Trying to promote democracy in Cuba, the Clinton administration has committed $2.1 million this year to 10 programs that help dissidents and nongovernmental organizations and send books, videos and medicine to the island.

Four of the programs are run by Cuban exile groups that received nearly $1.2 million to support political opposition factions, human rights activists and independent journalists inside Cuba.

``We're committed to a peaceful transition, so we have to do as much as possible now to make sure the transition takes place peacefully, said Rafael Sanchez-Aballi, head of the Miami-based Institute for Democracy in Cuba.

The 10 programs approved since Feb. 3 brought to $2.75 million the total contracted so far by the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) for a democracy-building campaign in Cuba mandated by the 1996 Helms-Burton Act.

AID has requested an additional $3 million in congressional allocations for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 and has already received several applications for new grants, said spokeswoman Laura Gross.

AID's commitments during 1998 so far represent a marked increase in the pace of funding for programs controversial both in Havana and Miami.

President Fidel Castro charges that outside financing has inflated dissidence inside Cuba. Exiles complain that some past U.S. programs, such as allowing U.S.-Cuba academic exchanges, do little to promote democracy.

Feeling the heat

The mixture of aggressive and less political programs approved by AID this year appears to have assuaged conservatives but left officials of the less political programs feeling exposed to Havana's wrath.

``Please don't use our name, pleaded one official of a program that will send books to Cuba. ``The Cuban government will see us as part of a Washington campaign to subvert them, and we're liberals.

Supporters of the programs say they are not meant to be subversive or provocative, but simply to prepare Cubans for a transition to democracy and a free market after four decades of communism.

``As a matter of policy, no guarantee is authorized to employ U.S. government funding to provide cash assistance to groups or individuals within Cuba, said one AID report on the grants.

Most of the programs are run by nonprofit organizations and focus on three areas: support for human rights activists and independent journalists; aid to Cuban nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); and transition planning.

Exile groups

Most likely to raise Havana's political hackles are the four grants to exile-dominated groups, three of them based in Miami, to support and spread the work of pro-democracy activists inside Cuba.

The Institute for Democracy, which received $400,000, will send food, medicine and literature on human rights and free markets to dissidents and even government officials ``who may be willing to listen, said Sanchez-Aballi.

It will also disseminate reports on Cuban human rights abuses to international groups, Sanchez-Aballi added, and plans to offer brief classes on democracy to Cubans who are on short visits abroad.

The institute was established in 1996 as ``an initiative of nine exile organizations that had run separate campaigns of assistance to dissident groups, the director said.

Another $400,000 went to the Washington-based Center for a Free Cuba to send pro-democracy books, pamphlets and videos to the island, and to send Western experts in labor unions, journalism and human rights on discreet visits to Cuba to contact local counterparts.

Center Director Frank Calzon handled the first AID grant approved under Helms-Burton, supervising a similar $500,000 program when he worked for the New York-based Freedom House pro-democracy group.

Envoys expelled

Havana has repeatedly denounced Calzon as ``a veteran CIA agent and expelled several of his envoys, the last one for delivering what Cuba called equipment for ``political subversion. Calzon says it was a typewriter.

AID also gave a $250,000 grant to the Cuban Dissidence Task Group, a Miami organization that supports the work of peaceful anti-Castro activists on the island.

And it committed an additional $120,000 grant to Cuba Free Press, a nonprofit Miami group that receives dispatches from about 25 opposition journalists in Cuba and distributes them abroad.

``We will not be sending them the AID money, but our work will make their writings and the truth about Cuba known around the world, said Cuba Free Press director Juan Granados.

One $172,139 grant approved late last year went to Partners of the Americas, a group created under the Kennedy-era Alliance for Progress, to forge contacts between Cuban nongovernmental organizations and their foreign counterparts.

Cubans working in drug education will meet their counterparts in Peru, for example, and Cuban experts on urban renewal will visit a Dominican Republic university that has an urban studies department, said director Don Finberg.

``We let the host NGOs do the work. We're just the facilitator for the contacts, but we do think it's good for Cuba over the long run for these people to meet and exchange ideas and experiences, Finberg said.