In his tiny Miami apartment, Nelson Rodríguez Dieguez collects books for Cuba's underground network of democratic independent libraries. A former political prisoner, Rodríguez has made it his mission now to set history straight until Cuba is free.

His latest project is a book lauding the hundreds of women -- he estimates as many as 13,000 -- imprisoned in the early years of Castro's communist power grab.

Like so many of the freed prisoners I've met over the years, Rodríguez recounts his decade in Cuban prisons calmly and methodically, picking apart Castro's proclamations that the regime never practiced torture.

Having spent 124 days naked and hooded during brutal interrogations at Las Cabañitas, a country home converted into a torture chamber of sorts outside Havana, Rodríguez learned the hard way about speaking truth to power at age 22.

FACING DEATH

Working to foment uprisings in Castro's home province of Oriente, Rodríguez was caught Nov. 3, 1961, and after three days of interrogations by state security in Havana was taken to Las Cabañitas. ''One-hundred-and-twenty-four days without clothes, without bathing, your hair's all pasty, your skin is full of welts,'' he told me. ``They throw buckets of ice water on you. They put you into an interrogation with chunks of ice on your back. You're so cold, you pass out.''

''First, they sentenced me to the firing squad,'' he said. The guards would line up a handful of men and go through the drill, pointing their rifles, and -- bang, bang! -- there were no bullets, only blanks.

Then came the ``hanging.''

A state security goon offered to lead an ''Our Father'' but a weak Rodríguez -- still nude, hooded and with a knotted rope tied around his neck -- jumped off the chair only to land on the cement floor with a busted big toe.

Even after those 124 hellish days, when he was sent to work camps at the Isle of Pines prison, Rodríguez said there were firing squads assigned to kill at least one man each weekend until 1967. ``The stress of living all those years without knowing if they were going to kill you on Friday or Saturday. . . .''

A WARRIOR'S OBLIGATION

After 10 years in prison and several more hounded by Cuban state security, Rodríguez left in 1978 for Venezuela, and eventually started an auto-parts business with family. When Hugo Chávez took up with Castro, Rodríguez headed to Miami.

He still has family and friends in Cuba, some of them former prisoners. Despite two hurricanes devastating much of the island, he's committed to getting ''democracy-building'' books to the independent libraries, though the Cuban regime keeps cracking down. At the movement's height there were about 200 libraries -- today 48 remain in the group Rodríguez helps.

On Saturday, the Grupo de Apoyo a Bibliotecas Democráticas, which supports independent libraries and helps the families of former political prisoners in Cuba, will commemorate the 12th anniversary of the library movement. For details, call Rodríguez at 786-306-2719. ''We send any book that will help give people a political formation, to help them understand true democracy,'' he said.

Rodríguez knows something about the risks of speaking up in a dictatorship. Having walked hooded and naked to face death -- and lived to tell about it -- he feels an obligation, as so many of our old warriors do, to spread the word about freedom's promise.

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