BY MATTHEW HANSEN / For the Lincoln Journal Star

In truth, man speaks too much of danger. Poison sumac grows in a man's field, the serpent hisses from its hidden den, and the owl's eye shines in the belfry, but the sun goes on lighting the sky, and the truth continues marching the earth unscathed.
-- Jose Marti

They're marching down a Havana street single file, olive uniforms giving them away even if you somehow miss the black rifles resting on their shoulders.

The tour group spills off a Mercedes bus and into Revolution Square, American eyes fixating on El Comandante's army first and the buildings comprising the heart of his regime second.

To the left, a towering gray granite statue of nationalist poet Jose Mart , the backdrop of many a famous speech. Behind that, the Palacio de la Revoluci n, the country's political headquarters. Farther left, the Department of Defense, where generals once plotted tactics against certain invasion from the north.

And up to your right, beyond the soldiers, sits the Ministry of the Interior. You'll find the eight-story edifice on many a postcard because a towering black-metal mural of beloved Che fills one side.

That side also has no windows. Unseen, the younger brother heads a government arm from his hidden den.

"You would not like to go over there," the tour guide says through a thin smile.

The square itself could pass for the abandoned parking lot of a closed Kmart, all cracking asphalt and sagging power lines. No activity save for those dozen-odd soldiers marching slowly out of sight.

To belittle this place, of course, is to ignore half its truth. Here, in Revolution Square, is where hundreds of thousands once cheered when he bellowed freedom from Batista, freedom from poverty, freedom from America. Right where the people stood when a dove fluttered from the sky and landed on his shoulder, a sign from the Santeria gods that he was their Chosen One.

This is where it began, a regime that has outlasted 10 U.S. presidents, a half-century Cold War and countless hot ones, survived both a 42-year-old embargo by the wealthiest democracy in the world and the death of a communist empire.

It's a regime that struggles on, weakened but still marching, to this day.

In this wide-open square you talk of truth quietly. But in the narrow streets of Havana the talk is growing louder and more diverse. There, amid the salsa and stickball, between the tourists and the beggars, among the laughter, rum and rumba, that's where you attempt to piece together what the dead poet claimed to find so easily.

A 32-year-old artist shakes his head. Good luck. You are standing at ground zero in his city that's the backbone of his country that's so very different from your own.

And you are so very far from the truth.

"Listen. Cuba is an illogical temple," Gregorio says, pointing toward a sunlit sky. "You have to be able to see the illogical temple."
 

Man loves liberty even if he does not know he loves it. He is driven by it and flees from where it does not exist.
 

The old man eyes you for a second, maybe less. "Buenos d as," he grunts.

Then he's busy scanning the empty street outside for the omnipresent police. Coast clear, he ushers you into his first-floor apartment. The building is like many in Havana -- a whiff of former greatness obscured by years of neglect obscured again by the possibility of rebirth. Past, present and future all disguise themselves under an unpainted shade of gray.

Inside lives the old man, his sick sister, a half-dozen dying plants and the clutter from a lifetime as a psychiatrist.

The government promised to repair the building years ago. Maybe the workers don't come because they're busy. And maybe, he thinks, they don't come because he's done something wrong.

The conversation proceeds in fits and starts, blocked by barriers of language and age, culture and money, three layers of paranoia lacquered on top.

The old man speaks in rapid Spanish and broken English and universal hand signs. One minute, he is admiring what El M ximo has created. He's praising good education, free health care and an infant mortality rate comparable to America's.

Problems? None really. He nods. This is good. This is true.

The next minute he leans forward, whispers to put the pen down and starts in about how Cuba's economy is failing. How he can't get the right medicine for his sister's Parkinson's. How the police tap the hotel phones and punish contrary voices.

Then quickly back to the party line, a cyclical rumba leaving your notebook full of positives, your ears filled with negatives, your mind still searching.

Later that day, a cab driver named Jose, speeding along the city's outskirts, laughs when told the story.

"Three words: People are afraid."

An hour here will teach you that the island Columbus stumbled on five centuries ago is all of that -- and so much more. It's the salsa's infectious beat and the rhythm to match. Caring doctors, tough teachers, world-class boxers and loving mothers live here. It's a sports purist's heaven, where you sidestep a raging stickball game or the wayward soccer ball. It's Charlton Heston's hell -- guns impossible to come by, deadly man-to-man violence unheard of.

It's the nervous excitement of a University of Havana student close to graduation and the real world. It's easy laughter and a hand on your shoulder and something abstract tugging at your soul.

And it's those old man's eyes ... tired, clouded by a lifetime of fear. They're more straightforward, more honest, than anything to pass through his lips. They know that talking freely ignores Fidel Castro's 44-year stranglehold on mouths. Talking freely ignores what he has done for Cuba, and talking also ups the fear.

The respect comes from some notion that this Cuba is an improvement over what came before, most notably a regime marked by widespread corruption, crooked elections and both American business and organized crime sticking fat fingers in an already thin economic pie.

B.C.: "Cubans tended to believe they were a little banana republic that didn't count for anything. Just a place where Americans came to get drunk on the weekend," says Wayne Smith, former head of the U.S. Special Interests Section in Havana and a leading expert on Cuban affairs.

A.C.: "He gave them pride in being Cubans. He put Cuba on the map."

The change, to its leader, also meant controlling what his people said, heard and thought. It meant one voice -- the truth! -- boldfaced across front pages, blaring from the evening news and staring right back as every "Socialismo o Muerte" billboard whizzed by.

It meant months like April. Cuban courts sent 75 dissidents to jail with sentences as long as 28 years for "working with a foreign power to undermine the government." On April 11, a Council of State ruling sent three men to the firing squad wall, where they were executed for attempting to hijack a ferry headed to the United States. The bullets came eight days after their arrests and five days after their convictions.

The jailed dissidents and executed hijackers are just the latest additions to a group of untold thousands wasting in prison cells and decomposing in graves.

Their crime? They didn't listen.

"No one crosses the Comandante," Smith says.

They're still toeing the line in official Cuba, both in the halls of power and in the classrooms of a typical social workers school.

There the tour group begins to fire questions at a select group of teenage students.

Question: Favorite music?

Answer: Cuban rap and American pop.

Question: Favorite movies?

Answer: Horror and shoot-em-ups.

Question: Favorite movie star?

Answer: Jackie Chan.

Both American and Cuban smiles circle the classroom.

Question: How are you different from your parents?

Uneasy silence. The only boy in the group, quiet until now, stands up and locks eyes with the questioner.

Answer: "Politically, we are no different from our parents." His stare never wavers.
 

He who turns inward and only thinks avariciously of cultivating his appetites loses his humanity and becomes loneliness himself. He carries in his heart the dreariness of winter. He becomes in fact and appearance an insect.
 

The first question is always the same.

"Where you from?" If the answer is the United States, they tell you of a brother in New Jersey or a cousin in Miami. Then it's down to business.

Want cigars? Need a tour guide? A good restaurant? A good time? I'm your man.

Businessmen sell newspapers and coins of Che. Artists draw caricatures. Cuban musicians form makeshift street bands, recruiting a German or Spaniard to fill in on the maracas.

For dinero, always dolares, part of a burgeoning capitalist spirit rooted in the economic ruin of the 1990s and Cuba's subsequent return to tourism.

"Cuban people are friendly because they want something from you," says Pedro Ugarte Bravo, a 31-year-old cook and erstwhile tourist aide. "It's a fake friendship."

Back in 1959, Castro pronounced the tourist persona non grata. Foreigners had brought only corruption, gambling, prostitution and drugs, he said.

"They didn't want to be monkeys in a zoo, with the tourists watching them," Smith says. "But, in 1992, what are you going to do? Back to tourism."

For decades, the Soviets had imported raw Cuban sugar and nickel at an inflated cost and exported finished products at bargain-basement prices. When coupled with cash, the total subsidy amounted to about $6 billion annually. Back then, democratic revolution neatly coincided with a plummeting sugar market. Smith estimates the Cuban economy shrank by half during the early years of what Castro ironically dubbed "the Special Period."

The worst year was 1993, artist Gregorio says. Blackouts lasted days. A once-reliable food ration dwindled to nearly nothing. No paint or brushes or hope to be found anywhere.

It's gotten better, mostly because of Cuba's campaign to bring in European tourists, advertising the country's beaches and natural beauty as an affordable alternative to Aruba or Cancun.

But Cuba's tourism boom also creates a series of moral contradictions its people wrestle with daily. In this system, hotel bellboys make more than doctors. Although a dollar goes a long way, 26 pesos, its supposed equivalent, "can't buy you no shit," said Mateo, a government employee. Foreign companies build four-star tourist hotels next to crumbling apartments. Most Cubans can't get 2 feet into these hotels before security stops them. That same security often looks the other way when teenage jiniteras wearing heavy make-up, high-cut skirts and profit-hungry smiles glide through the entrance, headed to the bar.

So men and women force themselves into the tourist game, becoming the proverbial insects, sometimes to provide the bare necessities, sometimes to get ahead.

The artist complains about tourism's evils as young Cuban men lead tourists into his gallery. The cabbie blasts the tourist system minutes after volunteering to drive you 10 miles even though he's not a licensed taxi driver. And the cook admits he's trying to figure out ways to pry dolares from you right now.

"That's how we live," Pedro says. "Nobody lives on salary. Nobody."
 

People are made of hate and of love, but more of hate than love. But love, like the sun that it is, sets fire and melts everything.
 

Ra l Costoya seems like a reasonable man. He sits at activity's edge in Miami's Domino Park, the epicenter of the aging Cuban-American community. Behind him perhaps 75 elderly Cuban men and exactly one elderly Cuban woman play cards, chess and the game that lent the park its name.

The 78-year-old retiree just whipped out a well-padded wallet to show off faded black-and-white photos of two daughters, three grandsons and one great-granddaughter, all living in Cuba. He prattled like a proud patriarch, listing names, ages and jobs in excited Spanish.

So, a mistake. You ask what positives came from the revolution. And now Ra l is staring as if the Bearded One himself just plopped down on the next park bench and asked the exile to light his Cohiba.

"Nothing. In Cuba everything that was good came before the revolution."

Welcome to Miami. At last count, 650,000 Cuban-Americans lived in Miami-Dade County, some forcibly removed from Cuba, most landing on Florida's shoreline by choice.

Sometimes, it's hard to believe that they and Cuba's current inhabitants came from the same planet, much less the same island, because their relationship to Cubans, and vice versa, marches to the strangest of truths.

Cubans ridicule their northern neighbors -- "Crazy," says a construction worker named Anthony standing on the Capitol steps, spinning finger around ear for emphasis -- even though Miami Cubans send millions to relatives on the island each year. In fact, those $10 and $20 bills make remittances the island's largest single source of income, trumping even sugar sales.

For their part, Miami Cubans are the strongest supporters of an embargo whose effects, any expert will tell you, hurt the Cuban populace to some degree.

To hear the shrillness of voices on either side of the Gulf Stream is to know hatred. To witness the passion of those same voices is to know love.

"One of the things about revolution and counterrevolution is that it's a very polarizing process," says Max Castro, a senior research associate at the University of Miami, a Miami Herald columnist and a Cuban-American who advocates ending the embargo. "The other side, the enemy, is black and white. If I say, `Look, there are 99 bad things about Cuba but one good thing,' they are going to point at that and say, `You are a friend of Castro.'"

The dead poet himself hasn't escaped the polarization. Both Castro and Cuban opposition leaders claim his words as their own, which is why you can walk out of Miami's federally funded Radio Mart , board a plane and land an hour later in Havana's Jose Mart International Airport.

The hard-line anti-Castro Miami Cubans, the Cuban government and, increasingly, more moderate voices on each shore -- they're fighting for minds, too. They want you with them on the embargo, on Castro, on the truth.

And so it goes. Schedule a meeting with one Miami doctor and arrive to a full-fledged, 10-person Cuban Liberty Council presentation complete with a Cuban lunch, Cuban coffee, a video about Cuba and more passion in one afternoon than you'd normally encounter in a month.

Let the superlatives fly.

"Everything that you hear in Cuba is B.S., completely B.S.," says one speaker.

Then people scream. A woman cries. "There has not been one country that has gone as wrong as Cuba in the history of all mankind," says another, oblivious to Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union and Pol Pot's Cambodia.

A growing number of Cuban-Americans think this rhetoric is, well, crazy. A recent Cuba Study Group poll shows 46 percent of Miami Cubans favor lifting at least the embargo's travel ban, while 28 percent wish to end the long-standing policy altogether. Those numbers jump higher among recent Cuban immigrants, eroding overall support for a policy that, for decades, has spurred Miami exiles to donate money and time to the powerful Cuban-American political lobby.

Max Castro helped organize a March 2002 conference in Coral Gables to discuss ending the Cuban embargo. Three hundred Miami Cubans showed up, which wouldn't and couldn't have happened a decade ago.

There is also evidence that the power of the Cuban-American lobby, always so crucial in delivering congressmen, senators and even presidents to Washington, is waning. The CLC is a splinter of the once-mighty Cuban American National Foundation, which lost popularity after the death of charismatic and controversial leader Jorge Mas Canosa. Cuban-American leaders themselves admit they don't have the resources to compete with big American business interests intent on ending the embargo.

"The estimates say we've spent $300,000 to $400,000 in the whole last five years," says lawyer Marcell Felipe, who sits on the CLC's board of directors. "Archer Daniels Midland, in the last two years alone, their group has spent $5 million. And that gives you a little bit of an idea how things shape up."

Of course, this all happened before Cuba's crackdown on free speech, an action that may ice over any previous thaw.

Which is not really the issue, many Miami Cubans say. You're missing half the truth again. The gray obscured by all the black and white is that every Cuban speaking wants to see Cuba bettered, at least from his or her own perspective. They may hate Castro, and each other, but hard-liners, moderates and Castro sympathizers share one thing: They all love the island.

Exit Havana's aforementioned Mart airport to see why.

Hundreds of people crowd one another outside, bodies pressed close to a security fence. And then the right person -- a brother, mother or best friend -- emerges from the double doors, luggage in tow. And a Havana Cuban and a Miami Cuban hug. Right then, they're both just Cuban.

As Cuban as the poet. So whose side is he on anyway? The answer, of course, is enveloped in gray.

"I read my Mart ," artist Gregorio says. "It's like my Bible. The government says they follow Mart . The Miami Cubans say they follow Mart . No. I know my Mart ."
 

Man is a wing.
 

The music is very near the truth.

It's Sunday afternoon in Central Havana and a rumba rages, all drums, hips and catcalls. The band is loose and fast, forever nearing a sure collapse into rhythmic anarchy, never totally collapsing. A crowd of mostly poor, mostly black Cubans meets the dizzying pace, fueled by cheap rum and the sort of joy you can't buy with a Master Card.

Roberto leans into a wall, exhausted. His breath proves he's swigging rum from a beer can and has been since morning. He's struggling for the right words in English, some final truth to offer before you board the Mercedes tourist bus ushering you to an official Cuba he knows little about.

Finally, a declaration.

"Fidel Castro is a son of a bit," he says, eyes locked on yours. "Son of a bit."

He loves so much about this place -- this dance, his friends, and most of all, a 9-year-old daughter. "She is beauty," he says.

But he can't stand it anymore, the police, the fear, the poverty. He wants to see the world. He needs to dream.

Which, of course, is only half the story.

Gregorio provides truth's bookend on your last day in Havana. The artist looks at this place, and he sees the same goodness. He's bitter about the same injustice.

And, yes, he'd like to march the earth unscathed, the danger gone, the light his guide.

So why not leave? He has money. The Cuban borders are open. Florida's coastline and U.S. citizenship await.

"Maybe I am Cuba. I am illogical. I love my country.

"Do you understand?"