At one time, Mario Chanes de Armas had far more in common with Castro than age, but today he is a humble spectator, watching Havana's political events unfold through the haze of exile.

I found him in a small storefront office where a group of former political prisoners keep a watch on Cuba, particularly this week. In Havana, heads of state paraded through town, some of them extending historic, albeit lukewarm, handshakes to Castro opponents. Outside Havana, this was being hailed as the summit that was upstaged by the opposition.

But from where Chanes sits, such diplomatic gestures seem to be nothing more than choreographed steps in a fleeting dance. Once the presidents are gone, he knows, it all resumes -- the brutality, the bogus trials, the political pathology that invades every inch of Cuban life. This is simply what happens in Cuba, even when the world is watching.

``What is it all for? After all these years, the world still embraces an assassin,'' Chanes lamented, his words fading into the sweep of traffic along Southwest 57th Avenue.

For a man so seemingly anonymous, Chanes played a lead role in just about every historic event of the early revolution, from the founding of the rebel movement to the 1953 attack on the Moncada army barracks, to the landing of the Granma, to the Sierra Maestra expedition. But just months after their triumph, Castro betrayed Chanes, throwing him in jail on trumped-up charges. What's more, Castro erased Chanes' name from the revolution's own history lessons.

As Castro continued his veering course, Chanes became the revolution's most distinguished casualty. His ludicrous sentence came to symbolize the cruel core of the regime.

He was sentenced to 30 years in prison -- and he served 30 years, longer than any other Cuban political prisoner. To explain it in a more global context, Chanes served longer than one of the world's most famous political prisoners, Nelson Mandela. Yet while the world prayed and lobbied for Mandela, it ignored Mario Chanes and his fellow political inmates.

``At the Isle of Pines prison, we'd ask one another, `Which of us will be the one to turn the lights out?' And it turned out to be me,'' recalled Chanes, who was allowed to leave Cuba in July 1993.

From 1961 to 1967, he watched 15,000 men pass through that prison.

``I watched men get shot, point blank, beaten with bayonets, arbitrarily pulled out and punished. But we were alone. The world didn't know,'' he said.

In subsequent jails, Chanes witnessed the most extreme manifestations of revolutionary justice. He also watched as his life painfully slipped away.

On March 21, 1962, two days after he began to serve his sentence, Chanes' wife Caridad gave birth to their only child, Mayito. He came to know his son through rare, high-security visits interrupted by long periods of isolation. As the regime tightened its fist against the political prisoners, pressuring them to wear the garb of common criminals and to embrace a ``reeducation'' plan, Chanes and fellow political prisoners declared themselves plantado, unyielding. This posture cost Chanes and his comrades family visits, medical care and other privileges.

From a muffled distance, he learned of the deaths of his father and his mother. Then, in 1984, he heard his son died during routine surgery.

The revolution he had risked his life for denied him the right to attend the burials.

It did, however, grant him the distinction of being the longest-held plantado. Long before presidents were offering lip service to Cuban dissidents, he wrote the prologue on Cuban defiance from a dark and forgotten place.