Who's Bugging Castro?

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.

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.

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