Nuance in Miami, Risk in Cuba

MIAMI -- Exile radio stations here are blasting the Cuban American National Foundation for breaking Little Havana's most sacred taboo: CANF changed its longtime policy and asked its members to travel to the bigger Havana 90 miles south of Key West.

It isn't hard to understand why most anti-Castro groups historically oppose travel to the island.

If you visit as a tourist, you provide dollars to the regime's machinery of repression, and you help Fidel Castro promote an image of Cuba as a tourist paradise instead of what it really is: a country where poets and librarians go to jail for writing the wrong poems or lending the wrong books.

But this is not that.

CANF is not urging its members to go sip rum mojitos and smoke cigars under the tropical sun at Varadero beach while proclaiming the wonders of The Revolution.

Instead, CANF wants to carry the peaceful anti-Castro struggle onto the soil of Cuba itself.

It started with an invitation from dissident -- and outlawed -- groups based in Cuba for Cuban-American organizations to join them as they "gather peacefully in Havana on May 20 to debate ways to democratize," according to Rene Gomez Manzano and Martha Cabello Roque, former political prisoners who are organizing the event.

"Our thinking was, How best to respond?" CANF's Camila Ruiz says. "We said, 'We should be supportive as much as we can, morally and spiritually. What better way than to be there and share with them that historic event.'"

In the political cauldron that is Cuban Miami, that's a hugely controversial stand. We Cubans are not the most nuanced of people -- it's black and white, off or on, yes or no. But it is about time to start seeing nuance.

The last time dissidents on the island tried to put together a national meeting of this scope was in 1996. A little more than a week before the gathering, state security agents rounded up nearly 200 of the organizers and threw them in jail.

No meeting. There was no one left to meet.

Castro fears nothing more than an organized opposition with international credibility, which is why he ordered heads busted nine years ago. This time dissidents know they face a similar crackdown.

So do the CANF members who go to stand by them. What's more, they might face even more danger, because the regime considers the organization a terrorist group. Chairman Jorge Mas and President Francisco (Pepe) J. Hernandez are certain to be arrested if they go.

And nobody knows if any of the 155 members of the board of directors will even be allowed in.

If the regime bans them from entering, it's a victory: Yet another demonstration of the Cuban government's complete inability to tolerate dissent.

And if they get in?

"We want the people in Cuba to take risks," Camila Ruiz told me. "Now we are willing to take a risk as well."

Cuban-born Roger Hernandez is a syndicated columnist and writer-in-residence at New Jersey Institute of Technology.