RIO DE JANEIRO -- Oscar Niemeyer, Latin America's most renowned architect, turns 90 in December, but no one should suppose his twilight years have dimmed his communist militancy.

His latest project is a 36-foot concrete-and-metal protest against U.S. policy toward Cuba.

The monument will stand outside the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, near a spot now graced by a huge poster of a swashbuckling Cuban patriot staring down a bug-eyed Uncle Sam.

The design, which Niemeyer calls ``my present to the Cuban people,'' is of a concrete circle, broken by the Cuban flag, symbolizing the island's resistance against the U.S. economic blockade.

``It's horrible, isn't it?'' Niemeyer said of the embargo, over lunch at his sunny studio in an Art Deco building with panoramic views over Copacabana Beach. ``It's so unjust, and has lasted so long.''

Niemeyer, best known as the designer of Brazil's capital, Brasilia, has been called the century's most prolific architect. He still goes to his studio five or six days a week.

The Havana memorial is designed to resist winds up to 155 miles an hour. Construction will cost $150,000, according to a
recent article in the Cuban newspaper Juventud Rebelde, and be paid by ``Latin American solidarity groups.''

Remembering the Maine

It is scheduled to be ready by February, timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the unexplained explosion that sank the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana Harbor -- helping spark the Spanish-American War. Many Cuban historians consider the incide nt the pretext for the first U.S. military intervention in their island.

Niemeyer's gift should warm President Fidel Castro's heart, since Castro has wooed the artist for several years to build something in Havana.

Once -- he can't remember the year -- Castro called him in Paris, bidding him to fly to Cuba and work on a monument in Revolution Plaza.

The architect declined; he passionately hates to fly. Castro said he'd send a boat. Niemeyer said he was too busy.

In 1987, Castro tried again. In a phone call to then-Brazilian President Jose Sarney, celebrating the first direct telephone line between Brazil and Cuba, the Cuban leader suggested that Niemeyer design Brazil's new embassy in Havana.

Sarney agreed, but Brazil's foreign minister was later quoted as calling Niemeyer's sketch not only overpriced but ``crazy and absurd.'' It stayed on the drawing board.

Hasn't visited Cuba

Niemeyer still hasn't visited Cuba, his flying phobia outweighing his fervency, but at last he decided to deliver his tribute.

``His time is coming to an end; Fidel's time is coming to an end; he figured it was the moment,'' said friend and fellow architect Italo Campofiorito.

Niemeyer's startling modernistic visions can be found in several countries. Besides leaving his mark on Brasilia, full of spaceship-like constructions, he designed part of the United Nations building in New York, the headquarters for the French Communi st Party and Constantine University in Algeria.

Monuments are a specialty. In 1981, he tweaked Brazil's right-wing ruling military with a memorial to the late President Juscelino Kubitschek that resembled a hammer and sickle. A later monument in Sao Paulo, dedicated to Latin America, is a huge hand imprinted with the shape of the continent, as if marked in blood, which Niemeyer has said represented imperialist oppression.

Niemeyer was born in Rio, into what he called a bourgeois family, but says he was inspired, in both his politics and his art by the misery around him.

``The poor are the majority, and I am on the side of the majority,'' he says.

Communist refuge

In the 1940s, he turned over his house to 15 Communist Party members as they got out of prison. As he once related, he told party leader Luis Prestes, ``Look, you keep the house, since your work is more important.''

Today, he still talks of the need to construct a new, communist world, without exploitation.

``The American people are fine,'' he said over lunch, ``but the government wants to rule the world.''

With a dash of pride, he added that he has been denied a U.S. visa for the past 30 years.

``I'm a very dangerous man,'' he said, working his features into a scowl.

When he was last rejected, 20 years ago, he said, ``It felt good, because it meant I had not changed.''

The United States has changed, however, if just a bit. A provision in the immigration law barring communists from entry was struck down in 1988.

Now, U.S. diplomats say, Niemeyer shouldn't have any trouble.

``Tell him to come on in,'' said a consular officer; ``we'd love to meet him.''

Copyright © 1997 The Miami Herald