Alfredo Guevara, a longtime Communist Party member, has resigned as president of Cuba's national film institute, dissident sources in Havana said Wednesday.

A person in Guevara's office denied that he had resigned. But the dissident sources said his successor had already been named -- actor Sergio Corrieri, president of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, which functions as a public relations agency for Cuba overseas.

Guevara's resignation could be a result of a recent wave of official criticism against intellectuals who seek greater freedom for the arts, the sources said.

The report of Guevara's resignation was denied Wednesday at the film institute headquarters in Havana by Marla Sanchez, who identified herself to a Herald reporter as Guevara's secretary.

``There's no truth in that,'' she said in a telephone interview. ``Everything is in place, as usual.''

Talk of Guevara's likely resignation spread through Havana last week after President Fidel Castro criticized filmmakers, writers and artists during his Feb. 24 address to the National Assembly.

Castro was particularly critical of Guantanamera, a movie produced under the institute's sponsorship, which won second prize at the 1995 Latin American Film Festival in Havana. The film satirizes the difficulties of a Cuban family trying to bury a relative.

``To poke morbid fun at tragedies . . . is not a patriotic act,'' Castro told the assembly. The movie, ``made in Cuba with [government] resources . . . reveals an absence of human sensitivity and expresses not even the slightest feeling of solidarity'' toward ordinary Cubans, he added.

On Friday, Guevara read a statement to the international press in which he accepted Castro's criticism ``with my soul in tatters'' and hinted that others may have turned Castro against the film.

``Some of us are certain that the information provided to the commander in chief did not flow in the most adequate manner,'' he said. Still, he added, to end the controversy ``I now opt for silence.''

The official newspaper Granma reported this week that Castro met privately on Monday with a large number of intellectuals for ``an in-depth debate about various aspects of [Cuba's] political culture, mostly conceptual.''

This report was supplemented with Herald wire services.