Havana's People's Provincial Court, sitting in Cuba's Palace of the Revolution government headquarters, began hearing the first of 100 witnesses who would testify in support of the compensation claim that was originally presented last June.

The suit demands $181.1 billion in damages for what it says were 3,478 Cubans killed and 2,099 disabled as a result of ``sabotage, bombings and other terrorist acts'' caused by hostile US government policy toward Cuba since the 1959 revolution.

The opening proceedings, held in the cavernous audience hall of the council of ministers, were solemn but subdued.

Prompted by the judge, veteran members of Cuba's security services, some old and greying, dutifully gave details of what they said was the complicity of the US government and its Central IntelligenceAgency (CIA) in a series of armed risings in the early 1960s against the new revolutionary government.

``Banditry in Cuba was organised, supplied and financed by the US government through the CIA,'' testified the first witness, Anibal Velaz, who worked for Cuba's military intelligence between 1959 and 1965.

Even though the incidents being remembered occurred over 30 years ago, most of the witnesses testified without notes, reeling off smoothly from memory names of captured CIA spies and infiltrators and their Cuban ``counterrevolutionary'' allies, as well as the identities of their Cuban victims.

The hearings will cover a litany of accusations of direct and indirect US aggression against the communist-ruled island, ranging from the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 to a 1997 bombing campaign against tourist hotels in Cuba which Havana says was masterminded by a US-based Cuban exile group.

The Cuban compensation claim is largely seen as a one-sided political and symbolic gesture as Washington,which does not have formal diplomatic ties with Havana, has not responded.

The presiding Cuban judge noted yesterday that despite an official summons, the US government had not come forward to contest the charges and was therefore declared ''in default''.

Foreign diplomats said Cuba's billion-dollar claim was probably partly a reply to recent US court decisions seen as hostile by Havana, for example the ruling by a Miami judge that families of four Miami-based pilots shot down by Cuban warplanes in 1996 were entitled to compensation.

But some diplomats said the public pillorying of the US government also seemed intended to whip up sentiment at home against Cuba's ``imperialist'' arch-enemy and to divert attention away from foreign criticism of a recent government crackdown against political opponents.