Long-time activists search for answers in the murky world of Cuban politics One returns to Havana, the other is accused of being

What was Elizardo Sanchez thinking when he accepted that medal?

 And will Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo be allowed to continue his daily strolls along the Malecon, the long seafront promenade that stretches from the Almendares River to
 the mouth of Havana Bay?

 Questions. Questions.

 In Cuba these days, the interrogatives cling to the damp salt air like the taunting refrain of an endless rumba, but there are very few answers, and just two
 observations can be made with any certainty.

 These are the murkiest of times. And ... these are the murkiest of times.

 Oh, and this is a tale of two dissidents.

 The tale begins — or at least its latest chapter does — this past August, when Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo stunned his wife and three young sons by digging in his heels
 at the Jose Marti International Airport in Havana. At the tail end of a two-week family vacation in Cuba, he suddenly declared that he was not going to board the
 plane that was to take them all back to Miami, which has been his home for the past 17 years.

 Instead, in front of a gaggle of journalists who had accompanied him to the airport, the 68-year-old former guerrilla fighter, former political prisoner and long-time
 Cuban opposition activist withdrew a four-page manifesto from his pocket, called A Message to All Cubans for a New Revolution, and started reading out loud.
 Shortly afterward, the airplane left without him.

 "It was kind of a surprise, it was kind of a shock," said Gladys Gutierrez Menoyo, now safely ensconced with her three boys in the family's house in southwest
 Miami. She spoke to the Star by telephone this week, while her husband bides his time across the Strait of Florida, waiting to see what the authorities will do.

 At first glance, his determination to remain in Cuba may seem a trifle odd.

 After all, a lot of people these days are going to extreme lengths to get out of Cuba — many by risking their lives aboard makeshift rafts and a goodly number by
 marrying elderly foreign tourists — but Gutierrez Menoyo is proceeding against the prevailing current.

 For the past seven or eight years, he hasn't been trying to get out of Cuba. He's been doing his damnedest to get in. Now he's there.

 "Will Fidel Castro let him do what he wants?" asked Ana J. Faya, a former member of the Cuban Communist Party who now works as an analyst for the
 Ottawa-based Canadian Foundation for the Americas. "That is the big question."

 While awaiting news of his fate, Gutierrez Menoyo goes for long walks each day and revisits childhood haunts.

 "Up to now, I've had no one bother me, either on the street or by telephone," he told the Star this week.

 He is currently living with friends in a section of central Havana called Vedado. Just in case Cuba's state security agents have lost track of him — granted, this is not
 very likely — they should take note that the house where he is staying is located on Calle 26 between Avenidas 23 and 26.

 "As far as they are concerned, my status is illegal," said Gutierrez Menoyo, whose tourist visa expired more than a month ago. "But, for me, I am legal because I am
 in my country."

 Born in Spain in December, 1934, Gutierrez Menoyo immigrated to Cuba with his family. Later, like Fidel Castro, he took up arms against the dictatorship of
 Fulgencio Batista. But, following the 1959 triumph of the revolution, he and Castro had a falling out.

 Gutierrez Menoyo fled the island for Miami, where he founded a small militant group called Alpha-66. In 1964, he and several others smuggled themselves back into
 Cuba, meaning to launch a new insurrection in the countryside. They should have stayed in Florida.

 Gutierrez Menoyo was captured and condemned to death. His sentence was later commuted to 30 years' imprisonment. In 1986, after serving 22 years, he was
 released at the urging of then Spanish prime minister Felipe Gonzalez. Newly exiled, Gutierrez Menoyo lived briefly in Madrid before returning to Miami, where he
 set up a small — and peaceful — opposition outfit called Cambio Cubano or Cuban Change.

 Unlike the larger anti-Castro organizations in the United States, such as the powerful Cuban American National Foundation, Gutierrez Menoyo has pursued a
 temperate political course, seeking not Castro's head on a platter, but something less messy and just possibly more palatable.

 He opposes the U.S. economic blockade against Cuba and seeks only to open a political space within the country so that a peaceful opposition can function legally.

 Not all Cuban exile groups share this moderate vision. Even within Cuba's wary network of internal opposition activists, there is considerable suspicion about
 Gutierrez Menoyo's motives.

 "For me, his return amounts to nothing," said Miriam Leiva, a prominent dissident. "I don't understand what he's doing here."

 Like other opposition activists inside Cuba, Leiva is still trying to come to terms with a stunning blow inflicted upon the dissident community last spring, when 75 of
 its members were rounded up, charged with sedition, and clamped behind bars with sentences as long as 28 years. Her husband, economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe,
 was sentenced to 20 years.

 Just as alarming, many of the dissidents were convicted on the evidence of long-time co-workers, some of whom turned out to have been government spies all along.

 That crackdown on dissent has cost Castro many of his former political supporters in Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere, but it has also seriously weakened a
 domestic opposition movement already afflicted by doubt, suspicion, and fear.

 Enter Gutierrez Menoyo.

 For Leiva, as for other dissidents within the country, perhaps the most serious rap against the new activist on the block is that he has long been highly critical of them.
 On many occasions — most recently, this week — Gutierrez Menoyo has accused internal opposition figures of having collaborated with the Cuban government.

 The charge comes at a particularly awkward moment for at least one leading dissident.

 His name is Elizardo Sanchez, and what was he thinking when he accepted that medal?

 Sanchez has long served as perhaps the most prominent voice of the internal dissidents' movement. He has spent a total of more than eight years behind bars as a
 prisoner of conscience. His credentials as a brave, reliable defender of human rights on the island were just about impeccable — until now.

 Lately, Sanchez has been having to fend off some irksome questions, following the publication of a 67-page booklet called El Camajan, which denounces him as a
 government spy. The book's title is Cuban slang for someone on the take.

 Written by two Cuban journalists and produced by Editora Politica — a publishing firm run by the Cuban Communist Party — the book alleges that Sanchez has
 worked as a government agent since 1997, when he began co-operating with the Ministry of the Interior. Since then, he is supposed to have provided regular
 reports on fellow dissidents and to have revealed the identities of at least three spies who briefly worked in Cuba on behalf of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

 Sanchez has flatly denied the allegations, calling them part of a government "set-up," but the plot thickened in mid-September when Cuban authorities released a
 videotape showing the human-rights activist attending a meeting with interior ministry officials in 1998, during which he received a medal from a ministry official
 named Col. Aristides Gomez, supposedly in honour of his role in combating counter-revolution. Later, Sanchez and the boys from state security are seen together, all
 raising their glasses in a jovial toast.

 The videotape has been aired on Cuba's state-owned television.

 Once again, Sanchez denied that he had ever collaborated with the government. He said that a particularly damning sequence of images, the ones that seem to show
 Gomez pinning a medal to his chest, actually depict the colonel giving him a pen.

 But in an interview with the Star this week, Sanchez conceded that it was, in fact, a medal.

 "They have all kinds of medals."

 He said he had attributed little importance to the ceremony at the time and gave the medal back before the meeting was over.

 He explained that he has periodically met in private with interior ministry officials in recent years, always to discuss the country's human rights problems or to lobby
 on behalf of individual political prisoners. He described his role as "quasi-diplomatic."

 "I had no hidden cameras or secret microphones," he said. "There are two things you can do. You can believe the Cuban government. Or you can believe me."

 The other principal dissident in this story — Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, still patiently awaiting word on his application for a Cuban residency permit — says he believes
 the Cuban government, at least on this occasion.

 But other opposition figures say they continue to trust Sanchez and accept his version of the affair, that he was the victim of a set-up.

 One leading dissident, Vladimiro Roca, told the Star that if Sanchez really were a government collaborator, then it would make no sense for the authorities to
 discredit him.

 "If he were with them, they wouldn't put out the book or the video," he said.

 "They did this because he isn't with them."

 Sounds logical.

 Of course, in the murky world of Cuban politics, even logic may not matter all that much.

 "Cuban people live in a kind of paranoid atmosphere," said Faya, who broke with the Cuban Communist Party a few years ago and came to Canada. "There's a
 sense that anybody could be part of the security apparatus. Nobody trusts anybody there."

 Meanwhile, after 44 years in power, Fidel Castro marches on.