Cuban dissidents are thanking a Catholic priest and a bishop for protecting a handful of opposition activists from a government-organized mob, armed with sticks and rocks, that besieged the church where they attended Mass Sunday.

The Cuban government, meanwhile, fired back at U.S., European and other officials who condemned the death of political prisoner Wilman Villár, accusing them of “unscrupulously taking advantage of a lamentable . . . death of a common prisoner.”

Villár’s death last week after a long prison hunger strike triggered a string of dissident protests over the weekend and the short-term police detentions of about 80 opposition activists, according to government opponents.

More protests, pots-and-pans demonstrations and other public activities are planned for Tuesday, according to the National Front for Civic Resistance, an umbrella organization of dissident groups around the island.

The government-organized mob and scores of police laid siege Sunday to the Cristo Redentor church in the eastern city of Holguin as two members of the Ladies in White and Javier Martinez, a dissident also dressed in white, attended mass to pray for Villár.

“We were terrified because the mob was armed with sticks and rocks,” the 25-year-old Martinez told El Nuevo Herald Monday by phone from Holguin. “It was something horrible.”

After the Mass, the Rev. Arnaldo Aldama told the dissidents to remain in the church while he went out and told the mob that “the people in the church were just as Cuban as they were,” Martinez said.

Holguin Bishop Emilio Aranguren arrived amid the standoff and met privately with a local government official in charge of relations with the church, Martinez added. During the talks several members of the dissident Christian Liberation Movement slipped into the church.

After the Aranguren meeting, the mob dispersed and the estimated 100 police in uniform and plain clothes withdrew about 200 yards from the church, said Jose Ramon Pupo Nieves, 40, a dissident who said he watched the incident from the edges of the mob.

Neighbors applauded as the dissidents emerged from the church and rushed to their homes, fearing that police would detain them on the way, both Martinez and Pupo reported.

A person who answered the phone at Aranguren’s office said the bishop was out of town. Calls to Aldama’s cellular phone were answered with a message that it was shut off or out of the service area.

Pupo and Martinez praised the two priests for their decision to protect the dissidents, very likely a tough choice at a time when the Cuban Catholic Church is preparing for Pope Benedict XVI’s planned visit to the island March 26-28.

Former political prisoner José Daniel Ferrer García said most of the 80 government opponents detained over the weekend as they tried to mark Villár’s passing were freed hours later; a few may remain in custody.

About 16 Ladies in White were detained in eastern Cuba and several others were briefly put under house arrest to keep them away from events honoring Villár, Ferrer added.

No incidents were reported as 47 Ladies in White attended Sunday Mass at the Santa Rita church and 35 others went to Our Lady of Charity Basilica in El Cobre.

Meanwhile, the official Granma newspaper shot back Monday at international condemnations over Villár’s death with a 1,500 word editorial insisting that Villár was not a dissident, that he was jailed because he beat his wife and that he was not on a hunger strike.

It said the media had paid little attention when three hunger strikers died in U.S. prisons in November or when a Morrocan prisoner died in a Spanish jail after a long hunger strike.

Havana human rights activist Elizardo Sánchez wrote to Interior Minister Abelardo Colomé Ibarra Monday asking for permission to enter the Aguadores prison, where Villár was jailed, to determine what happened to him.