Who's Bugging Castro?

ADALBERTO ROQUE/AFP
In a May Day speech, Castro claimed Cuban dissidents are colluding with the U.S.

Oswaldo Paya is something Cuban President Fidel Castro has rarely, if ever, faced: a dissident as hardheaded as he is. When Castro took power in 1959, Paya was the only kid in his Havana primary school who refused to become a Communist Youth member. In high school, after openly criticizing the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, he was sent to a labor camp for three years. Rather than escape to Miami in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, he stayed in Cuba to work for democratic reform. Now his doggedness has prompted one of Castro's most ironfisted crackdowns: scores of Paya's fellow dissidents have been arrested for treason and given lengthy prison terms. Paya, 51, says he's undeterred. "We're the first nonviolent force for change this island has ever known," he told TIME by phone from Havana. "Castro can't crush that, no matter how hard he tries."

Paya, an engineer who bicycles to his job as a hospital-equipment technician, is also complicating George W. Bush's policy toward Cuba. The U.S. President is expected to give an important Cuba policy speech next week. Given the jailing of the dissidents and the stunning executions of three Cubans for the noncapital crime of trying to hijack a ferry to Miami last month, the Administration's natural inclination is to hammer El Comandante. But with some 40,000 Cubans in recent years having openly endorsed Paya's campaign for a popular vote on expanding freedoms, his Christian Liberation Movement (M.C.L.) has produced what most Cuba watchers agree is the first real chance for democratic change on the island. If Bush is too bellicose, he risks provoking further retaliatory measures by Castro, possibly even a crippling of Paya's movement. "The dynamic has changed," says Joe Garcia, executive director of the Cuban American National Foundation in Miami. "We finally have strong democratic players on the ground in Cuba." Garcia's organization once wanted Bush to push for stiffer sanctions against Cuba but has now dropped that demand.

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In the past, Castro, 76, managed to neutralize dissidents before they became globally known, like Lech Walesa in Poland or Corazon Aquino in the Philippines. But Paya's celebrity is beginning to rival Castro's. During his visit to Cuba last year, ex-President Jimmy Carter hailed Paya in a speech broadcast to every Cuban household. Paya won the European Union's Sakharov Prize for human rights last December. Vaclav Havel, who led the "velvet revolution" that toppled communism in Czechoslovakia, has nominated Paya for the Nobel Peace Prize. Robert De Niro's Tribeca Film Festival last week canceled its screening of Oliver Stone's documentary on Castro, Comandante, and showed instead a film about Paya. All this attention probably keeps him out of jail.

Paya, a devout Roman Catholic whose model for action is the work of civil rights icons like Martin Luther King Jr., is in it for the long term. "Paya is unique," says Jose Miguel Vivanco of Human Rights Watch in Washington. "He is openly challenging Castro's system by using the system itself." Paya, for example, has at various times in the past publicly announced his intention to run as an opposition candidate in Castro's one-party elections, a transgression for which he was once arrested. But Paya's most effective tool has been his petition drive, the Varela Project. Under Castro's 1976 constitution, a national referendum requires just 10,000 signatures. Paya's movement has so far gathered some 40,000, calling for a plebiscite on free speech, multiparty elections and increased private enterprise.

Castro peremptorily refuses to recognize the petitions. But they have spawned a grass-roots dissident network that finally spooked him into action. In March, with the aid of agents who had infiltrated the island's opposition cells, Castro rounded up more than 75 dissidents and journalists, most of them Paya lieutenants. In a speech on May 1, Castro branded them "mercenaries on the payroll of Bush's Hitler-like government," which he claimed is poised to invade Cuba.

Paya says that when he goes out, he is shadowed by government agents, who sometimes follow just a few feet away. Despite the harassment, he says the arrests and repression are only broadening his base. Vivanco, however, fears that Castro is succeeding in weakening the movement by decapitating its upper management and thinks the U.S.'s handling of the issue could determine the movement's fate.

For Bush, that means walking a fine line between backing Paya and keeping U.S. support below Castro's radar. To demonstrate that he's not a U.S. pawn, Paya has made it a point to keep his movement at arm's length from diplomats like James Cason, head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. Cason infuriated Castro this year with a stepped-up campaign of visits with, and economic aid to, certain Cuban dissidents who Paya claims did not include the M.C.L. or Varela members. Castro seized on the actions, claiming that all dissidents were being paid to help the U.S. destabilize Cuba.