BY MARIKA LYNCH

  Eloy Gutiérrez-Menoyo fought against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, then against Fidel Castro. After 22 years in Castro's jails, he came to Miami, where he promoted peaceful change for the island and criticized exile hard-liners as well as dissidents.

  On Thursday, Gutiérrez-Menoyo did another about-face: Shunning the safety of exile in Miami, he announced in Havana that he had moved back to the island for another dose of dissidence against a Castro revolutionary gone wrong.

  Now 68 years old and nearly blind, Gutiérrez-Menoyo, the youngest of six children, was born in 1934 in Madrid. The family fled Francisco Franco's Spain when he was 12, and settled in the fishing village of Cojímar near Havana.

  TASTE OF FREEDOM

  There, in the town where Hemingway set The Old Man and the Sea, Gutiérrez-Menoyo first felt freedom, he would later recall. That ended when Batista took power by coup in 1952. Angered by the repression and corruption, Gutiérrez-Menoyo's brother Carlos joined the resistance against Batista. And Gutiérrez-Menoyo, then 18, followed.

  Five years later, the brothers were among those who conspired to kill Batista in an attack on the Presidential Palace. Batista survived, but Carlos didn't. The death
  devastated Gutiérrez-Menoyo.

  He formed a guerrilla movement in the island's central Escambray mountain range. Castro and his 26th of July Movement, a separate group, were already operating in the eastern Sierra Maestra.

  Batista fled Jan. 1, 1959. Gutiérrez-Menoyo and his troops arrived in Havana Jan. 3 -- days before Castro showed up with his men. He did not get a post in Castro's government, nor did he want one, he would say later.

  But as Castro moved progressively toward communism, Gutiérrez-Menoyo grew disillusioned. In 1960, he fled the country by boat to Miami and later helped found Alpha 66, an armed commando group that launched attacks on Cuba after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

  In late 1964, he invaded Cuba intending to establish a rural guerrilla movement to overthrow Castro, but he and his men were quickly captured.

  He was brought into a room blindfolded. The guards took off the cloth and Castro stood before him. ''I knew you would return,'' Gutiérrez-Menoyo later recalled Castro saying.

  YEARS IN PRISON

  Gutiérrez-Menoyo would spend 22 years in prison, where he suffered beatings that broke 24 ribs and left him blind in one eye and hard of hearing.

  In 1986, Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González helped get Gutiérrez-Menoyo released from jail.

  This time, Gutiérrez-Menoyo decided to fight Castro peacefully.

  In forming Cambio Cubano (Cuban Change) in 1993, he created a group that believed reforms in Cuba were possible only through dialogue -- an avenue many exiles reject.

  He attacked hard-liners who pushed to topple Castro by other means, but also blasted dissidents on the island as at best misguided, at worst puppets of Washington's hostile policies toward Cuba.

  Gutiérrez-Menoyo has made several trips back to Havana since the mid-1990s, and on June 19, 1995, he met Castro again, this time without the blindfold. There, he asked Castro for permission to open an office of Cambio Cubano in Havana.