Cuban revolutionary Max Lesnik fights on in Miami

MIAMI (Reuters) - He helped his friend Fidel Castro seize power in Cuba on January 1, 1959, and half a century later Max Lesnik is still fighting.

Lesnik ran a rebel propaganda network and served as a head of clandestine operations in Havana during the revolution, but he quickly became disenchanted as Castro forged ties with the Soviet Union and he fled for Miami in 1961 in a small boat packed with other former guerrilla collaborators.

Even after moving to Miami, however, Lesnik kept his rebellious streak and he has been the target of violent attacks by anti-Castro hard-liners in the Cuban exile community.

"I've always been very independent. I said the Cuban Revolution had to be carried out without either Washington or Moscow," Lesnik, 77, told Reuters in an interview last week.

He founded a popular magazine called Replica and used it to espouse his opinions about Cuba and U.S. policy toward the island, which this week celebrates the revolution's 50th anniversary.

Lesnik has sometimes praised Castro, who handed power to his brother Raul Castro this year after falling ill, and he has repeatedly called for an end to the U.S. trade embargo against Havana.

Fidel Castro once considered Lesnik a traitor but the two men smoothed over their differences and Cuba's government now sees him as a useful former odd man out on the home turf of its most strident enemies.

Replica's offices in Miami's Little Havana district were bombed 11 times, mostly in the mid-1970s during a period of political violence that saw drive-by shootings, car bombings and the downing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people.

One of Lesnik's closest friends, Luciano Nieves, was among the victims of the violence, which he blames on "CIA-created monsters" who targeted perceived Castro sympathizers.

Lesnik was eventually forced to shut down Replica in the early 1980s in the face of death threats to himself, his advertisers and businesses that carried the magazine. But he refused to be silenced, and still works as a Spanish-language radio commentator with an audience across South Florida.

Lesnik belonged to the same left-leaning Cuban People's Party as Castro before the revolution. He says he never fired a shot but braved bombs dropped by dictator Fulgencio Batista's air force in frequent visits to rebel-held positions in the Escambray mountains during the conflict.

Unhappy with Castro's alliance with the Soviet Union, he declared he wasn't a communist on a radio program he ran in Cuba just before fleeing into exile.

Lesnik called his adopted home a "hell" in a documentary about his life that was released last year and directed by his daughter Vivien Lesnik Weisman. In the film, "The Man of Two Havanas," he says Miami is a place "where terrorists are heroes" and "political assassination is regarded as heroic."

CHANGE UNDER OBAMA?

During the Cold War, when Cuba was an outpost of the Soviet empire just 90 miles from Florida, a majority of Americans agreed with a hard line on a communist government that violates human rights and holds political prisoners.

Attitudes have changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, even in Miami. A recent poll showed for the first time that most Cuban-Americans in Florida now favor lifting the economic embargo imposed in 1962.

Lesnik puts it down to a generational change with younger Cuban-Americans more concerned with domestic issues like the U.S. economy than with the political situation in Cuba.

He says the poll also highlights resentment over the restrictions on travel to Cuba by Cuban-Americans imposed in 2004 by President George W. Bush to toughen the embargo.

"I'm not going to tell you that people have changed opinion or suddenly changed into being pro-Castro," he said. "It's not an ideological change, it's humanitarian. The right wing has become an obstacle to reconciliation of the Cuban family."

Lesnik says it is only by lifting the embargo, which critics say has given the Cuban government its best excuse for the revolution's failures, that the United States can help open the door to real change in Cuba.

He says economic and social problems have fueled a lot of discontent in Cuba, but Washington has to revise its outmoded policies toward the island, and normalize relations with it, before any real Cuban democracy can flourish.

"When the United States is no longer a threat, when the United States isn't the country of the enemy always looking to complicate things for the Cuban government, change will be possible," Lesnik said.

He hopes now for an improvement in U.S.-Cuba ties under President-elect Barack Obama. But while Obama has promised to ease sanctions if Cuba frees its political prisoners and take steps toward democracy, he has not said what it would take for Washington to end the embargo.

Lesnik first returned to Cuba in the late 1970s and has paid frequent visits since the Soviet Union collapsed.

He stopped short of saying he wants to return to the island to live, having grown old and raised his children and grandchildren in the United States. But he called Cuba "the pearl of the Antilles," and seemed wistful as he said: "Let's see what happens with Obama."

(Editing by Kieran Murray)