Updated 3:43 PM ET September 29, 1999 By Andrew Cawthorne

HAVANA (Reuters) - In a rare public move, an umbrella opposition movement in Cuba Wednesday unveiled its blueprint for a peaceful transition to Western-style democracy from President Fidel Castro's current one-party socialist system.

The Moderate Opposition's Round-Table for Reflection urged immediate dialogue between the government, internal opposition, and the foreign-exile community to plan political and economic opening in communist-run Cuba.

"Today it is urgently necessary to have a transition toward democracy, but a transition that is agreed upon and achieved through dialogue and negotiation," one of the group's leaders, Fernando Sanchez Lopez, told a news conference.

Sanchez heads the Democratic Solidarity Party, one of five small, illegal opposition groups that formed the Round-Table.

At the news conference -- in itself a bold act for Cuban dissidents -- the group presented a 56-page Common Platform outlining their vision for change on the Caribbean island that Castro has ruled since his 1959 revolution.

Unlike more radical dissidents seeking a total break with the Castro government, or promoting nonviolent civil disobedience, the Round-Table's document used moderate terms to urge talks between all sectors of Cuban society.

Many of its basic demands, however, were similar to other dissident groups -- release of political prisoners, political plurality with multi-party elections, economic liberalization, independence for the media and civic organizations, and an end to politically motivated discrimination at work.

"The need for the transition is urgent in the national reality, given the wearing-out of the current project (Castro's government) with its economic, political, social and moral crisis, and its total lack of future perspective," the document said in a chapter on "Aims of the Transition."

The other four groups in the Round-Table -- all claiming nationwide support -- were the Cuban Democratic Project, the Cuban Workers' Unitary Council, the Socialist Democratic Cuban Current, and the Cuban Liberal Democratic Party.

Castro, 73, has specifically rejected the notion of a "transition to capitalism" in Cuba, saying the island's "revolutionaries" were set to uphold their socialist system into the future and beyond his death.

Castro's system outlaws opposition political parties in Cuba, and deems overt, anti-government activity a "counter- revolutionary" crime punishable under the penal code.

Despite that, scores of tiny, illegal dissident groups do exist in Cuba. But they are often divided among themselves, have no access to state media, cannot legally hold public meetings and do not threaten the ruling Communist Party's dominance.

Havana rejects the word "dissident," saying supposed opposition activists have no popular support, and are generally traitors and mercenaries in the service of the U.S. government or of anti-Castro, Cuban exile groups in Florida. The Cuban government says its political structure is more genuinely democratic than in the West, and denies it represses freedom of expression or holds prisoners of conscience.

Leaders of the Round-Table group said Wednesday their ideas were drawn up in consultation with a similar organization of moderate Cuban exile groups in the United States.

Their news conference at a Havana house was attended by foreign correspondents and local, self-styled "independent" journalists working unauthorized, outside state media.

Liberal Democratic Party president Osvaldo Alfonso Valdes said the fact they had been able to stage a news conference at all showed Cuba was now in a "post-totalitarian" stage where "the government does not like us, but we are here."

The group delivered a copy of their Common Platform to Cuba's ruling Council of State, headed by Castro, last week.