Sebastian Arcos Bergnes - a fighter and a dissident who survived years of imprisonment under the Fidel Castro regime- wages his toughest battle these days in a Southwest Dade apartment, a prisoner this time of a large cancerous tumour that has zapped his energy, but not his resolve.
Arcos, a leading human rights activist who reluctantly left Cuba last month to recieve medical treatment in Miami, spends his days fighting the rectal cancer that has been ravaging his body.
But while he watches cartoons and obligingly swallows the painkillers his daughter administers, his mind is elsewhere, busily mapping out a new strategy for the human rights movement to follow upon his return to Cuba.
And return, he says, he will.
He stops himself for a minute, hesitant to make a commitment when there are so many variables. He lists them: If his health permits it. If he's not in a wheelchair. If the treatment takes. If...His voice trails off.
"This is the most difficult challenge I have ever encountered," says Arcos, 64, putting the weight of his lithe body on a wooden cane."The toughest most unpredictable thing I have dealt with."
Arcos is a veteran of a war that he says began March 10, 1952, the day Fulgencio Batista seized power from Carlos Prio Socarras, Cuba's last democratically elected president.
That war was halted for a few years, while Arcos, like many Cubans, thought Castro's revolution was the solution to the country's many ills. When disillusioned by that promise, Arcos returned to the front lines, this time as a leader of Cuba's first human rights group, Comite Cubano Pro Derechos Humanos.
The committee was the first organization to denounce human rights violations from inside the island. It started with a few men who were in prison, and it now has members throughout the country.
Their job is to collect, investigate and send regular reports to their colleagues in Miami. They, in turn, send the information to international organizations like the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva Switzerland.
"The work on behalf of human rights is the only possibility - and the best - to take a stand against the government," Arcos says. "It has cost us all a lot. We've paid a big price for our work: family separations, imprisonments. But for me, this is the only way."
His stance, first against Batista and then Castro, follows a family
tradition to right the wrong, to help the weak, to be just.
And to do it all with
Arcos comes from a family that has given much to Cuba's struggle for the past 43 years. Most of the nine Arcos Bergnes children, four girls and five boys, have dedicated part of their lives to righting Cuba's political wrongs.
"Many families in Cuba have suffered much during all these years," said Ricardo Bofill, Miami representative of the human rights committee and the man who got the Arcos brothers involved in the human rights movement. "But few have given so much for so long."
In the fight against Batista, one of the brothers was killed, another was crippled, three were imprisoned and three more were exiled (one of them was a nun who left the convent to join Castro's mountain guerillas). Years later, this time working against Castro, three were imprisoned and two left for exile.
Luis, the youngest, was killed at the foot of the Sierra Maestra mountains
at the beginning of the armed struggle that ended with Castro's triumph in
January 1959.
Thirty years later, in a twist of fate that the family says Luis could never have fathomed, ther neighborhood watchdog committee that monitored the block where Sebastian lived and worked on behalf of human rights was renamed Luis Arcos Bergnes.
Gustavo, the family's moral guide, was maimed fighting alongside Castro in a 1953 attack against a military barracks in Santiago de Cuba. A bullet that tore through his back rendered his left leg useless.
Today, still limping and suffering from constant pain, Gustavo is one of Castro's harshest critics and an important dissident voice inside Cuba. After 10 years of prison under Castro and despite the government's offer to ease his way to exile, Gustavo refuses to leave and continues reporting human rights abuses from his dilapidated home in Havana.
Sebastian Arcos himself served time under Batista and Castro, 11 years all together. He blames his cancer on the Castro regime. If he had recieved proper medical attention during his latest imprisonment, his cancer would have been treated earlier.
"It was negligence, plain and simple, and there is no excuse for it,"he says.
The seventh child and the fourth boy of his family. Sebastian was born and raised in the center of Caibarien, a quaint port city in Cuba's central province. He grew up in a home where a picture of Cuba's patriot Jose Marti was always prominently displayed in the living room.
His mother, a deceptively frail-looking woman named Rosina who wrote love poems, instilled in the children a sense of love of country and a passion for history.
As her sons and daughters, one by one, joined the movement against Batista, she urged them on with one warning: "Fulfill your patriotic duty," she told them, "but beware of politicians, of opportunists and of death."
By the time she died in 1985, two of her sons, Sebastian and Gustavo, were in prison again. They went to her funeral briefly, after haggling with guards for hours because they refused to change from their prison uniforms to civilian clothes. That stubborness - what Arcos's children call "the Bergnes factor," a reference to their grandmother - has gotten the Arcos Bergnes in trouble many times.
He returned to Cuba, despite the advice of friends who begged him not to return. It cost him three years in prison, for the crime of openly criticizing the revolution's leaders.
While brother Gustavo was in prison, Arcos was like a caged animal, says his then-wife Maria Juana Cazabon.
He once visited Gustavo with the intention of getting him out of prison at gunpoint. But before Arcos could do anything, he was arrested. His mother, who had accompanied him on the visit, was so outraged that she beat the officers with her cane.
As he retells the story, Arcos smiles sweetly. He seems to soften when the talk turns to family. These days, when he can hardly walk or move, he relies on family more than ever. His children, Sebastian and Maria Rosa, are there to attend to his every need. If he winces with pain, they touch his arm or move a pillow under his body.
Ever since his arrival in Miami last month, his days are a long stream of doctor visits, shots of chemo and morphine, and an occasional chat with a friend. Mostly, he says, he is learning about Miami and the exile community.
The knowledge, he says, will be a useful tool upon his return to Cuba, where his siblings and his cause await him.
October 30, 1995 The Miami Herald