By Anthony Boadle, Reuters

 HAVANA - Cuban dissidents yesterday launched a civil society movement to build up alternative
 institutions to the island's one-party communist state and prepare the way for democratic change.

 Grass-roots political groups, human rights activists, 190 independent libraries, and more than 30
 dissident press services joined together under the umbrella of the Assembly to Promote Civil
 Society to prepare for a post-Castro Cuba.

 ''The purpose of this union is the peaceful struggle for the rebirth of civil society, which has been
 suffocated and repressed by the current totalitarian one-party regime,'' the assembly said in a
 statement.

 While other dissidents are pushing for internal political reforms under Cuban President Fidel
 Castro's government, the civil society movement's promoters say those efforts are doomed to
 failure and are looking at the longer term.

 ''With Fidel Castro in power we will never resolve anything. There will be no political transition,''
 said Martha Beatriz Roque, chief spokeswoman for the civil society assembly.

 Fellow dissident and engineer Felix Antonio Bonne said Castro, 76 and in power since the 1959
 revolution, had made it clear he will not permit political changes while he is alive.

 Roque, an opposition economist who spent years in jail for criticizing the Castro government, said
 the social transition away from communism in Cuba began after the collapse of its sponsor, the
 Soviet Union, over a decade ago.

 ''This social transition will lead to a political transition. You can already feel that on the streets,'' she
 said.

 Bonne said the legalization of the American dollar in 1993 had brought social stratification between
 Cubans who had access to dollars and those who did not, contradicting the government's ideology
 of social equality.

 ''Cubans used to obtain refrigerators and other goods on merit. Now there is only one merit: the
 greenback merit,'' he said.

 In May, Christian Democrat Oswaldo Paya presented a petition signed by more than 11,000
 Cubans calling for reforms to allow freedom of expression and assembly, the right to own a private
 business, and freeing of political prisoners.

 Paya last week won the European Parliament's top human rights prize, named after former Soviet
 dissident Andrei Sakharov, for his reform initiative, the first serious internal challenge to the
 communist authorities.