Freed dissident ponders his future

HAVANA - After three intense days of visits, telephone calls and scores of media interviews that followed his prison release, all writer Raśl Rivero wants to do now is wander through the noisy, cobble-stoned streets of his beloved Havana Vieja.

''I just want to walk,'' Rivero told The Associated Press on Friday night in his walk-up apartment, winding up what he said he hoped would be the last of innumerable interviews after his surprise release Wednesday.

GREAT NOSTALGIA

During his 20 months behind bars, Rivero said he longed for the familiar streets with their music and chatter just as he missed them in the 1980s while he was a Moscow correspondent for the news agency Prensa Latina.

''I've never wanted to leave,'' the 59-year-old dissident writer and poet said in his book-lined living room while consuming cigarettes and thick Cuban coffee served by his wife of 15 years, Blanca Reyes.

Now, freed less than two years into what was a 20-year sentence, Rivero is pondering his options. The mayor of the Spanish city of Granada has invited him to visit for a year. His daughter Cristina wants him to meet his 6-month-old granddaughter Maya in the United States. There is the book he's writing about his prison experiences. And a poetry book, and maybe a novel detailing the economic hardships of 1990s Cuba.

''What I really need is a vacation,'' he said. ``I haven't been able to travel outside Cuba almost 15 years.''

Rivero is the best known of six dissidents Cuba's government released from prison last week, all among a group of 75 independent journalists, opposition politicians and other activists rounded up in March 2003.

Charged with working with the U.S. government to undermine Fidel Castro's communist system, the dissidents received terms ranging from six to 28 years. The activists and U.S. officials denied the charges.

Rivero said he was surprised along with everyone else last week when he walked free with five other ailing dissidents. Rivero has early emphysema and a cyst on his kidney, but the others' health problems were generally more serious.

`DIPLOMATIC GESTURE'

Another seven of the 75 were released for medical reasons in recent months, bringing to 13 the total of those freed from the original group. Another 62 remain imprisoned.

''Starting this all over again without knowing what will happen seems crazy,'' Rivero said of his journalism work here. ``I'm not really asking a lot, just to work normally.''