Cuban hopes: the people find their voice--but will the world help the Castros silence it?

IN the 1980s, most American foreign-policy experts and intelligence analysts failed to see the internal changes taking place in the Soviet bloc as serious challenges to the regimes. Could history be repeating itself closer to home, this time in Cuba?

After 50 years of living under the most repressive dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere, the Cuban people are losing their fear and beginning to push off the Communist boot from their collective neck. Paradoxically, this is happening as a dark cloud of authoritarian populism spreads throughout Latin America, financed by Hugo Chavez's petrodollars, undergirded by Castro's intelligence and security infrastructure, and propelled by years of incompetence and selfishness on the part of political elites. Democratic change in Cuba, long deemed an impossibility, could turn the tide and usher forth a rebirth of freedom in the region.

An uncommon sound was heard throughout three Cuban cities in early May of this year: pots and pans being banged in protest over political and economic conditions on the island. The protest was as unusual as the way in which it was organized: An incipient movement of young bloggers used their limited access to the Internet--the Cuban government severely restricts access to computers and the Web--to call on the population to carry out the protest.

A few weeks earlier, on March 29, at the annual Havana Arts Festival, some of these same bloggers, together with young artists, had taken the stand during a presentation and proclaimed an "open podium"--calling on the hundreds of onlookers and participants to express themselves freely. Many did, openly and courageously mocking government censorship.

These reports are unusual because any anti-government protests in Cuba have traditionally been met with furious physical attacks by police and government-organized "rapid-response brigades" of local goons armed with iron bars and other blunt instruments. In these recent cases, however, the rapid-response brigades have not been effective: The citizens have responded with passive, but consistent, resistance.

At a government-sponsored concert a few weeks before the Havana Arts Festival, many youths had openly protested the arrest of Gorki Aguila, leader of a punk-rock band known for its obscene lyrics and no-holds-barred critique of the Castro regime. The Castros' gerontocratic ruling clique is attempting to maintain total control over a nation whose population averages less than half its age.

In the town of Placetas, in the central part of Cuba, lives 44-year-old Jorge Luis Garcia Perez, also known as "Antunez," a black Cuban who served 17 years in prison for calling for glasnost and perestroika on the island. Antunez has been called "the Black Diamond" by his fellow prisoners, for his tough resistance to the dictatorship and in reference to the color of his skin. He has organized meetings, marches, fasts, and vigils in a crusade to mobilize a nonviolent civic movement for change, and he recently went on a hunger strike to draw international attention to the plight of Cubans.