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He's 'The Man of Two Havanas'

Max Lesnik stirs things up on the radio in Miami and his native Cuba.

HAVANA - He fled Cuba in 1961, but still calls Fidel Castro his friend. He can't stand communism, but bitterly opposes the U.S. embargo. He lives in Miami, but travels regularly to Havana, even appearing on state-run television.

Max Lesnik always has an opinion, and often makes someone mad - no matter which side of the Florida Straits he's on.

"It's always been up to me to be critical. I've always been with the opposition, not with one government or the other," says Lesnik, a Cuban revolutionary-turned-South Florida radio commentator.

"I don't talk out of both sides of my mouth," he adds. "What I say here, I say in Miami. What I say in Miami, I say here."

"Here" is Havana's iconic Hotel Nacional. Lesnik slouches in a chair by a window overlooking Caribbean waters when his phone rings. He laughs, then hangs up.

"The deputy director of my radio program says there's a rumor going around in Miami that I had an accident and I've gotten killed," he said. "I just said, 'Don't deny anything. Say you don't know if I'm in the hospital, or what. See what happens.'"

There have often been questions about the well-being of Lesnik, now 76. Arriving in Miami nearly 47 years ago, he spent close to two decades publishing Replica, a Spanish-language magazine whose offices in Little Havana were bombed 11 times, allegedly by anti-Castro hard-liners in the Cuban exile community who opposed his calls to do away with the American embargo.

Lesnik's life and politics are chronicled in The Man of Two Havanas, a documentary directed by his youngest daughter, Vivien Lesnik Weisman, 45. It was screened this month at the New Latin American Cinema festival.

Lesnik hosted a Cuban radio program after Castro's forces toppled dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, but became disillusioned as Cuba deepened ties with Soviet Union. He finally declared on the air that he was no communist, and went to the United States.

Lesnik, who retains his Cuban passport, first returned to the island in 1978, and began visiting about three times a year after the Soviet Union collapsed. Both he and his daughter go as journalists and therefore do not require special U.S. permission.

Lesnik patched things up with Castro, and met many times with him - though he has not seen the Cuban leader since he underwent emergency intestinal surgery and ceded power to his younger brother Raul in July 2006.

Vivien Lesnik Weisman was supposed to have dinner with her father and Castro in 1996, but had to return to the U.S. when her then husband was hospitalized with a bleeding ulcer. Castro called her.

"I remember he made a joke saying U.S. intelligence is now trying to figure out what the code word 'ulcer' means," said the filmmaker.

Lesnik's daughter, still shopping for U.S. distributors, hopes her documentary will be shown at the Miami International Film Festival in February.

[Last modified December 25, 2007, 00:41:44]