Oswaldo Paya, who doggedly began a signature drive for a referendum on civil liberties riding a bicycle five years ago, has no access to e-mail.

But his website (www.oswaldopaya.org) was launched last month by relatives in Madrid. The site has Paya's statements and news about the Varela Project, a petition that was rejected by the government despite its 25,000 signatures.

"We have to do it from outside Cuba because we can't here," said Paya, winner of Europe's 2002 Andrei Sakharov prize for human rights, on Wednesday. "We want to express our point of view, which we cannot do here due to the lack of freedom."

Cuba, like China, restricts Internet access. Cuba chooses whom it will allow to have access to the World Wide Web, though passwords can be purchased on the black market.

Since Cuban leader Fidel Castro handed over power to his brother last July after undergoing emergency surgery, Cuba's communist authorities have released three dissidents from jail, but there is no sign Cuba's policy on limited Internet access has changed.

The wives and mothers of jailed Cuban dissidents, known as the "Ladies in White" because they dress in white to march in silence demanding the release of their men, have a website built for them by Cuban exiles in Spain (www.damasdeblanco.com).

"I've never seen it. I don't have access to Internet," said Miriam Leiva, a founder of the women's group whose husband was released in 2004 after 20 months behind bars for criticizing Castro's government.

A leading dissident in Cuba with close ties to the exile community in South Florida, Martha Beatriz Roque, has had a website (www.asambleasociedadcivilcuba.info) since 2004 that is run from Miami.

Even if Paya, Leiva or Roque could freely surf the Web, they still would not see their sites because they are blocked in Cuba, as are other sites of staunchly anti-Castro exiles.

"The Internet is a basic tool in today's world, but the government doesn't want Cubans to have outside information and only grants access to certain people," Leiva said.

Leiva said the site will help inform the world about their campaign to win the release of 59 of the 75 dissidents jailed since March 2003. The others were freed on medical parole.

The Cuban government calls dissidents "counterrevolutionary mercenaries" who are on the payroll of its ideological nemesis the United States and have little support in Cuba.

The dissidents' lack of access to the Internet comes on top of the everyday shortages that all Cubans deal with -- such as the limited transport that had Paya seeking petition signers on a bicycle.

Cuba says it restricts Internet use because US trade sanctions deny it access to underwater telecommunications cables and it has to use expensive satellite links through other countries.

Cuba last month announced a plan to bypass the US embargo with an underwater optic fiber cable to Venezuela, its closest ally.

Last year dissident Guillermo Farinas went on a seven-month hunger strike to demand open access Internet for all Cubans. He was on an intravenous drip when he called off the protest.

For free Internet access, some dissidents go to the US Interests Section, the American diplomatic mission in Havana, which has 23 terminals open to the public and takes about 200 users a week, by appointment.