A little more than a year ago, poet and journalist Raúl Rivero Castañeda wrote that he refused to let America's embargo against Cuba define the international debate over the fate of the island's 11 million people. "In this country, the real blockade, the one that affects the daily life of the people is the internal governing system," he declared. Since then, Rivero has endured his own private blockade.

Cuba's internal system is one that Rivero managed to avoid annoying too much until March of this year. But over three days that month, the Cuban government arrested Rivero and 27 other independent journalists. By April, all had been sentenced to 14-27 years in prison. The journalists were part of a spring sweep that turned 75 Cubans-including librarians, writers, and other professionals-into political prisoners.

For Rivero and journalists who smuggled their missives abroad, it was their insistence on writing what they saw and felt that put them in jail. That fidelity to the truth could now kill them. Rivero and journalist Oscar Espinosa Chepe, 62, are both ill, their families tell visitors. Rivero, who has lost much weight, has circulatory problems, and Espinosa suffers from a worsening liver disease.

Castro must realize that even if he relents and sets Rivero and others free, they are likely to stay. Rivero has long understood that Castro may be the Father of the Cuban Revolution, but that the revolution's children are increasingly restive. Castro can deny their simple truths like a Cuban King Lear, but Rivero and others persist. They witness. They write.

Rivero made his decision to go beyond the revolution's definition of journalism in 1989, when he broke from the writer's union and joined with nearly a dozen other intellectuals to sign an open letter raising the issue of political prisoners.

With the children of the revolution no longer obeying, Castro punished them. So, one-by-one, many left. But Rivero stayed. Still others-including the economist Martha Beatriz Roque and Dr. Oscar Elías Biscet, who are now in jail with Rivero-continued their peaceful opposition.

Rivero formed an independent news service and under the noses-and watchful eyes-of the authorities, sent his work abroad. In one 1998 column, he wrote about journalists jailed for operating independently and lamented an internal press "totally devoid of meaning." In another article, he wrote that no one could make him feel like a criminal: "I am merely a man who writes; one who writes in the country where I was born."

Over the years, the authorities picked up Rivero, questioned him, harassed him, and tried to nudge him off the island, where he would presumably disappear into the black hole of Miami's exile community. But Rivero was too smart. He stayed, calling himself an "inixile." Others did, too.

When I visited Cuba in 2001 with a group of students reporting on the island, one of them, Ezequiel Minaya, spent his days talking to Rivero and other writers. Many of Rivero's old friends feared that talking to the poet would endanger them, and he appeared lonely. My student asked why Rivero stayed and he replied with the mantra he lived: "Why should I leave, this is my country."

For years, Castro has blamed any internal problems on a draconian US trade embargo. But writers like Rivero and his fellow political prisoners, as well as those dissidents who are not in jail, refuse to let Castro off so easily.

They don't want to leave Cuba; they want to redefine it. More than 30,000 Cubans signed the Varela petition requesting a referendum on basic rights. The international community is listening, and the arrests and detentions have only made them pay more attention.

The American left, long silent on Cuba, has cleared its throat. In mid-September the pressure continued to build. The European Parliament condemned Cuba's human rights violations and demanded that Rivero and other prisoners be released. Earlier, the European Union agreed new sanctions against Cuba's government, enraging Castro. The Cuban Conference of Bishops followed by demanding clemency for the prisoners.

Jailed or freed, Rivero will not go away. In 2000, he wrote about a poetry contest in Cuba run by the dissident group Reflection. It was clear from the entries that Castro was failing to control his island's imagination. Rivero must still take pleasure in the poem by Nestor Leliebre Camue, a native of Santiago de Cuba.

"Don't plunge into the sea

for the love of God.

Wait. A fascinating brightness

Is rising from the land."

To end here, however, would fail Rivero. Cubans are known for managing humor in the worst situations. I imagine that Rivero would want to end with a diary entry smuggled out by his fellow journalist and prison mate Manuel Vázquez Portal. The Vázquez diary is posted on the web site for the Committee to Protect Journalists:

"Now, like T.S. Eliot, I can say, 'April is the cruelest month.' April 4 is a bad day for me. On April 4, my mother gave me 18 knocks on the head for joining the Young Pioneers (the communist youth organization) without her permission. This last April 4, they gave me 18 years for writing without permission. The first time I was a child, this second I'm an old man. It seems repression does not work; either that or I'm very stubborn."