Published: 07/08/90,
Section: VIEWPOINT
Page: 1E
In a home and a homeland and at a time where others might see bleakness, ugliness and little hope, Gustavo Arcos wears a resolute half-smile. His strength is built on love for the Cuba of his dreams -- those dreams of the past and those he believes will yet come true.
I found him calm amid the controversy over what he had to say last month. Then Arcos, associated three decades ago with Fidel Castro and now labeled an enemy of the state because he advocates human rights, called on all Cubans to join in discussions on the country's future. All would encompass, in Arcos' definition, exiles in Miami and elsewhere, Cubans in Cuba, members of the Castro government. That approach was swiftly condemned by some exiles, most notably by Armando Valladares, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission and former political prisoner who wrote Against All Hope about his experiences in Castro's jails. Valladares suggested that Arcos' willingness to involve the Cuban government in any conversations amounted to treason to the Cuban cause.
What Valladares had to say "somewhat surprised" Arcos, who said he's never met him. "I would never have expected those statements."
Arcos calls it a "lamentable controversy, but one with a positive side. At least I know our philosophy has been widely distributed." In an interview that lasted almost two hours, Arcos spoke of his "simple strategy . . . dialogue, a rational, civilized dialogue (and) involving those in exile, too. It is a peaceful strategy, a long-range one."
Arcos and his wife, Teresita de la Paz, live in the Vedado section of Havana. They and seven other families make their home in what used to be a mansion, but could in no way be described that way any more. The house has little furniture and the walls almost no paint. Picture frames hang on the walls, but no pictures. The front windows are broken in two places, signs of the March 8 demonstration against Arcos. "What happened . . . was orchestrated by the secret police," he says, absolving his neighbors. "In this neighborhood," he insists, "I have cordial relations with everybody."
We spoke downstairs in a room almost bare. A florescent light dangled from a red cord. The Arcoses, with apparently little that's worth any money, seem to have a great storehouse of dignity and decency, courage and conscience.
They live upstairs in three tiny rooms -- a terrace, bedroom, bathroom. The bedroom walls contain a rosary, a crucifix, pictures of Jesus and Pope Pius XII and five faded Modigliani prints. Undergarments hang on a clothesline on the terrace.
It is hard to see, in these surroundings and these circumstances, why a man like Arcos can be optimistic.
But he seems genuinely so. "This may seem to you as utopian," he acknowledges. "The regime does not value the dissidents and the people in exile. But some day they (those in power) will see the value and begin to dismantle the totalitarian instruments and institutions of this government. Some day," he says, "it will happen. You would have to be a prophet to know when."
Already, says Arcos, he can "feel symptoms" of change "in spite of the controls of this military state, the committees for defense, the absolute control of the TV and radio and press. The people wear masks, but I can see behind them."
Talk is the only realistic path to the future, he says. "I want to avoid violence and civil war." He calls "violent methods" of protest "not only absurd and useless, but bloody absurd and useless." That approach didn't even work in the '60s, he recalls, and "Now there is an enormous military apparatus in place. You see Cuba as a small country because of its geography, but it is a leading military power with operations elsewhere in the world."
Arcos has nothing nice to say about Castro.
Once they were allies, participants together in the fabled, semi-suicidal July 26, 1953, attack on the Moncada barracks. Wounded there, Arcos was arrested soon after and jailed with the Castro brothers. He was named Cuba's envoy to Belgium after Fidel Castro took power in 1959. By 1966, a disillusioned Arcos was in a Castro jail. He spent three years in prison, then seven more between 1979 and 1986.
"Originally," says Arcos, "I thought highly of Fidel Castro. He was my first leader, a man with the qualities necessary to lead the fight against Batista and then participate in leading the country. We thought he was gifted, 'the chosen one.' "
But Arcos says he "came to think of Castro as a man whose principal mission was to have and enjoy his power. For him (Castro) it was beyond family, beyond love, beyond money, beyond country. Power above all. He wanted to be one of the men of destiny of his time."
Arcos, at 63, the same age as Castro, remembers: "When he (Castro) was a young man, he was sensitive to other people's problems. He appeared to admire Jose Marti (the great Cuban patriot). He seemed to be a Don Quixote. Today," says Arcos, Castro "is . . . not only old chronologically, but his system is old and has failed."
Those are powerful words. Is Arcos scared?
Yes, he says. "To fear is very human. Fundamentally we all have the instinct of survival. I say without boast," he emphasizes yet softly, "that life has taught us that the courageous only die once; the coward dies many times."
There was a time he wanted to leave Cuba for Miami. "It was in jail (in the '80s) that I decided to stay no matter what."
He believes he and others in the human rights movement are making a difference. The movement, he says, "has diminished the credibility of the regime in the world in human rights." He calls that regime "a dirty, bureaucratic police state."
He lives quietly and modestly, spending much of his time with books. "I read and read and read, everything I can get my hands on that I didn't read in prison."
Right now he's reading, in Spanish, The General in His Labyrinth (The Last Days of Simon Bolivar) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He says he can read well in French, too, and "I can get by in English with the help of a dictionary."
He wants Miami's exiles to remember:
"One knows that if you have democratic ideas and ideals, you need to have room to disagree. I would like that this be the last controversy and that something positive would come out of it.
"The Cubans in exile can play a great role in the future of Cuba," he says, "but the road to democracy will start here and be resolved here. In the post-Castro world, the Cubans in exile will play a great role but, of course, in conjunction with the Cubans here.
"I wish," he says, "that all these prejudices from there (Miami) to here (Havana), and here to there, would disappear."
© 1996 The Miami Herald.