ELIZARDO SANCHEZ Elizardo Sanchez is Cuba's best-known dissident, president of the Cuban Commission of Human Rights and Reconciliation. He was a professor of Marxist philosophy at Havana University until he broke with Fidel Castro years ago. Now a socialist, he campaigns for human rights in Cuba, arguing for a peaceful transition to a more open society. Over the years, he has been arrested about a dozen times, spent eight years in prison and was given France's top human rights award by the French president.

Go and Sin No More

Havana, Jan. 30, 1998

It is difficult for me to offer an objective opinion or a few impartial observations about Fidel Castro. In the past 30 years, I have been part of the nonviolent resistance movement against his government, and that has meant (and means) living under the closest surveillance or subjected to naked repression from his ubiquitous, secret political police, who on numerous occasions have terrorized my innocent relatives and myself. I suffered privation for many long years in our very own gulag. A countless number of my compatriots suffered (or suffer) in greater measure.

Be that as it may, it is obvious that this man led the most profound popular revolution ever fought in this continent in this century, a feat that gained the support of almost all Cuban people. The great majority of them hailed the rebel triumph and the program of broad reforms introduced in 1959, and many of my compatriots, who now live in exile, applauded those emancipatory promises. I was one of them and have no regrets.

I have the impression that Fidel Castro has been and is, for better or for worse, the most intelligent and charismatic politician that 20th Century Cuba has produced. Likewise, for better or for worse, he has been our principal social reformer, because he inspired and spearheaded the overturning of almost all structures of society, of the State and even of the Cuban people's psyches. In the present order, almost every one of us has ``an account'' to settle with someone else.

After four decades of exerting power from a position of absolute authority based on a strange mix of respect and fear, Fidel Castro may be wishing to live in peace with others (though not with himself, something almost no one can achieve), surrounded by grandchildren and great-grandchildren to whom he can relate his many adventures, without alluding to his human fears or to his dreadful decisions, which he will no doubt refuse to recall.

It would be reasonable to allow this man -- who some applaud and some of us criticize, but who does not elicit indifference -- to preserve his own legend in a climate of absolute respect for civil and political rights, the same rights his government meticulously transgresses.

I firmly believe that we Cubans and the international community can contribute to such an outcome.

If this miracle on Earth does occur, then Fidel Castro and his followers may go in peace to ask forgiveness for their sins, as we seek forgiveness for ours.