CAROL ROSENBERG

 His bathroom was a hole in the floor. Breakfast was an egg, a roll and warm milk
 in the morning. Accommodations were an eight-person cell, lights lit around the
 clock, shared with three other people.

 For 20 days last month, a retired Chicago businessman on a self-styled
 people-to-people mission ran afoul of Cuban security services and was held at
 Havana's infamous Interior Ministry prison, Villa Marista, a former seminary turned
 interrogation center.

 His charge: ``Rebellion,'' for videotaping dissidents on why they oppose the U.S.
 trade embargo, then tipping them $20 to $30. He gave away four baseballs, six
 Beanie Babies and a box of books, which he delivered to three libraries.

 ``I met with probably a dozen dissidents. I was warned to be careful and I wasn't
 careful enough,'' said Douglas Schimmel, 70, in a phone interview from his home
 in Chicago.

 Detained Aug. 11, a day before he was to depart Cuba from a two-week visit, he
 was released Thursday evening and put aboard a plane to Jamaica.

 In between, he said, he was never abused but subjected to intensive interrogation
 by beefy state security members, who were exceptionally concerned about his
 health but equally convinced that he had been on a mission to undermine the
 Cuban system for a subversive organization.

 ``In terms of my face-to-face contacts, I cannot complain about the treatment,'' he
 said.

 Schimmel, a retired personnel manager for a Swiss agricultural firm, is a
 self-described ``knee-jerk liberal,'' with a history of activism in civil rights
 movements. An Amnesty International member, he was an election observer in El
 Salvador in 1990 and cut sugar cane in Cuba in 1998 with the Venceremos
 Brigades, which he found ``a Potemkin village sort of thing.''

 So he returned earlier this year, and again this summer, to hear from dissidents.
 He met a dozen, videotaped interviews with about six, he said, posed for
 photographs with them, and then gave them $20 or $30 each, ``a gratuity for their
 time and effort and information.''

 ``I wasn't delivering wads of cash to buy C4 with, or anything, like that,'' he said.

 But Cuban officials ``were very suspicious as to why I came down: whether
 somebody sent me, whether somebody directed me, whether somebody financed
 me. I said, `I'm on my own. I represent nobody except my curiousity on social,
 political and economic things in Cuba.' I don't know that they ever believed me,''
 he said.

 So for nearly three weeks, he engaged in near-daily rounds of interrogation,
 interrupted periodically by medical officers.

 ``They monitored my diabetes, smothered me with doctors and testing. They said
 their No. 1 concern was my health. It would've been embarrassing to have an
 American die in a prison for PR reasons,'' he said. ``I could not ask for a more
 conscientious, continuous monitoring in concern for my medical situation,'' he
 added.

 ``In terms of the way I was treated, I can't complain, I was very well treated. I was
 even warmly treated, and this from people whose job it was to find out, look under
 every rock to see what they could find me guilty of.''

 Describing the prison, he said the toilet was ``a hole in the floor underneath the
 shower,'' his cell was a ``sizable room with six bunks,'' in a hospital facility
 occupied by three younger men, all Cubans, whose circumstances ``I sort of
 made it my business not to know.'' Besides, he said, they didn't speak English.

 Schimmel said he was never fearful during his imprisonment, even when he
 concluded that he would probably be convicted of a crime and spend seven to 15
 years in prison.

 Opposed to U.S. trade sanctions of Cuba, he said he probably won't return to the
 island -- for fear of his wife, Priscilla. She raised a ruckus with the Cuban mission
 in Washington when he did not come home and with the State Department and
 members of Congress.

 So what did he learn on his fact-finding mission?

 ``They simply don't allow dissent. They make a distinction between dissent and
 desertion -- and they consider that anybody who is discussing other than the
 existing social economic order has deserted the objectives and accomplishments
 of the revolution.

 ``I lectured, unsuccessfully I'm sure, that dissent is what brings progress
 historically -- from the eight-hour day, to women's suffrage to civil rights to the
 Vietnam War. I told them, you know if we arrested people for what you consider
 dissent as a crime, we would have 95 percent of our population in jail at any
 moment,'' he said.

 ``Unfortunately, that doesn't exist in Cuba. I think that is their loss.''