One is a Cuban priest who wrote letters criticizing Fidel and Raúl Castro. Another is a Catholic layman who collected 25,000 signatures seeking change. The third edited a church journal muzzled under government pressures.

The Rev. José Conrado Rodríguez, Oswaldo Payá and Dagoberto Valdés are the best-known Catholics who regularly and aggressively attack Cuba’s communist system — and sometimes even their own church leaders.

All plan to attend the Masses that Pope Benedict XVI will celebrate in the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba and in Havana during his March 26-28 visit. But they are not likely to be seated in the front rows.

Rodríguez, 59, has long been a thorn in the side of a government that was officially atheist from 1962 to 1992, and to this day bans Catholic schools and requires prior permits for street processions.

Sometimes called the “people’s cardinal,” he first made headlines in 1994 with a letter blaming Fidel Castro for the island’s financial and social crisis, and urging him to open a dialogue with dissidents and exiles.

The church sent Rodríguez to study in Spain in 1996 — supporters say church officials wanted to protect him, at the same time get him out of the way — and he returned just before Pope John Paul II visited Cuba in 1998.

In 2007, State Security agents burst into his Santiago parish, Santa Teresita del Niño Jesús, to beat and arrest at least 15 young dissidents. The barrel-chested, blunt-talking Rodríguez branded the raid a “terrorist party.”

He followed up with a letter to Raúl Castro in 2009 complaining that “the daily difficulties are becoming so crushing that they sink us deeply into sadness, hopelessness . . . [and] a widespread sense of being defenseless.”

“We are at such a critical moment that we must undertake a profound revision of our criteria and our practices, of our aspirations and our objectives,” the priest wrote. Castro did not answer.

Rodríguez later reported that State Security agents had told his superiors that he was “the only thing standing in the way of good” church-state relations, according to a U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks.

He also told U.S. diplomats in Havana to watch what Raúl Castro does, not what he says, and that he would not be surprised if there’s a “social explosion” on the island, other WikiLeaks cables noted.

Rodríguez also has been critical of Cuban Cardinal Jaime Ortega, and another WikiLeaks cable quoted him as saying that although the church has a role to play in the island’s future, “it is not stepping up to the plate.”

Although other priests in Cuba quietly complain about the communist system, Rodríguez argues that the island’s church has failed to carry out its “prophetic mission” — the requirement that it publicly denounce wrongs.

Church officials transferred him last summer from Santiago, Cuba’s second largest city, to the nearby rural village of El Cristo. But he remains in Santiago, apparently because his replacement has not yet arrived.

Soft Oppositionist

Cuba’s best-known Catholic dissident is Payá, 59, who founded the Christian Liberation Movement and launched the signature-gathering Varela Project — neither recognized by the government.

One Vatican official praised him as a “committed Catholic who wishes to work within the system” in 2003, and said he had urged Cuban officials to “cultivate Payá as a ‘soft oppositionist,’ ” according to a WikiLeaks cable.

He opposes the U.S. embargo, does not accept U.S. support funds, usually remains aloof from other dissidents, and favors compromise over confrontation and a dialogue between government and dissidents. But the 25,000 signatures he gathered for a petition seeking a referendum on the communist system was a black eye for the government. Most of the 75 dissidents sent to prison during the 2003 crackdown known as Cuba’s “Black Spring” were active in his Varela Project.

Payá won the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize in 2002, has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize more than once and was briefly greeted by Pope John Paul II at the end of a public audience in Rome in 2003.

Cuba’s government allowed him to travel abroad to pick up his prize, and the engineer remains employed at a state enterprise that makes and repairs surgical equipment. He is married and has three children.

He said he’s glad Pope Benedict is going to Cuba “to try to add something positive to our people.”

But the visit should not help the government “apply an anesthetic” over the “grave tensions and suffering” afflicting Cuba.

“We hope his visit will be one of love and liberation. . . . But this event cannot take the place of a movement toward a true democracy,” Payá added in a telephone interview with El Nuevo Herald.

While Payá clearly has support in the Vatican, Valdés appears to be more controversial because of his more directly political dissent and clashes with some church hierarchs.

One U.S. diplomatic cable reported in 2003 that Msgr. Giorgio Lingua, then head of the Caribbean desk at the Vatican equivalent of a foreign ministry, had complained about “Cuban dissidents who ‘take advantage of the church to promote their politics,’ like Dagoberto Valdés.”

Not backing down

A top agronomist with a state tobacco enterprise in western Pinar Del Rio, Valdés was demoted in 1996 when he became editor of Vitral, a provincial Catholic magazine that often criticized the government.

Government officials regularly demanded Vitral tone down its reports.

One U.S. diplomatic dispatch from Havana reported Valdés had alleged that Ortega “maneuvered” to force him to quit Vitral in 2007 by replacing Pinar del Rio Bishop José Siro Rodríguez, who supported Vitral but was retiring, with a weaker Bishop Jorge Serpa.

Valdés “asserts [Ortega] is in bed with the Cuban regime. In his estimation, Bishop Serpa, therefore, is as much of a regime figure as Cardinal Ortega, and not to be trusted,” the cable added.

Valdés flatly denies that he made any such statement to the U.S. diplomats.

Another cable quoted a Vatican official as saying that the Cuban government “must be happy because the Church did its dirty work for it” in the Valdés case. Vitral curtailed its criticisms of the government under Serpa.

Valdés, who said he prefers to be described as “a Catholic who thinks differently” rather than as a “dissident,” now publishes the digital magazine Convivencia — Fellowship — and remains a steadfast government critic.

He declined to discuss the other cables and his clashes with Ortega but welcomed Benedict’s visit as an opportunity for all Cubans to mark the 400th anniversary of the finding of the statue of the Virgin of Charity, Cuba’s patron saint.

The anniversary’s motto, “Charity unites us,” refers to “all members of the Cuban nation, believers, nonbelievers, government, opposition and civil society, those who live on the island and those who live abroad,” he said.

“It means we all must participate in the changes that Cuba needs, without excluding from the church any programs, persons or groups in order to normalize relations between church and state.”