By Susan Benesch
ST PETERSBURG TIMES

HAVANA "For me, Fidel Castro was something more than a comrade and a friend," the old Cuban revolutionary said. "He was like a brother."

The words hung in the air for a moment like an undisturbed plume of smoke. Mario Chanes de Armas spent 30 years as a political prisoner of the Castro regime.

Mr. Chanes is the last and longest held political prisoner from the early days of the revolution. He believes he was punished more than others who opposed Mr. Castro because he had been close to the president a generation ago when they were young men and comrades.

Unlike nearly all of the other long-term political prisoners, Mr. Chanes has been denied permission to leave the country.

During the year since his release from prison, he has remained in Cuba--a country he refers to as a larger prison--getting to know it again and thinking about the past.

Mr. Chanes joined Mr. Castro's revolutionary movement in 1952, when he was 24 and the movement did not yet have a name. He was imprisoned with Mr. Castro for almost two years.

Soon after the 1959 revolution, Mr. Chanes began to criticize Mr. Castro for not allowing dissent.

The police came for Mr. Chanes on July 17,1961. They told him and his wife of five months that they wanted to ask him some questions. They released him on July 16, 1991, 30 years later, less one day.

By then he had spent half of his life in prison. He had been jailed longer than Nelson Mandela of South Africa. Mr. Chanes is now 65 years old.

His crimes, the court ruled in 1962, were plotting to kill Mr. Castro and Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, another top revolutionary leader, and planning industrial sabotage.

Mr. Chanes denies it. He says Mr. Castro betrayed the revolution and deserves to die, though he says he has too much respect for the past to kill his old comrade.

Asked what he would do if he saw Mr. Castro in the street, Mr. Chanes thought, smiled wryly, thought again and said: "I would try not to look at him. To me, even his face is a negative thing. I don't think we could manage dialogue. If it were up to me, I would avoid him."

Mr. Chanes was one of the young revolutionaries who joined Mr. Castro in the attack on Cuba's second largest army barracks, the Moncada, on July 26, 1953. The most famous single strike against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, it is celebrated every year as the anniversary of the revolution, even though it was a military disaster and the revolution didn't succeed until more than five years later.

Thinking about it made Mr. Chanes giggle.

"We were a little group of youths who had no military experience. It seems impossible, but that's how it was. They had tanks, they had barracks, thousands of soldiers and heavy armaments of every kind.

"We were a little group of youths, with a few little M-1 automatic rifles, a pistol and just one machine gun. A little pistol and four, five, six ammunition cartridges in your pocket."

Mr. Chanes and Mr. Castro were among the few guerrillas who survived the attack. Several were captured, tortured by the government's soldiers, then killed.

His face shows no sign of his decades in prison, except for the overwhelming patience in his gaze and thin lines beneath his eyes.

"There are things in life that make men into brothers," he said. "We were together in something that I consider glorious, because it is something in which men are ready to give their lives in exchange for nothing."

He's a bitter enemy of Mr. Castro now, but he isn't fighting in the same way he fought Batista. He said only time will defeat Mr. Castro.

Asked where he was jailed, Mr. Chanes laughed and went through the list, as if he were reciting a ponderous poem.

"Las Cabanitas," a house where prisoners were taken for questioning. "Fifth and 14th," the address. "The cells of the old Military Intelligence Service." By the time he reached the 15th location the infamous Combinado del Este where he spent 14 years, he stopped and shrugged.

He wasn't physically tortured, he said. "In the other [Batista] government, if you were imprisoned and you were somebody significant, you had to stand the battering."

Under Mr. Castro's government he said, "a few suffered some torture, but not much. Psychological torture, yes. Once you have plenty of experience with conspiracy and being a political prisoner, you say and do what you want."

He proudly described how he managed to keep a radio in prison by hiding it inside a wooden table -- with the help of Ernesto Diaz, the second-to-last long-term political prisoner. Mr. Diaz, released in March 1991, was permitted to leave Cuba and now lives in the United States.

Mr. Chanes believes Mr. Castro will never let him go to Miami, where he has four sisters and more nieces and nephews than he can name.

"I don't have the slightest hope that they'll give me permission to join my family. I think what angers him more than anything is that someone who was at Moncada, who was a section chief in the 26 [Mr. Castro's July 26 guerrilla group] rebels. He is very special in that sense."
 

Distributed by Scripps Howard.