Cuba Government

Convicted smuggler Joel Dorta Garcia sat inside the forbidding compound of Cuba's Department of State Security and showed little remorse while describing the journey that killed a man. Dorta was trying to outrun the Cuban Border Guard and reach U.S. waters in 1999 in an overloaded 32-foot Scorpion speedboat when the cap blew off a 200-gallon gas tank on deck. The 14 paying passengers screamed as gasoline soaked their legs. The seas were rough. There was no moon.

Container ships laden with food and consumer goods from Europe and Asia plow daily into Havana Bay, a body of water virtually empty five years ago. The merchandise is destined for the dollar stores once limited to foreigners, but now frequented more by Cubans. Huge cranes stretch high into the gray winter sky above construction crews building hotel and office towers on the few vacant lots remaining along Havana's broad Fifth Avenue.

One year after shipwreck survivor Elian Gonzalez returned to Cuba, his nation remembered the anniversary with pride Thursday as it seeks to build a new Elian-style campaign over five men jailed in the United States. In a campaign similar to its massive "Free Elian" movement, Cuba has been printing T-shirts, designing banners, organizing rallies and filling state media with its latest cause celebre: freedom for the five Cubans being held on spy-related charges.

His nickname was El Enfermero--The Nurse. His alleged occupation was torturer, in the service of Cuba's communist leaders. Eugenio de Sosa Chabau is now 85, but he remembers his tormentor with photographic clarity, down to the military-style khaki shirt and trousers he wore. Four times, he says, The Nurse attached electrodes to his temples, and 10 times to his sexual organs. "You feel like an explosion in your head, and you lose consciousness," De Sosa recalled.

A light plane piloted by an American buzzed Havana early Saturday, dropping scores of anti-communist leaflets that called President Fidel Castro an "old dinosaur" and urged Cubans to revolt against his "tyrannical regime," witnesses and U.S. authorities said. The U.S. Customs Service said the single-engine Cessna 172 was flown from South Florida by Ly Tong, a Vietnamese-born, 51-year-old "strident anti-communist" who had no apparent ties to Castro's exiled foes in Miami.

A senior Cuban official promised Sunday that if 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez returns to Cuba with his father, the Cuban government will not exploit the boy for propaganda purposes. "We are not going to parade him," said Ricardo Alarcon, president of the Cuban National Assembly and a top aide to Cuban leader Fidel Castro, on NBC-TV's "Meet the Press." "We are not going to use him as those people in Miami have been doing for more than four months," Alarcon said.

Private jets and airliners from nations far and near brought a steady stream of presidents, politburo members and parliamentarians to Cuba on Monday, setting the stage for a landmark Third World event. It wasn't quite on a par with the expected arrival of a single 6-year-old boy. But it was an encouraging start to a week that most of Cuba's 11 million people hope will finally bring to a close the custody battle over Elian Gonzalez, whose return from Miami has become a national obsession.

Thirty-nine years to the day after Fidel Castro handed the United States its humiliating Bay of Pigs defeat, the aging Cuban president marshaled his people again Thursday against America in one of the most strident mass demonstrations yet in the Elian Gonzalez custody dispute. On a day when headlines such as "Armed Mafiosos Near Elian" blazed across front pages, more than 100,000 students and workers packed the new Jose Marti Anti-Imperialist Open Stage in front of the U.S.

The Cuban community across the Florida Straits may have been in turmoil Saturday after the U.S. government's seizure of 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez. But here in the Cuban capital, the atmosphere was almost as if nothing had happened just before dawn in Miami. People went about their weekend routines as television returned to normal programming, and government leaders told the public to neither celebrate nor demonstrate. At Havana's Jose Marti anti-imperialist open stage in front of the U.S.

In its eagerness to appease tourists and prospective investors, the Cuban government is making it increasingly easy for visiting foreigners to "phone home" from the nation's capital. But long-distance communications from Cuba remain far from ideal. Internet cafes are a case in point.