Dignitaries Visiting Cuba Huddle With Dissidents

The paint is peeling off the walls of Elizardo Sanchez’s simple house in the Miramar Playa neighborhood of Havana. His furniture is old, sparse and frayed. And the telephone number on his business card is followed, in parentheses, by the words “If it works.”

But this week, the leaders of Portugal, Uruguay, Panama and Spain, Mexico’s foreign secretary and senior officials from half a dozen other Latin American nations have all sought Sanchez out.

Sanchez is a dissident in President Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and for the first time in four decades of Communist rule, he and a dozen or so other strident pro-democracy advocates have been allowed to meet visiting foreign leaders on Cuban soil.

Although the meetings were not among the televised events of Tuesday’s Ibero-American Summit, hosted by Cuba for the first time, they made as much history as the Havana Declaration signed here Tuesday night.

“Never before have so many dignitaries come to Cuba and met with dissidents and opponents of the government,” said Sanchez, a former professor of Marxist philosophy at Havana University who broke with Castro’s revolutionary ranks 32 years ago.

“This signifies a great acknowledgment of a sector of society that the government said for many years did not exist,” he said.

In fact, there has been no mention of the meetings with dissidents in Cuba’s state-run media, and they came after the pre-summit arrests of dissidents whom the government labeled “counterrevolutionaries” working for the anti-Castro “mafia in Miami.”

But Cuban officials privately said the meetings are part of a gradual opening of Cuba’s tightly controlled society and a policy that differentiates between ideological dissidents such as Sanchez and those with direct links to Washington or Miami whose aim is merely to destabilize the Castro regime.

The meetings also provided clear evidence that the visiting delegations have used the event to encourage change in Cuba’s one-party system--a process they have dubbed “constructive engagement” but one that for years has been roundly criticized by the U.S. government.

Portuguese President Jorge Sampaio used the summit floor Tuesday to quote from a 1996 declaration on human rights signed by the 24 member nations calling for “open participation of women and men in politics, the economy and society.”

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, in a news conference outside the summit chamber, said he had met with Sanchez and other dissidents to defend “aspirations of freedom, human rights, the rule of law and of just laws.”

In his closing remarks, Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo told the gathering: “Today more than ever, sovereignty also needs democracy. There can be no sovereign nations without free men and women--men and women who can exercise their essential freedoms, freedom to think and give their opinions . . . freedom to dissent and to choose. These freedoms can only be achieved in a free democracy.”

And the mere fact that the visiting dignitaries were permitted access to former enemies of the state such as Sanchez and Hector Palacios indicated to many here that an increasingly confident and emboldened Cuban government may be beginning to soften its policy against internal political dissent, as it did its policies toward religion in advance of Pope John Paul II’s visit to Cuba in January 1998.

At the very least, the meetings during a summit that was viewed universally as a success for the participating countries and for Castro himself benefited his political opponents at home.

“They have given us incredible moral support,” Palacios said. “I think we have won a lot of expectations and hope--hope that we will have other doors to knock on and other eyes that will look out for us.”

But he added: “We don’t have the hope that the government will change.”

Sanchez was more skeptical about the post-summit mood of the government.

“I don’t see the Cuban government preparing itself to make a transition to modernization,” he said as he sat beneath photographs of him meeting Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), Czech President Vaclav Havel and French President Jacques Chirac, who has provided funding for Sanchez’s Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation.

“I have the feeling the Cuban government is preparing to harden its position in internal and foreign policy,” he said.

If so, Castro gave only a few clues during his summit speech Tuesday.

In a sometimes cryptic, ironic and uncharacteristically brief address, the 73-year-old leader spoke of “learned and knowing people who predict the future giving themselves the impossible task of persuading Cuba that it should abandon the roads of revolution and socialism as the only alternative for salvation.”

“Advice rains from everywhere. But we thought of another way, and we were resolved to struggle,” he said.

Wearing a dark business suit instead of his signature fatigues, Castro added wryly, “As if our teacher were Aristotle himself, we listened politely to their advice with the smile of the Mona Lisa and the biblical patience of Job.”