Márquez, 25, and I shared a breakfast table that morning. Her husband, Osvaldo Alfonso Valdés, head of the newly formed Liberal Democratic Party, sat at a nearby table conversing with other editors. We shared photographs of our children, and I came away impressed with their commitment and, frankly, willingness to risk family life to pursue political pluralism and a free press.

The visiting editors promised closer ties and a commitment to lend moral, technical and mentoring support to Márquez and her colleagues as their nascent efforts take root.

Over the ensuing months, Márquez and I exchanged e-mails on Thursdays, the one day she could enter the U.S. Interests Section, our country's unofficial diplomatic compound, and enjoy Internet access for a few minutes. Over those months, we agreed to undertake an unprecedented experiment: Márquez would write a monthly column for the San Antonio Express-News about life in Cuba. Uncensored, no restrictions.

Her first and only column appeared with little fanfare in our Sunday Insight section March 9. In the piece, she openly challenged Cuba's oft-touted education system and said state officials use it to indoctrinate very young children with revolutionary propaganda. Parents who resist those efforts see their children lose educational opportunities.

Today Márquez is under virtual house arrest and constant surveillance. Her husband remains in jail. As world attention turned to the U.S. attack on Iraq, Cuban security agents struck in a series of coordinated raids.

By week's end, more than 70 of the country's leading dissidents and independent journalists were subjected without warning to searches and seizures, harassment, arrest and detention. Security agents emptied homes of books, files, computers and archives. The government threatened to prosecute and imprison the individuals for crimes against the state.

The Castro regime, ironically, has been seeking new openings between Cuba and the United States in the last year even as the Bush administration seeks to tighten the 40-year-old embargo. Those efforts reached their peak last year when former President Jimmy Carter, since honored with the Nobel Peace Prize, was allowed to address the Cuban people on Cuban television. Carter was openly critical of Castro's dictatorship and the failure of U.S. policy.

James Cason, the head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana appointed after Bush's election, has been an unrelenting and vocal critic of Castro, setting aside the traditions of quiet diplomacy to openly advocate regime change.

Castro and other senior Cuban officials have taken the bait and answered with a wave of repression. Unable to strike directly at their adversaries, they have cracked down with Stalinist tactics against the very Cubans who represent Castro's best chance to demonstrate his country is slowly evolving.

The dissidents and independent journalists have links to the U.S. Interests Section, links that might have become too pronounced as the ill-equipped and underfunded journalists reach out to the helping hand the American diplomats have offered.

But these Cubans are not U.S. agents. The government would be wise to quietly reverse its actions of the past week and allow the journalists to resume their peaceful activities.

For the last year I have served as the chairman of ASNE's international committee and, in that role, helped organize the Cuba trip. Last week I co-authored a letter of protest from ASNE to the Castro government. You can read it online at asne.org. We noted in that letter that the U.S. media does not endorse or represent the U.S. government or its Cuban policy. The same goes for independent Cuban journalists.

You can find other useful coverage, in Spanish, at cubanet.org, including a first-person account by Márquez of the 10-hour search of her home by 12 state agents.