BY TIM JOHNSON

  WASHINGTON - Believing a distracted world might not notice, the Fidel Castro regime ''sought to decapitate'' its growing opposition by giving some 75
  dissidents lengthy prison terms, Bush administration officials told a House panel Wednesday.

  ''The Cuban government hoped that world attention would be distracted by the war in Iraq,'' J. Curtis Struble, the acting assistant secretary of state for the
  Western Hemisphere, told a House International Relations subcommittee.

  In the first congressional hearings since the arrests, officials labeled the anti-dissident enforcement ''brutal'' and ''an outrage,'' and said the administration
  is considering ''a whole raft of options'' in retaliation.

  RIGHTS MONITORS

  Human-rights monitors joined in the criticism, telling the panel that the Castro regime denied defendants access to lawyers before their ''sham'' trials.

  The dissidents were given prison terms from six to 28 years, with an average sentence of 19 years.

  ''The Cuban courts have not imposed such draconian sentences on such large numbers of people in more than two decades,'' said José Miguel Vivanco,
  executive director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch.

  In a sign of the dismay at the crackdown, legislators interrupted an Easter recess to call the hearing. As Cuban diplomats watched silently from their seats,
  Rep. Christopher H. Smith, R-N.J., chair of the Western Hemisphere subcommittee, decried ``Castro's unbridled cruelty, thirst for blood and extreme
  paranoia.''

  Smith said those arrested are among ``Cuba's bravest and brightest.''

  The arrests began March 18 when security agents seized about 100 people, searching their homes and confiscating books, typewriters and personal
  papers, State Department officials said.

  Those arrested included some of Cuba's most well-respected dissidents, journalists and independent activists. Some were later released.

  ''The government of Cuba has sought to decapitate the democratic opposition and the strongest voices of independent expression on the island,'' said
  Lorne W. Craner, assistant secretary of state for democracy and human rights.

  Cuba's judiciary lodged ''spurious charges of subversion and treason'' against the dissidents and convicted them ''in secretive and summary tribunals,''
  Craner said.

  Twenty of those convicted were supporters of the Varela Project, a nonviolent opposition movement that is pushing for a national referendum on political
  and economic reforms, he said.

  ''The real reason that the Cuban security apparatus acted now is because the homegrown opposition is losing its fear of the regime,'' Struble said.

  `BIG LIE'

  Smith said Cuba was ''trying to peddle the big lie'' that U.S. diplomats in Havana provoked the reaction by handing out shortwave radios, books and other
  material to Cubans in recent months, giving them access to outside information.

  ''We absolutely reject this absurd and ridiculous assertion,'' Smith said.

  Craner said the repression amounted to ''an admission of failure by the regime'' to combat a civic movement opposed to Castro's 44-year one-party rule.

  Last Friday, in what Vivanco called ''a further display of contempt for the rule of law,'' the Cuban government executed three armed men who had hijacked
  a passenger ferry in Havana Bay on April 2. No one was hurt in the incident.