The poignant phrase comes at the moment when he sees what happens to his powerful father-in-law, General Tony de la Guardia, after he had missed a family luncheon. It is Tuesday, June 13, 1989.

Arriving at Tony's Havana home, Masetti and wife find it ransacked by police, and learn that the general was a prisoner in Villa Marista, on the brink of being executed as a traitor. A stunned Masetti gasps, ``That's incredible!'', whereupon a policeman asked him, ``Why incredible? Don't you trust the Revolution?

The question helps crystalize the unfolding drama. To trust means to have faith in something. For centuries this meant belief in a God that cannot fail us. On the theological plane, faith in God must be absolute, blind.

When tragedy befalls someone, when misfortune plagues a family, the common credo is ``Have faith.'' It reflects the tenet that God loves all men, and that any suffering an individual encounters is part of God's plan for his salvation. Beaten in body and spirit, Job prostrated himself on the sand and made the ultimate declaration of faith, ``Jehovah gave and Jehovah took away! Blessed be the name of Jehovah!''

But when the Industrial Revolution and the Enlighment created a new perspective on life and death, intense intellectuals attempted to remove God from significance in their worship of science and reason.

From these roots arose the strongest anti-religious (as well as anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalistic) force of the 19th Century, Marxism. After gaining power in Russia, Marxism transformed into a religion; with Marx God, Lenin his prophet and the Communist Party his church. Marxist arguments ossified into dogma, and the incredulous were persecuted and eliminated.

Heroic individuals strove for truth over the barbed wall of propaganda and denounced the horrors beyond the wall. They helped to bury Marx as ``the god that failed.''

Yet, even after the fall of the Soviet Union, not everyone accepted the failure. Wrapped in abstractions such as ``national sovereignty'' and radical anti-imperialism, some believers reaffirmed their commitment to violence. One of them still rules Cuba -- which is why the Cuban policeman's question to Masetti still echoes: ``Don't you trust the Revoution?''

Probably the asker himself doubts. But his question pierced Masetti and plunged him in angst. ``What is the Revolution?'' It cannot be the random way in which the state condemns and executes principles and dreams. Perhaps . . . And what is trust? A new form of hypocritical religious faith?

Being an honest revolutionary, Masetti reaches the conclusion that loyalty to ``the Revolution's early virgin dreams obliges one to denounce the lies and crimes of the Cuban situation.

``The true treason is to guard a silence that perpetuates and consolidates injustice,'' he proclaims. The Marxist god has failed again.