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HAVANA -- After three intense days of visits, telephone calls and scores of media interviews since his prison release, the only thing writer Raul Rivero wants to do is wander through the cobble-stoned streets of his beloved Havana.

During his 20 months behind bars, Rivero said he longed for the familiar streets with their music and chatter just as he missed them in the 1980s while Moscow correspondent for the official news agency Prensa Latina.

"I just want to walk," Rivero told The Associated Press Friday night in his walk-up apartment, winding up what said he hoped would be the last of innumerable interviews after his surprise release on Wednesday.

"I've never wanted to leave," the 59-year-old dissident writer and poet said in his book-lined living room while consuming Marlboro cigarettes and thick cafe cubano served by his wife of 15 years, Blanca Reyes.

Now, freed less than two years into what was a 20-year sentence, Rivero is pondering his options.

The mayor of the Spanish city of Granada has invited him to visit for a year. His daughter Cristina wants him to meet his six-month-old granddaughter Maya in the United States. And then there is the book he's writing about his jail experiences. And a poetry book, and maybe a novel detailing the economic hardships of 1990s Cuba.

"What I really need is a vacation," he said. "I haven't been able to travel outside Cuba for almost 15 years."

Rivero is the best known of six jailed dissidents released by Cuba last week, all part of a group of 75 independent journalists, opposition politicians and other activists rounded up in March 2003.

Charged with working with the U.S. government to undermine Fidel Castro's communist system, the dissidents received terms ranging from six to 28 years.

Rivero said he was surprised when he walked free with five other ailing dissidents. Rivero has early emphysema and a cyst on his kidney, but the others' health problems were generally more serious.

Another seven of the 75 were released for medical reasons in recent months, bringing to 13 the total of those freed from the original group. Another 62 remain imprisoned.

"It seems to be a diplomatic gesture," said Rivero, pointing out Cuba recently resumed formal contacts with Spain. While still calling for the release of Cuba's political prisoners, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is urging other European nations to help bring about an opening on the communist-run island.

"I have the impression this process will continue," Rivero said of the releases.

Dressed in a denim shirt, dark blue shorts and plastic sandals, Rivero sat in a white wooden rocker and stopped occasionally to take congratulatory phone calls.

Reyes, his wife, said her earlier depression and nightmares vanished when her husband walked through the door. "It was as if he had never left," she said.

"Starting this all over again without knowing what will happen seems crazy," Rivero said of his journalist work here. "I'm not really asking a lot, just to work normally."

Rivero, who boasts volumes of articles and poetry, is among few independent Cuban journalists with professional training and experience.

He received a Reporters Without Borders award in 1997, a special Maria Cabot Moors citation from Columbia University in 1999 and UNESCO's Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize, named for a murdered Colombian journalist, earlier this year.

Long a reporter for Cuba's official media, Rivero broke with the government after signing a "Letter of 10 Intellectuals" in 1991 calling for the release of political prisoners. The other nine signers have since emigrated.

In 1995, Rivero formed the independent CubaPress news agency, which published his and others' work in newspapers and Web sites overseas. Rivero said he remains optimistic there will be change in the future of Cuba, now ruled for 45 years by the 78-year-old Castro.

But he predicts "a long process."

"I don't think the changes will be magic -- there isn't a button," he said.