We were meeting with Ricardo Alarcón, president of the National Assembly of People's Power, in a small, air-conditioned office, sipping sweet coffee and pretending not to notice Alarcon's navel, which was peeking through a gap between the buttons of his guayabera.
Alarcón is charming and well educated, a doctor of philosophy and letters who also served for several years as Cuba's ambassador to the United Nations.
He is also one of the founders of Cuba's Communist Party and is often mentioned as a possible successor to Castro. Alarcón sat facing us, a group of eight or nine reporters, one of whom bravely asked: "What is your policy toward dissidents?"
AlarcÓn paused a moment and then chuckled. "Well, of course," he said, "our policy is to sometimes arrest them."
Earlier this summer, Castro exercised that policy by arresting some 60 dissidents, a dozen of whom reportedly remain incarcerated, while denying that dissidents are a problem.
In July, on the 52nd anniversary of the start of the revolution, Castro spoke to an audience at the Karl Marx Theater in Havana in a style reminiscent of our beloved Baghdad Bob, who steadfastly insisted that no American troops were in Iraq as American tanks trundled behind him.
"The much-publicized dissidence, or alleged opposition in Cuba, exists only in the fevered minds of the Cuban-American mafia and the bureaucrats in the White House," said Castro. ". You would think that the revolution only had a few hours left."
The audience, which included hundreds of Americans in Cuba as part of an aid program, gave Castro a standing ovation.
That's the nice thing about being a totalitarian ruler. Everyone agrees with you no matter what you say, and everyone celebrates your birthday. Unless they don't, of course, in which case, well, sometimes you get arrested.
(Bush's birthday, just in case things go badly here, is July 6.)