One man's prison

Cuba's leading dissident plans for life after Castro, and a Salon reporter gets hands-on experience with smuggling and the secret police.

By Colleen Kinder

Read more: Politics, News

Photo by Claudia Daut/Reuters

Osvaldo Paya

Aug. 22, 2006 | EL CERRO, Cuba -- The window blinds of Osvaldo Payá's front parlor are shut on greater Havana. In this metropolis of shared noise and open-door dinners, depriving pedestrians of a peek inside is not the norm. But Payá has reason to pull back from Calle Peñon, a dingy, potholed street in El Cerro, a close-in suburb southwest of Havana's center. Payá, Cuba's leading dissident, has been harassed by neighbors and security police alike, and the word graffitied on his house years ago established Payá's place in the neighborhood: "Traitor."

Despite the sealed blinds, the 4 p.m. din of Habaneros in midcommute fills Payá's parlor. Payá himself has just biked home from work on his Chinese-made one-speed, and his jet-black hair is still slick from the shower. At age 54, he maintains two careers. By day, like any upstanding adherent of the revolution, Payá repairs medical equipment at a nearby hospital. He does his other work here in this cloistered residence, alone. He used to have colleagues in his fight against the Castro regime, but all that remains of his original team of dissidents are the photographs that hang from a white plaster sculpture in a corner of the parlor. All his friends are in prison.

In 2002, Payá and his team delivered 11,000 signatures to the Cuban Parliament in the hopes of getting that body to debate and vote on a human rights referendum called the Varela Project. A year later, the Cuban government arrested 76 "counterrevolutionaries." Fifty of them were Payá's co-conspirators in the Varela Project. Payá was spared because he'd become internationally famous. By the time of the arrests, he was a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize and a winner of the European Union's Sakharov Prize for promoting human rights.

Ever since, Payá has been involved in a still more ambitious project. For the past three years, he's been spending his nights on what he calls the National Dialogue, a campaign to bring Cubans together to discuss life after Fidel Castro, and a possible transition to democracy. In secret groups of two to 12, as many as 14,000 Cubans have specified in written surveys how they'd like to see Cuba change, asking for everything from constitutional reform to better healthcare to access to the much-resented tourist-only hotels. Even before the announcement of the ancient leader's serious illness, Payá had begun an assault on Cuba's ultimate taboo.

In person, Payá doesn't have the bravado or charisma one might expect from a totalitarian regime's most prominent critic. A stocky man with a nasal voice, he makes only sporadic eye contact during conversation. He speaks forcefully, in long barrages of opinion, but swallows every few minutes as if there's a pill in his throat that he must force down without water.

On the summer afternoon I appeared at his door without warning, Payá forgave my spontaneity, knowing its reason. Since Payá's phone is tapped, a Cuban nun had told me that the safest and most confidential way to request an interview was to approach Payá's brother Alejandro in person, at the church where Alejandro works. I contacted Alejandro as instructed -- and was interrogated by the Cuban secret police the next day. Deciding to trust no intermediary, I waited a few weeks and then went directly to Payá's one-story home in El Cerro. His 18-year-old daughter answered the door, handed me a glass of limeade on a saucer and asked me to wait. After 10 minutes, Payá greeted me with a smile, shooed his portly, asthmatic beagle from the room and gestured toward two rocking chairs. "I have a lot of work," he said, "but I can talk for a few minutes." He sat down and began to rock and speak without pause for an hour.

The lack of open debate within Cuba about a post-Castro government has long irked Payá. "It's as if there were a fatalism," he complained, "in which they say, 'There's nothing to do. You have to wait until Fidel Castro dies. And after that, his successors.'" When Payá says "they," he means, like many Cubans, the voice of the regime's propaganda machinery. Payá imitated the voice's newest, doom-laden iteration, as shouted from billboards, about what the U.S. government plans for Cuba should socialism fall: "They're going to take away your house ... You're not going to have education ... You're not going to have public heath." Lest Cubans misconstrue this "they" as a domestic villain, each slogan is headed: "El Plan Bush."

What bothers Payá even more than Cubans assuming the regime is immutable is when non-Cubans pontificate that the island will "fall" in one of three directions. "What are the alternatives that people are discussing," Payá asked, "a succession? Chaos? An intervention?" Dryly, he dismissed all three. "These aren't alternatives, though the danger of them exists." Payá has a fervent conviction that the future of Cuba hinges on citizen involvement. He gazes up the tall parlor wall, looking for an apt metaphor, and settles on one from the New Testament: "In architecture, the cornerstone is the point of equilibrium. If it's missing, everything falls. This cornerstone is the Cuban people."

In Cuba, few people even refer to their leader by name, using nicknames like "the Boss" or miming a long beard below their chin. When I asked Payá how he pulled off his post-Castro focus groups in such a climate, he made it sound uncomplicated. "It was easier," he shrugged, "than getting 40,000 signatures," which is the current and still growing total for the Varela Project. Payá had asked signers to include their identity card numbers. For the National Dialogue, explained Payá, Cubans "got together in some churches. They got together in some houses, with much privacy."

Then Payá's doorbell rang. He stared at the parlor door for an instant before rising to answer the bell. After a quick exchange with an unseen and unnamed woman, Payá resumed our interview. "Many participated under surveillance," he continued, "with the [secret police] interfering."

Next page: On the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the police rounded up most of Paya's colleagues