By REUTERS

           HAVANA -- Communications between Cuba and the United States
           took another step forward Saturday with the arrival of the first
          direct charter flight from New York to Havana in almost four decades.

          The four-hour flight, a Grupo Taca Airbus A-320 chartered by Marazul
          Tours of Weehawken, N.J., carried 138 passengers from Kennedy
          International Airport to José Martí International Airport in Havana,
          landing at about 1:30 a.m. Havana time.

          Marazul's owner, Francisco Aruca, told reporters that the flight, which
          will now be weekly, symbolized "a slow path toward flexibility" in
          Cuban-American relations.

          Washington has kept an economic embargo on Havana since soon after
          Fidel Castro's revolution in 1959.

          The start of New York-Havana flights, together with other routes like
          Miami-Havana that resumed last year, comes as part of modifications to
          the sanctions announced by President Clinton in early 1998.

          The flight brought an emotional reunion for some separated Cuban
          families.

          "The fatherland is the fatherland, and I feel happy to return," a
          Cuban-American from New Jersey, Maria Prieto, said as she tearfully
          hugged brothers and cousins she had only known through photographs. It
          was her first visit in 28 years.

          The passengers included Cuban relatives, academics, journalists and
          participants in the Havana film festival -- all of whom fall into special
          categories of people allowed to use the direct flights under strict United
          States regulations.

          In another development Saturday, about 30 opponents of President
          Castro's government staged a peaceful and highly unusual protest march
          through a Havana suburb to demand freedom for political prisoners.

          The demonstrators, all members of Cuba's small dissident groups,
          gathered after morning Mass on the steps of a Roman Catholic church in
          Parraga before marching about six blocks to another church.

          Unlike other recent opposition gatherings, there was no chanting of
          slogans or waving of banners. Instead, the marchers carried out the
          protest mainly in silence, apart from quietly intoning a religious hymn
          twice.

          "This man has maintained a dictatorship here for 40 years," one
          demonstrator, Iovany Aguilar Canejo of the Fraternal Brothers for
          Dignity Movement, said of Castro. "He has to go. It's enough for one
          man to go, no one else."

          Although technically illegal under Cuba's penal code, which outlaws
          opposition groups and unauthorized public gatherings, government
          officials monitoring the event did not intervene.

          Nor was there any confrontation between the dissidents and pro-Castro
          sympathizers, as occurred the last time dissidents sought to organize a
          march, on Nov. 10 in Dolores Park in Havana.

          The dissidents, however, said that at least a dozen opposition members
          intending to take part in today's march had been temporarily detained or
          ordered to stay in their homes by Cuba's state security. Officials could
          not confirm that.

          The dissidents said the specific reasons for the march were to call for the
          freedom of political prisoners in Cuba and denounce human rights abuses
          by the Castro government. Opposition groups say there are around 400
          political prisoners.

          Havana denies the existence of political prisoners, saying all inmates are
          in jail for legitimate reasons, including so-called counter-revolutionary
          crimes stipulated in the penal code.

          Cuba routinely denounces all dissidents as mercenaries and traitors
          serving both the American government and anti-Castro Cuban exile
          groups in Florida.