By Jeff Jacoby

                  Second of three parts

                  H AVANA

                  ''THERE ARE NO banned books in Cuba,'' Fidel Castro declared in February
                  1998, ''only those which we have no money to buy.''

                  Of course, books are banned in Cuba; just try to locate one that criticizes Castro.
                  Bookstores and public libraries here carry works exalting Marxism, but you won't
                  find ''The Gulag Archipelago'' or ''Darkness at Noon'' on their shelves.

                  So when Ramon Humberto Colas, a psychologist in Las Tunas, heard Castro's
                  words, he and his wife Berta Mexidor decided to put them to the test. They
                  designated the 800 or so books in their home as a library and invited friends and
                  neighbors to borrow them for free. And so was born the first of Cuba's
                  independent libraries - independent of state control, of censorship, and of any
                  ideology save the conviction that it is no crime to read a book.

                  The men and women who run these humble libraries risk government retaliation;
                  several have been threatened, interrogated, raided by the police - or worse. Colas
                  and Mexidor were evicted from their home, denounced in the (state-owned) press,
                  and repeatedly arrested. Their books were confiscated. They were fired from their
                  jobs. Their daughter was expelled from school. Government persecution eventually
                  drove them from Cuba, but the seed they planted bore fruit. Today there are more
                  than 100 independent libraries in homes across the country, each one a little island
                  of intellectual freedom.

                  In Gisela Delgado's library in Havana, visitors can borrow Spanish translations of
                  Adam Michnik's ''Letters from Prison,'' Vaclav Havel's ''The Power of the
                  Powerless,'' or the speeches of Martin Luther King. On her shelves are everything
                  from art to philosophy, but when I ask which books are the most popular, she
                  doesn't hesitate: ''`Animal Farm' and `Nineteen Eighty-four.''' It does not come as a
                  surprise that readers in this hemisphere's only totalitarian outpost hunger for the
                  greatest antitotalitarian novels ever written.

                  The Castro regime boasts of having wiped out illiteracy. That makes it all the more
                  unforgivable that it has turned the lending of books into an act of defiance. Dissent
                  in Cuba takes many forms, but there is none that shames the regime more.

                  Like most communist countries, Cuba is plagued with shortages of everything from
                  food to electricity, but political dissidents it has in abundance. The government
                  maligns them as malcontents and traitors - ''all these people are financed by the
                  United States,'' sneers Fernando Remirez, Cuba's deputy foreign minister - but the
                  dissidents I met here uniformly come across as men and women of integrity and
                  courage.

                  On my first day in Havana, I visited Oscar Espinosa Chepe, an economist who lost
                  his job at the National Bank of Cuba - and whose wife was fired from the Ministry
                  of Foreign Affairs - when he began calling publicly for economic reform. Bluff and
                  good-natured, he describes himself as a former true believer who gradually came to
                  realize the truth about Castro.

                  ''He turned out to be someone who did everything for his own power,'' Espinosa
                  says. ''Life in Cuba is a mixture of Stalinism and `caudillismo''' - rule by a caudillo, a
                  Latin dictator - ''and there are no parties, no opposition, no elections, no choices.''

                  Another one-time true believer, Martha Beatriz Roque, was a professor of statistics
                  at the University of Havana who fell out of favor for praising glasnost and
                  perestroika. In 1997, she and three other dissidents released a report criticizing
                  Cuban communism and urging a peaceful transition to democracy. For that offense,
                  they were arrested on charges of spreading ''enemy propaganda,'' and convicted in
                  a one-day show trial that was closed to the public. Roque and two of the others
                  spent nearly three years in prison; the fourth, Vladimiro Roca, is still there.

                  Roque has been detained by the police 17 times; her home has been broken into
                  and searched; she assumes her phone is tapped and her visitors spied on. But she
                  doesn't fear for her safety. Well-known dissidents like her and Espinosa and the
                  others I met - Elizardo Sanchez, Oswaldo Paya, Ricardo Gonzalez - are protected
                  by their international reputations. If something happens to them, says Roque,
                  ''people outside Cuba will make a big noise.''

                  What worries her more is the fate of dissidents who aren't as well known. Juan
                  Carlos Gonzalez, for example - the blind president of the Cuban Foundation for
                  Human Rights, who was abducted by the security police and battered so badly he
                  needed stitches in his head. Or 70-year-old Juan Basulto Morell, a dissident
                  journalist who was beaten bloody with a club as his assailant yelled, ''This is for
                  being a counter-revolutionary.''

                  In Cuba, as in all dictatorships, it is the dissenters who sustain hope and keep
                  conscience alive. On this tormented island, they are the bravest and the best.