It's a powerful image given Cuba's latest crackdown on human rights: the Baltimore Orioles playing ball at a Havana stadium and popular American musicians jamming with their Cuban counterparts on the island.

The Orioles' game Sunday marks the first time a Major League team plays in Cuba since 1959. The musicians' concert at the Karl Marx Theater, also Sunday, and a musical workshop that runs through this week -- a collaboration between the U.S. nonprofit organization Music Bridges Around the World and Cuba's state-run Institute of Music -- marks the first time American artists appear in a large-scale, official event in Cuba since the 1979 Havana Jams.

While the two high-profile events have galvanized media attention and drawn criticism from traditional exile circles, the larger response has been much more muted and pragmatic.

`Mixed feelings'

``When all that started to happen with the four dissidents, the terrible sentences, the whole climate of the hardening of the stance, I started to have mixed feelings, but it only lasted a couple of days,'' said Manny Hidalgo, 29, a Cuban American.

``I realized this is not about overtures to the government, but connections to the people. We have to be willing to stick to this policy [of people-to-people contact] regardless of what the Cuban government does. It's about moving beyond the Cuban government. Anything that helps reduce the level of isolation Cubans feel is a good thing.''

The fact is that athletic, cultural and academic exchanges between Cuba and the United States are fairly common.

Classes in Havana

American students take summer classes in Havana. Cuban students spend a semester in U.S. universities. Cuban and American scientists combine efforts to explore and catalog plant and animal species on the island.

Once unthinkable, a steady flow of Cuban musicians who have not broken with the Cuban government have performed at Miami Beach clubs and returned to the island in the past year. Although militant exiles have staged protests at the events, the performances have been packed with Cuban Americans. And where only a few years ago those demonstrations would draw hundreds, even thousands of exiles, that number has noticeably dwindled: Only about 100 protested the Cuba trip during a Marlins-Orioles game at Fort Lauderdale Stadium last week.

``The Cuban community in the United States has changed a little bit and you have more people willing to sit down at the same conference, the same table to discuss issues,'' said Mauricio A. Font, director of the Cuba Project at Queens College in New York.

``It's not yet a groundswell, but I hear from a lot of people who are beginning to think that there may be a third way [to bring about democratic change in Cuba]. We've been doing this [isolating Cuba] for 30-some years and it hasn't worked,'' said Elena Freyre, 52, who returned to Cuba for the Pope's visit a year ago and became an activist on behalf of exchanges with the Cuban people.

Interest in travel steady

U.S. Treasury Department spokeswoman Beth Weaver said interest in travel to Cuba has remained steady the last several years -- with ``a slight increase since the Pope's visit a year ago.''

Weaver would not provide specific figures about the increase in applications for permits to travel to Cuba. But the number has hovered at 6,000 a year for the last several years, she said.

``There's been an increased awareness of Cuba, and we've received an increase in calls about information, but as far as people requesting a license to travel to Cuba for a specific purpose, we have not seen a marked increase,'' Weaver said. ``That certainly may change given the Orioles game.''

Some exiles think the timing of the game and concert -- barely two weeks after Cuba gave prison sentences to four dissidents for publishing a pamphlet critical of the government -- is particularly egregious.

`The wrong message'

Cuban-exile jazz trumpeter Arturo Sandoval summed up the feelings of many exiles when he said in an interview after his Grammy win that the American musicians' trip to Cuba ``sends the wrong message. It says we're willing to accept what Castro is doing to my country.''

Another exile, retired banker Carlos Arboleya, likened the Orioles baseball match to the Ping-Pong games between the United States and China during the Nixon administration.

``I remember when Nixon sent the Ping-Pong team to China and that was an opening,'' Arboleya said. ``How can you go play ball there? I can see the point that penetrating the enemy is favorable, but still I'm against it. I'm still the hard-line, right-wing type. I cannot see it being done when there's a lack of human rights.''

Exiles who support the U.S. embargo as the way to topple Fidel Castro fear that the high-profile exchanges are a prelude to more openings.

``Musical concerts and baseball games are very visible, things that people popularly follow. People think that because it's so visible, it's the start of something else,'' said Lisandro Perez, director of the Cuban Research Institute at FIU, which has an academic exchange program with the island. ``I don't think so, but some people believe it's part of a plan by the Clinton administration to open up things.''

`Nothing has changed'

Ninoska Perez Castellon, a director of the Cuban American National Foundation, summed up the hard-line position on her radio show on WQBA: ``I'm not going to change my principles because in Cuba nothing has changed.''

Yet, some change has taken place in South Florida's exile community when it comes to the level of tolerance for some exchanges, which are permitted under the U.S. embargo.

Some of the change is generational. Cubans who came to the United States in the 1960s -- and traditionally have held the more conservative views -- now make up only a third of the Cuban population in Miami-Dade.

``Through time, there has been a greater acceptance that there are going to be these initiatives,'' Perez said. ``I also think that to some extent, there's been a transition in the Cuban-American community. People have changed their position, and many of the traditional hard-liners have died.''

In academic circles, exchanges with Cuba are almost routine, and at many universities, the programs are led by Cuban-American scholars.

``Academic contact with Cuba is part of our work,'' said Perez, a founder of the 7-year-old program at FIU. ``You can't have a research institute on Cuba without having contact with Cuba. . . . If this program is going to bring prestige and a national reputation to FIU, we have to have contact with people from Cuba.''

Just last week, a group of Cuban academics and composers attended an FIU conference on Cuba and Cuban studies. In the past four years, 14 students from Cuba have attended FIU as fellows for a semester under a program funded with a $250,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

FIU professors, in turn, are invited to participate in conferences in Cuba, where they make contacts with their counterparts on the island, have access to research materials and get a first-hand view of Cuban society.

`Low-key' exchange

``They [the exchanges] are low-key not because we're trying to keep out of public eye, but because it's academic,'' Perez said. ``It's not like the musicians who give a big show.''

Other than periodic criticism on Cuban radio by hard-line commentators, the FIU program goes largely unnoticed, although Perez said he refrains from using state funds for the program for fear that the Dade legislative delegation, which is half Cuban American, would object and put the program in jeopardy.

A similar program was started in 1996 at Queens College by a group of Cuban-American scholars. Their Cuba Project, which includes a Web site, now engages Cuban and U.S. academics, policymakers, NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) and professionals such as journalists in discussions about ``the dynamics of the Cuban process.''

``There is a fascination with Cuban culture and history and relations with the United States,'' said Font, who has traveled to Cuba three times in the past four years to promote the exchange. ``I deal with different countries, and when I put on a seminar on, say, Brazil, I get 15 to 20 people. I do a seminar on Cuba and I get 40.''