Journal: It's Everything Castro Promised, on Lake Ontario
 

          By ANTHONY DePALMA

               ORONTO -- Each stroll in the neighborhood opens new worlds for
               Guillermo Sambra. He gawks at the shoes and radios in Toronto's
               store windows and shakes his head in disbelief at the gleaming new
          cars that actually stop to let him cross the street.

          Until recently, Sambra's world was limited to one cockroach-infested
          Cuban prison cell where he was serving an eight-year sentence for the
          crime of distributing election material.

          After five years and four months in jail, Sambra, now 27, was suddenly told
          that he was being released. One day last month, he was put on a jet along
          with his wife and daughter and sent to Canada to begin life again. In all, 17
          Cuban dissidents have been exiled to Canada since Pope John Paul II urged
          Fidel Castro early this year to throw open the doors of his prisons.

          "I feel like a newborn," said Sambra, a slightly built young man with hollow
          cheeks, dark sunken eyes and a pain in his stomach that developed in prison
          and is a constant reminder of his time there. He arrived in Toronto with
          little more than the clothes on his back. "When the plane left Cuba I felt as
          if a great weight had dropped off of me."

          Canada is a land of immigrants and that is especially true of Toronto, which
          is peopled by so many newcomers from so many different parts of the
          world that at times it feels more like an international airport terminal than a
          city.

          But few immigrants arrive here with such a depth of disbelief as Sambra
          and the other Cubans. For them, not only is the richness of North America
          staggering, but also its very existence represents a challenge to lifelong
          ways of thinking.

          Since he landed at Toronto's Pearson International Airport, Sambra said he
          had learned that contrary to what was drilled into him at home in Santiago,
          the island's second most important city, communist Cuba is not the only
          place with universal medical care.

          "You don't have to pay anything here," said Sambra, who has had free
          medical exams since he arrived. "I thought that the only country in the
          world where that happened was Cuba." He and his wife, Miriam, and their
          daughter, Jessica, have been given landed immigrant status in Canada,
          which automatically entitles them to all the benefits of Canadian citizenship,
          without allowing them to vote. They can apply for citizenship in three years.

          Sambra's euphoria may be tempered when he finds himself paying
          Canada's high taxes or suffering through a northern winter. But for now
          even the simplest aspect of life takes on great significance. The cars that
          stop at crosswalks have quickly become his favorite symbol of Canada, a
          land, he said, where even powerful machines can be stopped by the
          individual rights of ordinary people.

          "The automobile has the force, it's made of steel and the people are just
          flesh and bones," he said. In Cuba, drivers lean on their horns when
          approaching pedestrians, expecting them to give way. "But here," he said,
          "the person has the right to go first."

          Although he was jailed on charges of rebellion, Sambra considers himself
          an unlikely rebel. Before he was imprisoned in 1993, he had lived his entire
          life in his grandfather's house. He had not gone beyond the 10th grade and
          his only dream was to pick up his grandfather's trade, keeping old
          American-made, pre-revolution General Electric, Westinghouse and Philco
          refrigerators running as long as possible.

          He said the communist newspapers in Cuba never tired of publishing
          articles about how bad things were in the United States and, it sometimes
          seemed, every country but Cuba.

          "Every place seemed to be so bad that you figured you might as well stay in
          Cuba," he said.

          But despite the isolation and misinformation, the never-ending shortages of
          food and clothing made him suspect that what the newspapers said could
          not be true. His dissatisfaction gnawed at him.

          His mother and father had divorced long ago but he knew his father,
          Ismael, was an important writer and television producer, who also felt
          cheated by life in Cuba. When the elder Sambra began distributing
          anti-government campaign literature before the 1992-1993 local and
          national elections, Guillermo did so too.

          The offending words on the pamphlets he slipped under doors were simple:
          liberty, dignity, independence. The underlying message was a direct
          challenge to Castro's old chant of "Socialism or death."

          "We said, 'No socialism. No death. No Castro,"' the younger Sambra said.

          Early one morning, five armed policemen came for Guillermo Sambra. They
          hauled him in for questioning. Eventually he was transferred to a grim state
          prison that baked during the day and swarmed with insects at night. Clouds
          of mosquitoes filled the cell and constant dampness attracted roaches.

          A month after Guillermo was arrested, police came back for his father.
          Both were eventually found guilty of rebellion. Guillermo was sentenced to
          eight years. His father got 10 years.

          The Canadian chapter of PEN, the international writer's group, began a
          campaign to free the elder Sambra, which was furthered by the Canadian
          government. Canada ignores the U.S. embargo and maintains diplomatic
          and commercial relations with Cuba. In the last two years, Canadian
          officials have moved to strengthen those ties while pushing the Cubans to
          improve their record on human rights.

          Ismael Sambra was freed from prison just over a year ago and exiled to
          Canada, where he has taken up the post of scholar in residence at York
          University in Toronto.

          Life in Canada for the elder Sambra has also been an adventure. After
          learning to write on a computer, he has done substantial work on a book
          about Cuba. He also used his e-mail to campaign for the release of his son.

          He was disappointed when Guillermo was not among the first batch of
          prisoners to be freed after the pope's visit, but elated to learn he would be in
          the second group.

          Guillermo and his family spent their first weeks in Canada at a nonprofit
          immigration center in West Toronto called Costi, which arranges
          government assistance and helps provide food, clothing and housing
          subsidies for a year, or until Guillermo finds work. He has already moved
          into his own apartment, not far from his father.

          Both father and son find it difficult to describe how they feel about being
          forced to leave Cuba and take up residence in Canada. But both are equally
          struck by what they say are the walls built around Cuba during the last 40
          years that made the rest of the world seem so forbidding.

          "Rights for workers, liberty of expression, social benefits, free health care,
          education, children's parks -- all that Fidel promised was going to happen
          has happened here in Canada," Ismael Sambra said. "Once I told a friend in
          jest, 'Hey, this is communism. This is what they told us it was going to be
          like in Cuba.' So for what did we shed so much blood in Cuba? Why did we
          go through such anguish?"