishops] think like them, they support them."

The 14-page document, titled "The Social Presence of the Church," urges national reconciliation and more religious and political freedom while criticizing the
government's "return to language and methods used during the early years of the revolution."

More than 51/2 years after Pope John Paul II's historic visit and more than a decade after Cuba went from being an atheist to a secular state, the Catholic Church --
the island's most powerful nongovernmental entity -- continues to carve out its role in society. The bishops' document, some said, is one more effort to do just that.

"The church's social role has been undefined, and in being undefined everyone has tried to pressure it in the direction they want," said opposition organizer Manuel
Cuesta Morua. "Some say it should act more politically, others say it should be limited to a pastoral role. The church has oscillated between these extremes."

It is a delicate balance in a country where the Catholic Church was once seen as a counterrevolutionary organization defending the interests of the elite.

"How far can the church push the government without being viewed as the enemy?" asked Dan Erikson, head of the Cuba program at the Inter-American Dialogue, a
Washington-based think tank. "It's a very tight spot."

In their document Cuba's bishops insisted they are aligned neither with the government nor the opposition, but said they cannot remain neutral when human rights are
not respected.

Some said they struck the right balance.

Miami's auxiliary bishop, Agustin Roman, who was expelled from Cuba in 1961 as a young priest, called the document "prophetic."

"The position of the church in every totalitarian system is difficult, but you see the progress since 1980," said Roman, who has never returned to Cuba. "I think the
church has acted the way it has to act: in defense of man. Its role is not political."

Last week's document was viewed as an extension of a wide-ranging 1993 pastoral letter titled "Love Hopes for All Things." It became an unprecedented, candid
criticism of the Communist Party's monopoly on power and the "excluding and omnipresent official ideology."

At the time, Pope John Paul II endorsed the pastoral letter and joined its call for a national dialogue. However, Cuba's state-run media issued scathing editorials calling
the pastoral letter a "stab in the back" and claiming the bishops were heading a "conspiracy" against the Cuban people.

The government has not yet responded to last week's church statement.