With frustration mounting over the latest crackdown on Cuba’s pro-democracy movement, its leaders in Washington and Havana are stepping up pressure on Europe, denouncing the Continent’s past accommodation of the island’s communist strongman, Fidel Castro, and urging that the European Union issue a strong condemnation of this weekend’s repression.

On Friday, more than 30 dissidents were rounded up and jailed as they prepared to demonstrate in front of the French Embassy in Havana. Among the detained were the three principal organizers of the May 20 meeting of the Assembly to Promote Civil Society in Cuba, a historic gathering that brought together representatives of 365 independent civic groups to discuss and effect democratic reform on the island.

According to reports from London’s Daily Telegraph, one of those organizers, Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello, issued harsh condemnations of France’s Cuba policy from her home in Havana yesterday. The dissident, 59, was released on Saturday and is reported to be suffering from low blood pressure and other ailments as a result of her internment.

“The French are two-faced,” Ms. Roque said in the Telegraph report. She was referring to the decision by the French ambassador to Cuba, Marie-France Pagnier, to invite dissidents to the embassy on July 13, the day before receiving Mr. Castro’s foreign minister, Felipe Perez Roque. Mr. Perez Roque was invited to the embassy’s Bastille Day celebration on July 14, from which leaders of the opposition were excluded. The demonstration that resulted in Friday’s crackdown was a protest of, among other policies, the unilateral normalization of French relations with Mr. Castro’s communist regime, according to reports out of Havana.

“For a little money, they have made the Cuban people suffer,” Ms. Roque said of the French. Europe maintains substantial economic investment in the island, and one scholar of the Cuban economy, Maria Werlau, said European nations were particularly compliant with Mr. Castro because of Cuba’s “scandalously huge” debt, unwilling to provoke the dictator into refusing to pay the “outrageous” sums he owes private interests in E.U. countries. Last year, Ms. Werlau said, an estimated $1.63 billion in credit was extended to Cuba by financial institutions in E.U. countries.

Several observers of Cuba have said these economic ties, particularly those between Cuba and Spain, have influenced E.U. policy and made it more lenient toward Mr. Castro.

They have cited, in particular, the decision reached by the European Union last month to grant Mr. Castro a year of “constructive dialogue” before reconsidering the ban on high-level diplomats’ visits to Cuba and whether to open embassies in Havana to Cuban dissidents. The move was criticized by opponents of the Castro regime as an appeasement of the dictator, who was irked by the diplomatic sanctions Europe imposed following the strongman’s crackdown on the opposition in March 2003. Friday’s was the largest since the 2003 roundup, in which 75 independent librarians, academics, journalists, and other opposition leaders were jailed during what is known on the island as the “primavera negra,” or “black spring.”

When the European Union granted Mr. Castro a reprieve last month, it expressed hope that the move, and the “constructive dialogue” accompanying it, would bring about the release of many of those jailed in March 2003 who have still to be freed. Yet since the E.U. decision has instead only brought about more repression, the policy should be reconsidered, one Cuban-American leader in Congress, Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, said.

Mr. Diaz-Balart, a Republican of Florida, will be introducing legislation in the House to that effect, a spokeswoman said yesterday.

“The resolution,” Mr. Diaz-Balart said, “will denounce the most recent barbaric acts of repression by Castro’s terrorist regime and call for greater solidarity from the international community with the Cuban people.” The resolution will also call on the European Union to re-examine its current policy of “constructive” engagement with the Castro regime before the scheduled revisiting of the subject in June 2006,and urges America’s representative to the United Nations to work with the world body’s Human Rights Commission and other diplomatic organizations to secure international condemnation of Friday’s crackdown.

Such international expressions of solidarity were vital to the opposition movement, one Cuban human rights activist, Elizardo Sanchez, said yesterday.

Mr. Sanchez, the president of the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation, added that it was fear of the dissident movement’s stepped-up activity that was provoking recent acts of repression. In addition to Friday’s crackdown, on July 13, the regime rounded up nearly 30 protesters in Havana who were honoring the 41 Cubans who drowned while attempting to escape the island by boat on July 13, 1994. According to Mr. Sanchez, six of the July 13 detainees remain in prison.

As the regime prepares to celebrate today in Havana the revolutionary holiday marking the commencement of Mr. Castro’s hostilities against the Batista dictatorship on July 26, 1953, Mr. Sanchez said that Cubans were demonstrating signs of fatigue and extreme impatience with what that revolution had wrought.

“In more than 46 years,” Mr. Sanchez said in Spanish, “my colleagues and I have never seen such popular discontent as there is right now.”

The extraordinary heat of the tropical summer, combined with a lack of electricity, water, cooking gas, and other vital infrastructure caused by Hurricane Dennis earlier this month, has Cubans enraged, Mr. Sanchez said. Mr. Castro turned down aid offers from the European Union and America in the aftermath of the hurricane, and as a result of the poor health conditions caused by the storm, the Cuban Public Health Ministry issued a warning yesterday to Havana residents, Reuters reported. The admonition came after the mysterious deaths of eight children in the city, and officials urged Cubans to be especially careful about hygiene to prevent respiratory and gastrointestinal illnesses.

These circumstances have begotten unprecedented unrest among the Cuban populace, Mr. Sanchez said. During the blackouts that have rolled across the island all summer, he said, Cubans have taken to acts of vandalism, smashing the glass windows of government offices and commercial enterprises. Mr. Sanchez said that, in private conversations among friends, family members, and neighbors, the regime is the subject of unusually intense mockery, with special scorn reserved for “El Comandante.”

This atmosphere, combined with the recent uptick in activity by the dissident movement – from the May 20 gathering to the July 13 protest to Friday’s actions in front of the French Embassy – has the regime fearful of a small protest turning into a spontaneous demonstration of hundreds of thousands against Mr. Castro, Mr. Sanchez said. “They’re afraid of it snowballing,” he said.

This fear, the activist added, was what had provoked Friday’s crackdown.

As of yesterday evening, Mr. Sanchez said, nine dissidents remained in prison after the roundup, while reports yesterday from the Miami-based support center of the Assembly to Promote Civil Society in Cuba said “fewer than a dozen” remained jailed – down from the 15 who remained imprisoned on Monday. Among the released was Felix Bonne Carcasses, one of the three main organizers of the May 20 Assembly meeting.

The third Assembly organizer arrested Friday, Rene Gomez Manzano, remained in prison yesterday, his brother, Jorge Gomez Manzano, said. Reached by phone at Rene’s residence yesterday, Jorge said, in Spanish, that his brother was still in jail, and that he had been permitted neither to visit nor speak with him. Jorge said that, according to secondhand accounts from others who had been detained with his brother, Rene was in good health despite having been in a Havana prison since Friday.