Who does Fidel really fear? Cuban dissident Oscar Biscet

The jailed Dr. Oscar Biscet is becoming the public face of the island’s dissident movement, more so after President Bush on Monday gives him in absentia the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom award. In interviews with Winnie and others close to Biscet, the portrait that emerges is of a determined and profoundly religious man with an ability to connect with ordinary folks.

The medal will be presented at a White House ceremony to Winnie and Biscet’s stepson, Yan Morejón. Family friends say Biscet wants the medal kept in Miami, until Cuba is free.

`LITTLE CRAZY MAN’

Fidel Castro has called Biscet “a little crazy man.”

Miami Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who lobbied the White House for months to give the medal to Biscet, admits the Afro-Cuban is far from a household name in Cuba, a country where the media is under strict state control. But she believes he has the qualities that could galvanize a country the way Vaclav Pavel did in the Czech Republic or Nelson Mandela in South Africa.

”All political prisoners are meritorious of this award,” Ros-Lehtinen said, “but it’s important to select a person to symbolize a movement.”

The 46-year old Biscet represents a younger generation of dissidents who are a product of Castro’s Cuba, she said.

”He is a man of the revolution, who grew up in this corrupt system of the Castro thugs and has only known that system,” she added, “and he’s rejected (that) in favor of peace, democracy and liberty.”

Biscet was born poor. His father was a port worker and his mother an office assistant. Studious and disciplined, he graduated from medical school in 1985, and his troubles with Cuban authorities began shortly thereafter, when he protested the long work hours at Havana’s National Hospital and was suspended for one year.

In 1997, he founded the Lawton Foundation on Human Rights and conducted a clandestine study of the high abortion rates in Cuba. In February of 1998, he was expelled from the health system, a government monopoly.

His opposition work went into overdrive.

Between June 1998 and November 1999, he was arrested 26 times. On an anniversary of the 1996 downing of two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft by Cuban MiGs, he publicly displayed large photographs of the four Miami pilots killed in that incident.

In mid-1999, his group carried out a 40-day ”liquid-only” fast, in an apartment decorated with posters of leaders Biscet admired: Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi and the late Cuban exile leader Jorge Mas Canosa. He cast his struggle against communism — not just against Castro — in biblical terms. ”We fight against evil,” he said, “not the evil-doers.”

The group would hold seminars on peaceful ”civil disobedience” methods every Friday at a farm near Havana. ”Biscet was a stickler for punctuality,” said María del Carmen Carro, a Cuban independent journalist who worked with Biscet.

”He would start talking at 8:30 in the morning, even if the room was empty,” she said.

At a news conference in late 1999, Biscet displayed three Cuban flags upside down, as a form of protest. He was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison for, among other charges, “dishonoring national symbols.”

He delivered sermons to his fellow inmates. ”Most of them were bad people,” he told reporters afterward, “but they had a good side and that’s what I looked for.”

After his release in 2002, throngs of neighbors in the mostly poor black neighborhood of Lawton flocked to his family home to greet him.

”The people who know him,” said Winnie Biscet, recalling that day, “love him as if he were a president.”

He said he was not afraid of going back to jail. “I overcome that fear because I lean on God.”

Thirty-six days later, on Dec. 3 of 2002, he was arrested again. Four months later, he was condemned to 25 years in jail on charges of being a U.S. agent, along with 74 other activists in what became Cuba’s harshest crackdown in decades.

MH