She spent 16 years, nine months and four days in Fidel Castro's prisons, but it's what happened on Dec. 7, 1969, that still torments Georgina Cid.

That cold dawn, prisoner Cid was ushered into a room in a forced-labor farm outside Havana with the government-imposed Orwellian name of America Libre, Free America. Two interrogators delivered an impossible ultimatum as a simple choice: Snitch on your group's anti-Castro activities -- on lacausa, the cause -- or we'll kill your older brother, who had been running CIA-backed raids on the island from Miami.

Cid had already lost her younger brother, Eladio Jr., to the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista during a shootout at the Haitian Embassy, where he had been hiding in 1956. And now, facing these two men -- just months after her father, Eladio Sr., had died of a heart attack in state custody under questioning -- she was supposed to help the regime?

'I told them, `Look, I am willing to give my life for my brother's because he is better than I am and more useful than I am,' '' said Cid, catching her breath while wiping tears from her face at her Miami home recently. ' `But I can't do that. This is a struggle, and I can't risk anyone's security to save even those dearest to me.' ''

Francisco ''Paco'' Cid -- bruised, emaciated, his once sturdy muscles hanging from bone as he hugged his imprisoned sister for the last time -- was executed by a firing squad, leaving his widow, Ofelia Rodríguez, in prison and a young son.

TOUGH CHOICES

Thousands of women like Georgina Cid had to make tough choices. While Cuban male political prisoners have long captured the media limelight, the women have mostly kept their memories private.

When set free in the 1970s and 1980s, these women set out to rebuild their lives in South Florida. Some earned university degrees; others worked menial jobs. Many married former political prisoners -- men who understood their pain and pride.

Now in the twilight of their battle, the former women prisoners who are left -- many of them called plantadas because they were firmly planted against the regime and refused Marxist reeducation programs -- share a precious bond. Their stories, rarely told outside Cuban exile circles, stand as testament to these women's grit and defiance at a time when most women -- Cuban and American alike -- were expected to be prim and proper homemakers, not gun-toting conspirators for democracy.

Cid was just shy of her 25th birthday when she was sentenced in 1961 to 20 years for hiding a gun ''to conspire against the powers of the state'' -- against a revolution she had embraced after Eladio Jr.'s death.

When she arrived in Miami in 1979, she had become, like so many of the ferociously hopeful Cuban women of her era, a symbol of proud suffering, never cracked by jailers in a bloody, dysfunctional regime that sought to break them.

Most of the imprisoned women had championed the revolution but turned against it once Castro stopped talking about building a big political tent for democratic ideals, and started building prisons instead.

So the women hid young conspiracy-hatchers, cooked up Molotov cocktails, moved weapons and distributed anti-Castro pamphlets.

They stole their Fidelista father's guns for the underground, learned to set up a radio station to incite the masses, or, like Zoila Aguila, known as La Niña del Escambray, took to central Cuba's hills to fight the new revolutionary army. They did everything and anything in the hope that the citizenry would find the nerve to rise up against a communist takeover of their young country. It was a tough sell in a climate of fear fed by hours of bloody executions showcased on TV.

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