HAVANA --- Cuba has released the first 19 of about 300 prisoners the government has said it will free following Pope John Paul II's visit to the island last month, a leading dissident said Friday.

Odilia Valdes Collazo, president of a group called the Partido Pro Derechos Humanos de Cuba (the Cuban Party for Human Rights), told Reuters that those released included Hector Palacios, a well-known dissident who was serving an 18-month term on a charge of "disrespect for authority.''

Collazo said Palacios, who had been due to be freed in July this year, was now at home in Havana. Palacios was jailed after giving an interview to German television in which he criticized President Fidel Castro and described him as "crazy.''

Collazo said 17 other prisoners were freed with Palacios from Havana's Combinado del Este prison Friday morning, and another was released in the eastern town on Manzanillo late Thursday.

Of those freed from Combinado del Este, Collazo said at least one other person was a political prisoner --- Jose Angel Carrasco, who was jailed for seven years in 1992 for "enemy propaganda.'' Collazo said she did not know how many others of those released from the Havana jail were political detainees.

Cuban officials, giving more details of pardons announced Thursday by the Vatican and the Cuban Foreign Ministry, said on Friday that the total of those to be released would number about 300. But they said some "counter-revolutionaries'' could not be pardoned.

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