IN an unintentionally revealing address to the then-spirited, long-since gelded Cuban writers' guild shortly after seizing power in 1959, Fidel Castro enunciated the broad paramaters - and razor-wired boundaries - that creativity and freedom of conscience would enjoy in the new Caribbean workers' paradise.

"Within the revolution, everything," he said. "Outside the revolution, nothing."

Since Castro and his inner-circle of cohorts still define what constitutes the revolucion, the demarcation line between freedom of expression and counter-revolutionary subversion in Cuba has proved to be every bit as flexible as it has been logically and morally inconsistent.

This week 78 Cubans were adjudged to be counter-revolutionaries by a kept judiciary, one that does not so much uphold what a civic society would understand as the rule of law but which exists only to add a gloss of legal sanctity to Fidel Castro's arbitrary whims.

The dissidents - economists, teachers, journalists - were sentenced to jail terms ranging from 15 to 27 years by the Cuban dictatorship. Some defendants got off relatively lightly: prosecutors had, in fact, asked for life sentences to be imposed on at least three of those before the courts.

Their crimes against the state included reading titles on Castro's Index of Forbidden Books. These included works by such noted voices of reaction and counter-revolutionary sabotage as Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., John Steinbeck and Stephen King. While reading Mr. King's opuses may well constitute prima facie evidence of bad taste, this is perhaps the first time his small library of doorstop books has ever been deemed a bad influence in law.

This purge represented a brutal backward step following a decade of incremental and often stalling lurches towards liberalisation.

But by abruptly reverting to totalitarian type, using the smokescreen of the Iraq war to launch a brutal counter-attack against his opponents, Castro has been comprehensively and roundly condemned.

The European Union immediately announced that plans to broadly normalise trade relations with Cuba would be suspended until Castro rolled back this latest grotesque encroachment of the honours system among nations that constitutes international law.

Ottawa, which has maintained generally cordial ties with the Castro regime since Pierre Trudeau instituted what might best be described as Canada's policy of asymmetrical foreign relations, delivered a "strongly worded letter of protest" to Havana.

The Los Angeles Times, which has led a 20-year campaign in its editorial columns to lift the US trade embargo against Cuba, made an immediate and unapologetic about-face roaring that "the return to repression looks like a trend . . . Before the US Congress even thinks about loosening (trade) restrictions, it should demand that Castro free those rounded up this month and demonstrate that his nation is moving to democracy and away from totalitarianism."

Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, approvingly and regularly cited by that united front of new generation appeasers and old school anti-Americans who formed a Pacifist International during the stage-setting period before the Iraq war, described the iron-fisted crackdown on perceived dissent as "one more example of the ongoing human rights violations being committed in Cuba".

The Organisation of American States, a hemispheric umbrella group that prides itself on its independence from - and occasional nose-thumbing of - Washington, described Castro's actions as "a wave of repression" intended to deny Cubans the opportunity to "exercise the right to freedom of expression and information".

The widely respected Human Rights Watch, which confirmed Iraq's use of chemical weapons against its Kurdish minority in 1998 following meticulous on-the-ground testing, condemned Castro as a "totalitarian living fossil, a brutal anachronism from the age of dictators".

Amnesty International decried what it called "a giant step back in human rights".

The US State Department, predictably but not inaccurately, rounded on Castro's repressive measures as "the most despicable act of political repression in the Americas in a decade. While the rest of the hemisphere has moved toward greater freedom, the anachronistic Cuban government appears to be retreating into Stalinism."

Finally, with the thunderous hurly-burly of indignation and condemnation breaking everywhere around us, Bermuda gifted Castro its old fleet of buses. Seemingly to be shipped to the dictator at Bermudian taxpayers' expense.

And the Tourism Minister, instead of attending a regional hospitality industry summit hosted by her own civil servants, opted to get some R&R in Havana, presumably among people who look like her. The message telegraphed was twofold. First, an attitude of what can most politely be termed as benign neglect for the already degraded Bermudian tourism infrastructure the Minister is honour- and duty-bound to maintain. Second, tacit affirmation of her demoralised Ministry's widely held belief that she intends to do nothing on the tourism front except mark time until the General Election is called.

THE Minister was not only conspicuous by her absence from the tourism conference; her decision to send her regrets because she was vacationing in an island-nation that will put many other regional resort destinations out of business once Castro and his hijacked revolucion are dead and the hospitality economy fully reborn was, to put it kindly, ill-advised.

The Transport Minister waxed eloquent on the prospect of establishing a regular air route between Bermuda and Cuba. Charter flights already fly to the last Communist redoubt in the Western hemisphere on a semi-regular basis, providing Bermudians with the opportunity of comparatively affordable holidays.

But the traffic between Bermuda and Cuba is already entirely one-way. The average Cuban, of course, will be hard pressed to afford the cost of tickets on the hand-me-down Bermuda buses that Dr. Ewart Brown has bequeathed them. They will not be lining up to book seats on a regularly scheduled flight to Bermuda.

There will be an outflow of dollars from Bermuda to this palm-fringed Stalinist Disneyworld, not one penny of revenue earned by the island except by that handful of businessmen and speculators now investing in Cuba's slave economy in anticipation of earning thousandfold returns once the Communist regime collapses.

And collapse it will.

During the 1960s ane '70s, it was not uncommon for US aircraft to make unscheduled landings in Havana at the behest of pistol-waving radicals seeking either asylum or revolutionary kinsmanship in the Soviet satellite. Thirty years on it's become increasingly common for Cubans to hijack their own state-owned aircraft and ferries to flee the increasingly erratic dictatorship of Fidel Castro.

Castro's Cuba is not so much a one-party "people's republic" as a one-man republic. Like Ceaucescu's Romania or the Duvaliers' Haiti, the revolution will not survive its leader; he is at once both its avatar and its gravedigger. The omnipresent Castro cult of personality, the concentration of executive, legislative and quasi-judicial power into his hands, the lack of any line of succession, all make it impossible for what was a popular revolucion to survive the death of an indiviudal who co-opted it, abused it and corrupted it into an instrument for wielding absolute power with absolute impunity.

Castro's brand of Communism at one time held a tremendous emotional appeal to many in the Caribbean as well as Central and South America. Backed as he was by Soviet patronage - and, by implication, the Red Army's bayonets and tanks - his regime was generally viewed as a not unnecessary counter-weight to unchecked US economic, political and military dominance in the region during the Cold War.

In the 1960s he survived the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion, the missile crisis which brought the world as close to nuclear armageddon as it has ever been and sundry, spectacularly badly planned hits co-ordinated by an alliance of convenience between the CIA and a Mafia still stinging at the nationalisation of its tourism industry assets in Cuba - hotels, casinos and bordellos. This relentless - and futile - pressure, this stand-off between a Caribbean David and superpower Goliath, served to make Castro into something of a cause celebre while tending to obscure the inherent brutality of a regime that has, in fact, been a cause de scandale for almost 40 years. His willingness, eagerness even, to play to the visiting cameras, the battle fatigues he favoured as if to suggest the Revolution was an ongoing campaign, even the trademark cigar clamped between jutting jaws in a shameless counterfeit of Hemingwayesque posturing, all served to turn an undistinguished tin-pot dictator into a celebrity. Castro became the magnetic pole that the compass needles of Westen Hermisphere revolutionaries, radicals and various non-ideological freeloaders attempting to chart non-American courses were drawn to.

BUT his star, at its brightest in the late 1970s when Cuban forces were deployed to the front lines in superpower proxy wars throughout Africa and Cuban bureaucrats were remaking Jamaica and Grenada into client states, abruptly imploded into a black hole directly the Cold War ended. At that time Cuba's chief export was neither cigars nor sugar - it was Soviet-financed revolution modelled on Castro's blend of nationalism and socialism.

With the end of what was in reality a hot-and-cold superpower war, Cuba abruptly found itself with a dearth of markets for its revolutionary fervour. The regime has been rotting by inches since the early 1990s, its latest cretinous clampdown on freedom of thought and expression an unmistakeable death spasm.

But given such deathbed dictatorial convulsions, the Bermuda Government's decision this week to embrace Cuba as a commercial and tourism partner was a minor masterpiece of bad timing and even worse judgment.

Such decisions might better wait until after Castro had finished digging his own grave and laid himself out in it; when everything will be permissible in Cuba whether or not it is sanctioned by a capricious revolucion.