When the news broke last week of a handshake between Bill Clinton and Fidel Castro, the sound of business lobbyists licking their chops echoed through Washington. Mr. Clinton makes no secret of his desire to "normalize" relations with the Cuban dictator. To his campaign contributors, who expect to get in on the ground floor of Cuban investing, that salutation was no doubt a signal that the moment grows nearer.

Ending the embargo would give Mr. Clinton a legacy other than scandal. But considering his reputation as a first-class opportunist, it's not hard to imagine that he also has other goals. Who has trouble picturing a post-embargo world where civilian Clinton and his kindergarten chum Mack McClarty put on guayaberra shirts and white shoes, sip rum niojitos and do deals at Hemingway's old Havana haunt, Ambos Mundos?

What concerns human rights advocates though is the thought of Vladimiro Roca and thousands of other political prisoners still rotting in Cuban dungeons while Mr. Clinton is chasing sin-yur-eetas on Havana's nzalec6n. Mr. Roca, who is in solitary confinement for his non-violent political opposition, symbolizes both the regime's continued repression and Cuban contempt for Fidel. Ending the isolation of the Cuban people has its merits, but if the US has any moral conscience left after eight Clintonista years, it will deniand fundamental human rights for Cubans before it lifts the embargo. Securing the release of Mr. Roca and all other political prisoners would be a good start.

In the interests of ending the embargo and gaining access to World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank funding, Castro is desperate to put a humane face on his totalitarianism. Some U.S. business interests -including, in all probability, the same circle of Clinton friends and family that are doing business in Haiti with the repressive Aristide government-want to "engage" Castro. This means that they expect multilateral lending to transform Fidel, Inc. from a bad credit risk with a history of default into a going consumer concern with a charge card.

Grasping at its last chance for communist vindication, the American left also lobbies for the regime by droning on about the country's per-capita literacy and medical care. This ridiculous rationalization ignores the gruesome and persistent violence required to produce those results. As former Cuban political prisoner Armando Valladares has pointed out, if we justify dictatorships because they build schools and hospitals, then Hitler, Stalin and Pinochet would all be justified. "How do you justify that when Cubans find anything that will float, they will leave the island?"

Cuba's undying repression is recognized by the U.N. Human Rights Commission, which denounced it in t999, proving that while Castro can schmooze with socialists in the free world-as he did at a church in Harlem last week-he can't dodge his record as a ruthless dictator.

Fidel cannot reinvent himself as a postrevolutionary social democrat because his "new man" still has not materialized. Despite the beating, torture, murder and exile of millions of opponents of Cuban communism, new homegrown varieties --many former communists-keep sprouting like kudzu. And so the revolution must continue devouring its own through imprisonment, torture and exile.

This offends decent people -particularly in places like the Czech Republic and Poland where totalitarian tactics are a recent memory-and their condemnation embarrasses the dictator. Castro is prepared for an armed struggle, but not for tenacious non-violent speech.

Mr. Roca is a particularly serious problem for the regime. For starters, his father was the legendary Was Roca, a top Red in pre-revolutionary Cuba and one of the most influential figures in the transformation of Fidel's guerrilla movement into a communist regime after the 1958 overthrow of Gen. Fulgencio Batista. He was secretary general of the communist party, and Cuban school children are drilled to worship his memory.

As a young man, Vladimiro Roca Vladimiro-named after Lenin-flew MIG fighter jets for the Cuban Air Force but eventually left the military to study economics at the University of Havana. In the mid-1980s he grew disillusioned with the corruption, privilege and one-man control of the system and began to argue with his father about the merits of communism. In 1991 he illegally founded the Social Democratic Party.

In 1997, Vladimiro, and three other Cubans, published "The Homeland Belongs to All of Us," a paper calling for human rights and a national dialogue among all Cubans to discuss the country's future.

Shortly after the release of the document, the authors held a press conference where Vladimiro called on Cuban exiles that send money to families on the island to ask those families to boycott the regime's public rallies.

That press conference and the essay landed all four authors in jail. About a vear later, a classic closed-door communist trial handed down sentences of between 3 and 6 years for all of them. Since then, three of the four have been released; Mr. Roca has not.

A favorite Castro punishment tactic is imprisonment far from home because it is difficult for resource-starved families to make visits. Mr. Roca's case is no exception. He is being held in the Ariza prison in Cienfuegos, six hours by car from his Havana home. He suffers from severe back pain but has been denied treatment.

Notwithstanding the hardship of Cuban prison, notorious for rodent infestations, filth, psychological torture and minimal rations, Mr. Roca shows no signs of backing down. Last year, during an island wide protest called "The life and freedom fast in Cuba," he organized a prison hunger strike. That put him in solitary confinement. A further affront to the regime was Mr. Roca's conversion to Catholicism.

The Roca family name is synonymous with the revolution, making Vladimiro's rebellion the spoken acknowledgement of its failure. Moreover, his stature in the nomenclature requires that the regime use him to send a message to middle- and Lipper-ranking apparatchiks that dissent will not be tolerated.

For many years now Castro has dealt with opponents by imprisonment and torture. When international pressure grew too great, he forced them into exile. Mr. Roca and many of his compatriots have broken that pattern by refusing to accept release in exchange for banishment. Considering the regime's well-documented cruelty, this is remarkable courage and it should shame the Washington deal-makers who choose to ignore it.

Ms. O'Grady edits the Americas.