  The chromo-dielectric soliton model (CDM) is Lorentz- and chirally-invariant.
It has been demonstrated to exhibit dynamical chiral symmetry breaking and
spatial confinement in the locally uniform approximation. We here study the
full nonlocal quark self energy in a color-dielectric medium modeled by a two
parameter Fermi function. Here color confinement is manifest. The self energy
thus obtained is used to calculate quark wave functions in the medium which, in
turn, are used to calculate the nucleon and pion masses in the one gluon
exchange approximation. The nucleon mass is fixed to its empirical value using
scaling arguments; the pion mass (for massless current quarks) turns out to be
small but non-zero, depending on the model parameters.
