A government threatened by outside views needs to repress free expression in order to sustain itself. As so it has come to pass that mere conversation has landed two Czech citizens in jail in Cuba.

Ivan Pilip, a member of the Czech Republic Parliament and former finance minister, and Jan Bubenik, a student leader of the 1989 Velvet Revolution and president of the Czech Pro-Democracy Foundation, were detained by Cuban authorities after the two met with two local dissidents in central Cuba on Friday.

In similar cases, such pesky foreigners routinely have been expelled. But yesterday the Cuban regime announced that Messrs. Pilip and Bubenik would be sent to trial. A diatribe in the state-owned newspaper said that the men violated their tourist status by making ``subversive contacts'' with ``counterrevolutionaries.''

The truth is that Cuba's bankrupt regime cannot survive any close examination. The free flow of information and ideas, however modest, is its biggest threat. So while the world has opened to Cuba, as exhorted to by Pope John Paul II in 1998, Cuba's regime hasn't opened to the world.

Instead it has clamped down, harassing and detaining struggling dissidents regularly. Such repression has well led to increasing international condemnation of Cuba's human-rights abuses.

The regime wasn't happy last April when the Czech Republic, along with Poland, presented a resolution before the United Nations Human Rights Commission condemning Cuba's practices. Relations with the Czech Republic have been strained since.

Too bad for Messrs. Pilip and Bubenik, protagonists of their country's peaceful transition to democracy from Soviet-style communism -- dangerous role models for a totalitarian state.