The Clinton administration's campaign to promote people-to-people contacts with Cuba, including the Baltimore Orioles' controversial game in Havana this weekend, appears to be rattling President Fidel Castro's defensive strategies.

``Relations with the United States are at one of the most complex and sophisticated points in years, one Cuban government official said. ``Things are no longer black and white. Now we have more shadows.

Those shadows were cast by a series of Clinton administration actions that include the decision to allow the Orioles to play an exhibition game in Havana on Sunday.

The aim of the policy measures is to isolate Castro and push him to halt human rights abuses and embrace economic reforms even as individuals on both sides of the Florida Straits reach out to each other.

Critics on both sides

Two batches of such measures announced Jan. 5 and in March 1998 were flayed by critics of the U.S. embargo as too feeble and by conservatives as part of a veiled Clinton plot to slowly lift all U.S. sanctions on Cuba.

The Orioles game against a Cuban team, the first Major League Baseball visit to Havana since 1959, turned especially thorny after a Cuban court convicted the island's four top opposition leaders of sedition last week.

``This is no time to play ball with Fidel Castro, a Houston Chronicle editorial said. The three Cuban Americans in the U.S. Congress and one dissident on the island, among others, demanded that the game be canceled.

But Washington has hung tough, with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright managing so far to forestall attacks from key players such as Senate Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Jesse Helms, R-N.C.

Trial cited as example

The trial of the four dissidents was ``exactly why we must continue people-to-people contacts, because the regime cannot stand up to the increasing flow of information from the outside world, one State Department official said.

The Orioles game ``conveys the message that the American people bear the Cuban people no ill will, the official added. ``We want Cuban people to be exposed to democratic values. Sports contacts . . . will do that.

That argument leaves some critics unconvinced. ``The game is not political? You mean Fidel Castro will not be at the stadium? said Frank Calzon, head of the Washington-based Center for a Free Cuba.

The 200 people on the Orioles' plane to Cuba, and the hundreds of journalists who will cover the game, Calzon added, ``will make this a media circus at a time when Cuba is violating every human right known to man.

Others say the only shortcomings of the Jan. 5 and March 1998 measures is that they do not go far enough in permitting contacts between the United States and Cuba.

``If the goal is to foster a more open society in Cuba, it doesn't make sense to have a policy that closes off commerce and travel, said Phil Peters, a senior fellow at the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, a Virginia think tank.

Cuba's perspective

But while the argument over the Clinton measures rages in the United States, Cuban officials have been complaining that those measures are indeed proving disturbing to the island's communist regime.

National Assembly chief Ricardo Alarcon complained last week that while some Americans might view the Clinton measures as a ``flexibilization of the U.S. embargo, Cuba regarded them as an ``intensification of the 40-year-old confrontation across the Florida Straits.

Alarcon told the Communist Party's Granma newspaper that U.S. policy toward Cuba was in fact still dominated by the Helms-Burton legislation adopted in 1996 and ``only tightened again and again in the nearly three years since.

The Jan. 5 measures, he added, were especially ``aggressive because they allow Cuban Americans and U.S. citizens to send financial aid to dissidents whom the government considers to be ``counterrevolutionaries.''

One Cuban official went even further in a recent series of conversations with foreign journalists, arguing that the Clinton strategy of promoting ``people-to-people contacts was throwing Havana off balance.

Concern about image

``When you come at me with a saber in your hand, I have to defend myself any way I can. But when you put away that saber and try to embrace me, you put me in a difficult situation, said the official, who asked for anonymity because he was speaking more frankly than his government might wish.

``I know that what you have in mind is this sort of `deadly embrace,' but imagine what the world would think if I pushed you away, the official added. ``We know the U.S. aims, but the world would see us as paranoid.

Castro's concern over this new U.S. approach may be part of the explanation for his drive to have the Cuban legislature adopt a harsh new law against dissent in January, the official speculated.

Cuba must now decide how it will handle these seemingly softened but in fact more threatening Clinton initiatives, one foreigner living in Havana said later: reject the contacts altogether, or take some risks.

``Miami is worried because of the propaganda value the Orioles game here might have, he said. ``Imagine the worry here about defections when the Cuban team goes to Baltimore for a game in May.