One man's prison

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

Aug. 22, 2006 | 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 Pay&aacute. "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."

Payá himself has clashed with the Castro regime since puberty. In 1968,
at age 17, he was shipped off to a work camp for young people with
"ideological problems" on the Isle of Youth, off the southern coast of
Cuba, for being a devout Catholic and for speaking publicly in favor of
Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring. Payá labored at the island's rock
quarry, getting special permission from the camp guards to live in an
abandoned church. It was in the old nave of Our Lady of Dolores that
Payá resolved to take a pacifist approach to challenging the Castro
regime -- and to do so from within Cuba. Unlike many Cubans who branded
themselves dissidents as early and as loudly as Payá, he didn't flee to
Miami. Payá married and had three children in Havana, where his
movement, the "Movimiento Cristiano Liberacion," was also born. By 1996,
the group had recruited enough activists to cover the island, and Payá
zoned in on what he thought could be the Achilles' heel of Castro's
totalitarian regime.

There was a clause in the 1976 Cuban Constitution stipulating that
10,000 citizen signatures could bring about a national referendum. Payá
started petitioning Cubans to support five reforms: freedom of speech,
freedom of the press, free enterprise, amnesty for political prisoners
and new electoral laws. He named his campaign after Father Felix Varela,
a Cuban priest who had championed Cuban independence from Spain. Asking
participants to write down their identity card numbers was an exercise
in combating fear.

Once the Varela Project petition had surpassed 11,000 signatures, Payá
and his fellow activists lugged the cardboard boxes to the Cuban
Parliament. The regime responded with an immediate counterreferendum,
which it boasted had a whopping 99 percent approval rating among Cuban
voters. To stomp on Payá's petition with classic Castro flourish, the
government used the counterreferendum as an occasion to declare
socialism in Cuba "irrevocable." The following spring, on the eve of the
United States' invasion of Iraq, when few foreign media outlets had an
eye on the Caribbean, the police rounded up most of Payá's colleagues,
sentencing them to prison for up to 28 years.

Cuba's chief activist was marooned. Three years passed, and by Payá's
account, surveillance only worsened. ("Imagine if the parents of your
children's friends were harassed.") When I sat down with Payá and
listened to his assurance that the Castro regime was in its "final
stage," the claim sounded wishful. Payá was the lone change-maker on the
anti-change island. The only novelties in the Havana landscape were
fallen pillars, collapsed roofs and a few new billboards of doom.

But Payá proceeded with his National Dialogue. In May 2006, Payá
announced that he and his "modest network" of activists had compiled the
feedback of these meetings and now had a hefty 170-page document that
would guide the country through its seminal post-Castro steps in the
direction dictated by the Cuban people. "It tells us how there can be a
bridge between our current situation and democracy." Payá leaned forward
in his rocking chair. "It's the fruit of the process of citizens'
participation. And that's why it weighs so much!"

At that, the fat, wheezing beagle waddled back into the room, and Payá
allowed himself another of his infrequent jokes. "Vamos. Ya
participaste," he told the dog. "Let's go. You have participated."

Though the "All-Cuban Plan" may have been written by a committee of
thousands, the document bears a clear Payá imprint. He's most known for
championing free elections and human rights, but Payá also insists that
Cuba's public healthcare and education not be trampled as democracy
rushes in. Payá doesn't rush, nor does he think Cuba can. "It can't
happen overnight," he kept repeating, as he flipped through some key
components of the massive blueprint: the return of exiles, privatization
of the media, economic aperture. "Fine, open the economy," said Payá,
"but not so that those who have money can come and buy Cuba like it's an
estate."

"The hope is that with this plan, the Cuban people can discover ... that
change is not a punishment. That it is not a jump to capitalism as
savior. Nor is it a piñata of anguish."

Until last month, the idea of these Cubans -- sitting among strangers
and deliberating how the Cuban revolution, at 47 years strong, might
look with a democratic makeover -- was almost laughable. But one month
after Payá and I spoke, both his words and campaign gained prescience.
Paya had spent years shepherding Cubans into secret rooms, positing that
Papa Fidel could someday expire, and coaxing them to opine on a future,
anonymously. Then Castro got on the loudspeaker and broke the news
himself. Overnight, Cuba's 11 million people were rushed through step
one of Payá's anti-fatalism campaign: realizing that the status quo
could break.

"Yes, there's a change in the atmosphere here," Payá said over the phone
last week. After days of trying to catch him in the early evening, I had
called at 7 a.m. -- before he bicycled to work. "For the first time,
people think that Cuba will have to change." Payá is eager to continue
holding meetings as part of the ongoing National Dialogue project,
though he was reluctant to provide many details over his bugged phone
line. He wants to use the "All-Cuban Plan" as a working document that
can "say to the world, 'Look, yes -- there is a real alternative ...
found[ed] on the wisdom and experiences of Cubans." Some of Payá's
allies in Miami maintain a National Dialogue Web site, where the plan
waits in PDF form for anyone who wants to look. "It's what Cuba needs.
It can open a dialogue about the changes that are being proposed,
because it's not a rigid formula. It can evolve."

Despite the hint of optimism, however, Payá sounded beleaguered.
Surveillance has increased since the announcement of Castro's illness.
"There's a great deal of vigilance," he said in a tired monotone. "The
situation is much, much more closed." He may believe his 170-page plan
is the cornerstone of the future, but Payá now has even less opportunity
than before to meet with fellow dissidents. When I asked if other people
might have more latitude, he cut the question short. "No one. Everyone's
watched and persecuted. Everything's closed off. Completely."

While the security police are intent on keeping Payá inside his
shuttered parlor, they pounce on Payá's foreign media contacts as soon
as they leave. Those journalists who make it to El Cerro learn soon
thereafter that they've broken and entered the island's highest-security
one-man prison.

After leaving Payá's home, I rejoined the foot traffic of Calle Peñon
and went looking for a cab. While waiting to flag one, I spotted a
propaganda billboard, took out my notebook and wrote down its unironic
slogan: "Determined to Go On Being Free." About 36 hours later, an agent
from contrainteligencia was at my host family's house, inquiring (among
many other things) whether I liked to carry a notebook around Havana.

To gauge how many more run-ins I would have with agents in olive-green
fatigues, I consulted a Cuban acquaintance. "Prepare yourself for a
hellish airport experience," he advised. "Everything will be searched."

By then, I'd lived in Cuba, off and on, for a year. I'd had only a
tourist visa, and had done only untouristy things. In three days, I had
to expunge all trace of journalism from my luggage. I dressed my
notebooks as birthday presents and mailed them via DHL to an address in
Toronto. I hand-shredded 60 printouts of a Cuba-centric book draft and
dumped the bag of memoir confetti into a dumpster on garbage day. I even
cured my laptop's Cuba infestation by copying its documents onto three
CDs: Salsa No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3. Most important, I found a tourist
kind and daring enough to smuggle the cassette tape of my interview with
Payá out of the country.

When counterintelligence returned to my guest house, this time with a
police car, my belongings were clean. I braced myself for the Osvaldo
Payá inquisition, and got into the car waiting below my casa balcony.

When my three-on-one interrogation ended with a soft rebuke to get the
right visa next time -- no mention of my visit to the famous dissident
-- I thought I'd let my paranoia swell to Cuban size unnecessarily. It
seemed safe enough to hide a computer flash-drive in the base of my
flashlight for my flight home, remembering that Payá himself had told
me, as I set my tape recorder on his parlor table, "You always have to
run a risk, or you'll never accomplish anything in Cuba."

I arrived at the Jose Marti International Airport at the crack of dawn
and, sure enough, I made it past the ticket counter, customs and the
carry-on scanner. At my flight's gate, I sprawled out over three seats
to take a nap, noticing the airport employees lollygagging at the
breakfast counter. Then two men in tan fatigues approached and told me
to come downstairs, to a pitch-black interrogation room, where two of
the four interrogators were slumped over desks, asleep.

They combed through every item in my luggage and scanned everything with
text, from half-written postcards to a paperback of "Lolita." If Osvaldo
Payá has lived even 10 moments like the moment I spent watching
counterintelligence pull a flashlight out of my suitcase sleeve, then
it's no wonder Cuba's leading dissident braids his activism with
religious faith. Counterintelligence did not unscrew the cap of my blue
flashlight to find the blue flash-drive. They were more interested in my
address book.

The interrogation then became a name game, as the men pressed me to
confess the name of every Cuban at whom I'd ever smiled. When the flight
crew peered through the room's glass window, hinting that takeoff was
imminent, one interrogator finally snapped, and threw the name "Payá" at
me, demanding to know where Osvaldo and I had met. They'd found nothing
to confiscate, no proof that I was a spy or even a journalist, and would
have to let me board the plane. But first, they did want to make one
thing clear. I'd touched an untouchable in Cuba, and the revolution had
been watching.

-- By Colleen Kinder

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/08/22/osvaldo_paya/?source=whitelist