Cuba's economy is still spiraling downward even though tourism and remittances from abroad are rising and the Communist government again feels strong and confident, a panel of experts on Cuba reported Thursday.

The panel opened the annual Miami meeting of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy, largely made up of academics and business people, with a review of the past year's developments in economics, politics and human rights.

``The year 1997 may well have been Cuba's worst since 1993,'' one year before it hit bottom after the collapse of Soviet subsidies, said University of Pittsburgh professor Carmelo Mesa-Lago, regarded as the dean of the Cuban economists in exile.

The 1997-98 sugar harvest of about 3.2 million tons was the worst in decades, food production sank and underemployment hovered around 27 percent. Reflecting the shortage of jobs, enrollment in higher education centers fell by half from 1992 to 1996, Mesa-Lago said.

Although tourism hit record levels in 1997 and the government claimed to have received $800 million in remittances from Cubans living abroad, Mesa-Lago said he estimated the island's overall income for the year had dropped from the previous year.

Cuba's governing system appeared to have grown stronger and more confident over the past year and in fact rolled back some earlier changes, said Marifeli Perez-Stable, sociology professor at the Old Westbury Campus of the State University of New York.

``Common'' Communist Party members named to the ruling Central Committee in the early 1990s to represent average Cubans were dropped from the committee last year, returning more power to orthodox party ``cadres,'' Perez-Stable said.

About 30 percent of the party's members joined since 1991, and many party jobs at the provincial level have passed from veterans to newcomers -- a positive renewal of leadership but one that sometimes put uninformed newcomers in power, she added.

Their experience over the past 40 years have made Cubans so mistrustful of their leaders, Perez-Stable concluded, that they will likely reject all politicians after President Fidel Castro surrenders power, no matter their message.