Almost a month after the July 22 crackdown in which Cuba’s communist dictator, Fidel Castro, rounded up and jailed over 30 pro-democracy activists, a detainee from the roundup and one of the island’s leading dissidents, Rene Gomez Manzano, announced he was on a hunger strike, democracy leaders said yesterday.

While the American government said it had not yet confirmed Mr. Gomez’s hunger strike, they denounced the roundup and his ongoing detention.

A spokeswoman for the White House, Maria Tamburri, said yesterday: “This is another example of the oppressive nature of the Castro regime.”

“The objectives of the U.S. policy towards Cuba are clear,” she said. “They are to bring an end to the ruthless and brutal dictatorship, assist the Cuban people in a transition to a representative democracy, and also assist them in establishing a free-market economy.”

Mr. Gomez is one of the three principal organizers of the Assembly to Promote Civil Society in Cuba, an organization of 365 independent civic organizations that held a historic pro-democracy gathering in Havana on May 20. The meeting marked an increase in activity among the Cuban opposition to Mr. Castro, including protests outside the French Embassy that led to the July crackdown and Mr. Gomez’s imprisonment.

Jailed with Mr. Gomez were the other two leaders of the Assembly, Felix Bonne Carcasses and Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello. Both were subsequently released, but Ms. Roque, reached yesterday by phone at her home in Havana, said Mr. Gomez remains jailed and has initiated a hunger strike to protest the unjust detention of democracy activists and to draw the world’s attention to their cause.

Ms. Roque said Mr. Gomez initiated the strike on Tuesday, but little was known of his condition. According to reports out of Havana, Mr. Gomez’s brother, Jorge, has been denied access to Rene, who has been cut off from all contact with family or the outside world.

“They arrested him in his home, sleeping,” Ms. Roque said yesterday in Spanish. “He was innocent, totally innocent.” Mr. Gomez’s ongoing imprisonment and suffering, she added, was “the dictator’s caprice – it’s the caprice of just one egocentric man.”

A U.S. State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: “Rene Gomez Manzano is unjustly incarcerated, and he, and all political prisoners in Cuba, should be released right now.”

Joining the Bush administration in its interest in Cuba’s pro-democracy movement this week was Senator Specter, a Republican of Pennsylvania who met earlier this week with Ms. Roque and another leader of the Cuban opposition, Vladimiro Roca, at the home of the America’s envoy to Havana, James Cason.

Ms. Roque said she had spent her conversation with the senator explaining the difficulties encountered by Cuba’s pro-democracy activists, particularly in light of an increase in Mr. Castro’s acts of oppression. In addition to the July 22 crackdown, several dissidents were arrested following protests on July 13, and democracy activists have in recent weeks been harassed in their homes. Meetings of the opposition have been forcefully interrupted.

Visits such as Mr. Specter’s, Ms. Roque said, are vital to the island’s democracy activists.

“That a senator like this man, who is head of the Judiciary Committee, met with us is a form of recognizing the opposition,” Ms. Roque said. Such recognition goes a long way toward countering Mr. Castro’s propaganda, which claims that no opposition to him exists and that the pro-democracy activists are part of a “mafia in Miami,” she said.

Also this week, the governor of Nebraska, David Heineman, conducted a trade mission to Cuba to meet with agents of the Castro regime, but he refused requests from Cuban-American leaders in Congress to meet with dissidents.