| | |  Travel & Outdoors | December 2008 
The End of the End of the Revolution - 5
 Roger Cohen - New York Times
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I FOUND HÉCTOR PALACIOS at his cluttered apartment in the leafy Vedado district of Havana. He was thrown in prison in 2003 along with 75 other dissidents charged with subversion and collaboration with the United States. Sentenced to 25 years, he was released in late 2006 for health reasons. But 55 of those arrested are still in captivity, among the more than 220 political prisoners in Cuba.
“My crime was simple: thinking that the government has to change from totalitarianism,” Palacios told me.
He’s a big man, and when he talked about his cramped cell and isolation, his eyes darted here and there, and he began to sweat. The memory of what was his third spell in prison was still harrowing. Palacios, the leader of the banned All United opposition group, was an organizer of the Varela Project, a petition calling for a referendum on democratic change. Orchestrated by another prominent dissident, Oswaldo Payá, the movement brought ripples of a Cuban spring before the 2003 clampdown.
Palacios, 65, has traveled since his release to the United States, where, last May, he met with Obama in Miami. He asked Obama to show flexibility. He urged him to allow wealthy Cuban-Americans to send money to dissidents. “Obama is the new element,” Palacios told me. “He’s ready to talk to anyone. As with our aging government, the hard-line generation of Cuban-Americans is dying out. Significant change is possible within two years.”
“Why do you stay here?” I asked.
“I stay because I am a patriot.”
That’s not the official view. Dissidents are routinely called “traitors to the homeland.” Palacios showed me a copy of a congratulatory letter he sent to Obama on Nov. 4. It ends, “With the hope that I will be heard and confidence that your mandate will bring the renewal that eliminates the obstacles preventing us from putting an end to the tyranny suffered by our people.” A restoration of the battered moral authority of the United States could have a significant impact in Cuba, Palacios said.
Cuba’s dissidents are marginalized. The press is muzzled. The print organ of the regime, Granma, named after the cabin cruiser that bore Fidel, Raúl, Che and their followers from Mexican exile to Cuba in 1956, is a study in Orwellian officialese. State television is a turgid propaganda machine. Cuba can show “The Lives of Others” at its annual Havana Film Festival, where a few thousand people see it, but that remarkable study of the all-hearing Stasi in totalitarian East Germany would never be shown on national television. Too many Cubans might want the movie renamed “The Lives of Us.”
But of course Cuba is not totalitarian East Germany. Fidel has been nothing if not a brilliant puppet master. He once said that some revolutionary fighters “let their enthusiasm for the cause overwhelm their tactical decision-making.” Not Fidel, whose training as a lawyer has been evident in his mastery of maneuver and brinkmanship, not least in his dealings with the United States. There have been hundreds of executions, especially in the early years, but he has never been a bloodthirsty dictator, a Caribbean Ceausescu. Nor has he tried, in the style of some despots, to sweep the past away; he has merely let it wither.
“There’s a very intelligent repression here, a scientific repression,” Yoani Sánchez, the dissident whose blog is now translated into 12 languages, told me. “They have killed us as citizens, so they do not have to kill us physically. Our own police is in our brains, censoring us before we utter a critical idea.”
At 33, Sánchez is half Palacios’ age. She represents something new: digital dissent. The authorities seem unsure how to deal with it. Sánchez, a slight and vivacious woman, started her blog in 2006. It was, she told me, “an exorcism, a virtual catharsis.”
“Who is last in line for a toaster?” she asked in one blog entry this year, noting that a ban on sales of computers and DVD players had been lifted but toasters would not be freely sold until 2010. Now her biting dissections of the woes of Cuban life have a wide international following — to the point that “the intelligence services know if they touch me there will be an explosion online.”
Still, they harass her. When she won Spain’s prestigious Ortega y Gasset prize for digital journalism in April, she was prevented from going to collect the award. She would like to take up an invitation from New York University, but permission has been denied without explanation.
I asked if she was optimistic about change. She said she was pessimistic in the short term because “apathy has entered our bloodstream, and a lot of people are just waiting for a bunch of leaders over 70 to die.” Democracy, national reconciliation and change demand a new civic involvement, not apathy. But she was optimistic in the long term because we “are a creative, capable people, with no religious, ethnic or other conflict, who have developed an allergy to what we have: a totalitarian system.”
Sánchez looked at me — an intense, intelligent, brown-eyed gaze with humor twinkling near its surface. We were seated in the gardens of the Hotel Nacional, looking out over the Malecón to that empty sea. Here, I thought, is Cuba’s future, a Blogostroika, if only the repressive gerontocracy would let it bloom; a Blogostroika that will fill that sea with bright vessels.
“You know,” Sánchez said, “when a nation gets on its knees before a man, it’s all over. When a man decides how much rice I eat a month, or whether or not I can leave a country, that country is sick. This man is human. He commits errors. How can he have such power? Like a lot of people of my generation, I have willed myself to stop thinking about him, as a therapy. I think there will be relief when Fidel dies. We will breathe out. The mystical and symbolic weight of his presence is very heavy, for his opponents and even for his supporters. It’s hard to right his errors while he’s still there.”
I think Sánchez is right. Only after Mao’s death could China unshackle itself by officially determining that he was “70 percent right and 30 percent wrong.” Perhaps Cuba will come down somewhere like that on Fidel — say 75-25 — and move on.
While I was in Cuba, everyone I spoke to referred to Fidel as “Comandante,” even though Raúl formally became commander in chief when he assumed the presidency. Rambling, almost daily “Reflexiones del Compañero Fidel” — signed commentaries on everything from capitalism to the U.S. election — appear in Granma, pored over like Kremlin utterances of old.
Fidel published a book last month called “Peace in Colombia.” Its presentation, the occasion for a collective genuflection by hundreds of guests in a large hall, merited hour after hour of coverage on national TV. At the gathering, I ran into Randy Alonso, host of a TV news show and the director of the information office of the Council of State, the main governing body. I asked him where Fidel is. “He’s lucid, but in a secret place,” Alonso said. “If he wants to reveal it, he will.”
It’s hard in any circumstances for a 77-year-old to be an innovator. But for Raúl, with his far-more charismatic brother looking over his shoulder, it must be near impossible. No wonder Raúl, the former defense minister who hates the limelight, has appeared faltering. He has freed up cellphones (at a price), allowed Cubans into international hotels and intimated that some salaries might be paid in convertible pesos or even be tied to performance. But in essence all he has done in two and a half years is tinker. Perhaps that’s not surprising. He has a vested interest in the existing system: the military runs conglomerates, like Gaviota, that control most of the tourism industry.
“We are at the fading of an era, and it is fading into the unknown,” Juan Carlos Espinosa, a political scientist at Florida International University, said.
In Miami, I caught up with Giselle Palacios, Héctor Palacios’ 23-year-old daughter, who managed to get out of Cuba a few months ago, having been thrown out of the University of Havana because of her father’s activities. She told me she is still in shock. She has realized that the place she was living in is not the real world. There are things happening in Cuba, she said, that don’t happen anywhere else. You carry that knowledge inside you, and you feel lonely.
“Revolution was supposed to mean equal opportunity for all, but it has become a word the Castro brothers own,” she said. “Young Cubans don’t believe in the Castros’ version of revolution. They don’t believe in a world where the Internet is forbidden and your whole world is Cuba with the rest blocked out.”
“Will you stay in Miami?” I asked.
“No, I want to go back one day when other jobs are possible. I think I will always be lonely here. I want to help democracy emerge.”
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