BY CAROL ROSENBERG

  One by one, former political prisoners who between them spent hundreds of years in Cuban jails lined up Sunday night to shake the hand of Vaclav Havel -- the Czech playwright-turned-president here on a first-ever visit to show support for Cuban dissidents on both sides of the Florida Straits.

  ''I admire you because you stayed in jail more time than I did,'' Havel, 65, told a group of aging men and women proudly displaying on their chests nameplates with the number of years they spent in Cuban prisons.

  During the dark days of Czechoslovakia's communist rule, Havel's work was banned and he was jailed for his outspoken opposition to Soviet-style rule. Soon, after 12
  years as his nation's democratically elected president, he will be stepping down.

  So, with a badge reporting his 19 years in Fidel Castro's jails, an emotional Luis Zuñiga of the Cuban Liberty Council, told Havel: ``You are an example for humanity and, I hope, for democracy. Thank you for what you have done with your life.''

  The meeting -- a mutual admiration society -- was held in a reception room of Coral Gables' Biltmore Hotel packed with foreign and U.S. news crews. Finally, after prodding by security guards and Czech advisors, journalists gave Havel, 65, the private moment he wanted with the 21 men and women gathered.

  Then he plunged into a huge cocktail party put on by the Cuban Liberty Council and the National Council of Political Prisoners to introduce the man who is seen as an icon of anti-communism by exiles waging a war of words against the Castro regime from their Miami base.

  SEEING THE VICTIMS

  ''He's given special recognition to the victims,'' said Spanish-language radio talk-show hostess Ninoska Pérez Castellón, who helped organize the reception. ``I think it's always important that the victims are recognized.''

  It was, after all, the reason for the Czech president's pilgrimage here:

  Havel said he had come to pay his respects out of a sense of common experience. Before his Velvet Revolution peacefully swept the communists from rule, he spent four years in Czech communist jails.

  STRONG MESSAGE

  Today, he delivers a speech at Florida International University that pointedly addresses both exiles and island Cubans, via a live Radio Martí broadcast.

  His message: How ideological jargon can numb a nation's intellectual and political consciousness.

  Totalitarian language, he says, not only straitjackets and stereotypes but suppresses expression.

  He has named his speech The Power of the Powerless, for his 1978 essay that circulated in the former Czechoslovakia as an intellectual how-to guide on resisting the communist regime. Soon after his arrival Sunday, Havel wavered in an interview on whether to criticize the U.S. embargo of Cuba.

  It is not appropriate, he said, to comment on this nation's internal affairs, especially when Cuba is so close by.

  But he added that, even among Castro opponents, there is a lively debate about whether sanctions help or hurt.

  ''What we have observed from our experience, when goods, investments, foreign visitors, tourists come to a country, then part of the free world comes in with them -- even though the ruling regime may oppose it,'' he said.

  ``But even that may be double-edged, because we have also known cases where an economic brotherhood was created and those who could've spoken up remained silent for the sake of those economic brotherhoods.''

  Ideology aside, Sunday night was a Czech-Cuban lovefest.

  Mario Chanes, who with 30 years in Cuban prisons is the longest-held Cuban political prisoner, praised Havel as sending a potent signal to those still opposing the Castro regime in Cuba: The world has not forgotten them.

  Chanes' attendance reflected the variety of former prisoners the Czechs invited to meet their president. He once fought alongside Castro, and was jailed with him before the revolution, then broke with Castro's communist regime. Others included Caridad Roque, jailed for 16 years, as well as Roberto Perdomo and Roberto Martín Pérez, who both spent 28 years in Cuban prisons.

  ROOTING FOR PAYAA

  In this visit, the Czech president is also putting his personal prestige on the line and campaigning for a Nobel Peace Prize for Oswaldo Payaá Sardiñas, leader of a
  Havana-based dissident movement.

  In the interview, Havel chuckled when asked whether Payaá was the Vaclav Havel of Cuba. ''I would rather stress the analogy of the attitudes and methods used by those who engage in the fight for freedom,'' he said.

  Payaá's Varela Project seeks a plebiscite on the island on democratic reform, in the framework of the communist constitution, to the consternation of some exiles here.

  HIS ACTIVISM

  Havel was an architect of the Charter 77 movement, whose demand for political and intellectual freedoms in communist-run Czechoslovakia united dissidents during the country's years as a Soviet satellite. Havel has spoken warmly of Payaá's personal integrity and at-times lonely struggle, saying it is important for those who suffered under communism to tell those still suffering that they are not alone.

  Jewish-community leaders are also honoring Havel tonight at a $1,000-a-plate black-tie fundraiser to benefit his post-presidency human rights foundation.

  He is being honored for permitting Prague to be a way-station a decade ago for Russian Jews migrating to Israel after the collapse of the Soviet Union.