President Bush will reach out to the Cuban people over the airwaves of Radio and TV Marti Friday – the 103rd anniversary of the island nation’s independence from Spain – to celebrate Cuban history and the nation’s ongoing fight for freedom, a White House official said yesterday.

The president’s videotaped message will air as Cuban dissidents stage in Havana what is being called a historic convention to effect democratic reform of Fidel Castro’s totalitarian regime.

Friday marks the opening of the General Meeting of the Assembly to Promote Civil Society in Cuba, a nonviolent convention of 365 independent Cuban groups to discuss and plan for the nation’s transition to a democracy from a communist dictatorship.

Among the issues delegates will tackle are health care, poverty, labor rights, the environment, and multiparty elections. According to the meeting’s organizers, if the Assembly is allowed to take place, it will be the first open, public gathering of opposition activists in the 46-year history of Mr. Castro’s rule.

Meanwhile, a Cuban exile, Luis Posada Carriles, was charged yesterday with illegal entry into America by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. According to a statement from the agency, Mr. Posada will be held without bond until an immigration hearing set for June 13. Many observers have labeled the recent focus on the case a ploy by Havana’s strongman to distract attention from Friday’s events.

Mr. Posada was arrested in Miami Tuesday, after Mr. Castro turned out hundreds of thousands of protesters in Havana in an anti-Bush demonstration demanding that the president detain Mr. Posada, a Castro opponent accused of involvement in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner. The attack killed 73 people.

Cuban officials had asked the American government to extradite Mr. Posada to Venezuela, which filed a provisional arrest request with the State Department. While yesterday’s charges mean Mr. Posada could be deported, the American government does not, as a general rule, remove detainees to Cuba or states believed to be acting on its behalf. According to the Associated Press, the American government has all but ruled out deportation to Venezuela, whose president, Hugo Chavez, is an ally of Mr. Castro.

Members of the American Congressional Cuban Democracy Caucus, however, urged yesterday that Mr. Castro’s antics, and the developments surrounding Mr. Posada, not overshadow the unprecedented Assembly meeting. The dictator, they said, has a history of stirring up trouble, especially with America, to obscure domestic unrest – and ensuing crackdowns. According to a reporter who attended the Miami press conference held by Mr. Posada shortly before his arrest Tuesday, the exile himself expressed concern that his situation would interfere with Friday’s gathering.

Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a Cuban-American and Republican of Florida, said this week’s diversions by Mr. Castro made it all the more important that the world remain focused on the Assembly. International attention, he said, was a deterrent to acts of violence by the dictator. If Mr. Castro thought no one was paying attention to the organizers of the Assembly, Mr. Diaz-Balart said, “They would be dead.”

Not yielding to Mr. Castro’s diversions was “a matter of life and death” for the “brave heroes who are struggling and working and fighting, in a peaceful manner, for their freedom and for democracy in Cuba,” Mr. Diaz-Balart, who sponsored legislation in the House extending solidarity and support to the Assembly, said.

The three figures most associated with the Assembly’s role in that struggle are dissidents Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello, Rene Gomez Manzano, and Felix Bonne Carcasses, the principal organizers of the meeting. According to another Cuban-American, Florida Republican congressman and Mario Diaz-Balart’s brother, Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, all eyes should be on these and other leaders of the Assembly to glean a sense of Cuba’s future.

The fact that the Assembly was taking place, Mr. Diaz-Balart said, “shows that there is a tremendous network in Cuba, throughout the island, of leaders and pro-democracy activists.”

Because members of the Assembly are convening at great risk to themselves and their families, and because some – including Ms. Roque, Mr. Gomez, and Mr. Bonne – have been jailed by Mr. Castro before, Mr. Diaz-Balart said, they are accruing moral authority that will translate into political authority down the line. “These people are going to be senators, governors, congressmen, and presidents,” Mr. Diaz-Balart said. “These are the freedom fighters of Cuba – the Lech Walesas and the Vaclav Havels,” the congressman added.

As the congressmen urged continued vigilance of the situation in Havana, reports out of Cuba suggested the Assembly would take place as planned, despite evidence of related crackdowns and repression by Mr. Castro and his associates.

As of yesterday, more than 125 delegates had arrived in Havana and checked in with the Assembly, coordinators in Miami said. Earlier this week Mr. Gomez told The New York Sun, in Spanish, that it appeared more likely than not that Mr. Castro would allow the Assembly to take place.

Miami organizers said the Assembly’s leaders had been so thorough in gaining foreign recognition of the event in the preceding months that it would be impossible at this point for Mr. Castro to prevent its taking place – as he did with the last similar attempt to stage a prodemocracy meeting, a planned gathering of the human-rights organization Concilio Cubano, in 1996 – without a significant international outcry.

European observers from the Czech Republic, France, Italy, and Germany arrived and checked in with the Assembly in Havana, organizers reported yesterday. As the Sun reported in March, Europe will be scrutinizing Mr. Castro’s response to today’s events as the European Union prepares to decide in coming months whether to renew sanctions imposed on Cuba after the regime’s jailing of 75 freedom advocates in March 2003.

According to reports out of Cuba, Mr. Castro’s response to the Assembly has already been defined by acts of repression. As the Sun reported Wednesday, a delegate from the Cuban province of Camaguey, Jose Antonio Mola Porro, was detained without reason by Cuban police before departing for the Assembly, according to his wife. An Assembly activist and member of the Cuban opposition, Antuan Clemente Hernandez, disappeared Monday after receiving a summons on May 12 from the Cuban political police, Assembly organizers said.

Yesterday, another delegate, Iliana Lopez Valdez, was informed that she was on a list of individuals to be denied access to state-controlled transportation when she attempted to purchase a bus ticket to travel to Havana for the Assembly, organizers reported.

On Wednesday Mr. Gomez told the Sun that several delegates had had their identification cards, without which travel between Cuban provinces is impossible, seized by the police. Delegates reported that after gathering for local organizing meetings, Castro agents followed them home, where they were stripped of their IDs.

As the Miami Herald reported last week, Mr. Castro has also arrested in recent months about 400 Cuban youths, most of them black, whom the dictator believes to be potential lawbreakers. Some observers said this week that the crackdown may be related to a fear of domestic unrest on Mr. Castro’s part related to the Assembly.

Despite the reported acts of repression, however, Assembly organizers seemed committed to proceeding with the meeting, which will take place in Rancho Boyeros, a municipality within Havana. The site of the gathering – which Mr. Gomez termed a “turning point” in Cuban history – is a piece of land next to Mr. Bonne’s home that had previously contained trees, weeds, and an abandoned car. Assembly leaders cleared the site and set up a concrete floor, a stage, and seating to accommodate about 500 people for the meeting, which will be conducted Friday and Saturday under the open Havana sky.