No longer an exile, commentator at home in Cuba, Miami

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, in an interview with The Associated Press.

"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 the sixth-floor executive lounge of Havana's iconic Hotel Nacional. Lesnik slouches in an armchair by a window overlooking sparkling Caribbean waters when his cell 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 explains. "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 45-year-old youngest daughter, Vivien Lesnik Weisman, which screened this month at the New Latin American Cinema festival.

Shot over 2 1/2 years in Havana, the Cuban capital, and Little Havana, the Miami Cuban district, the film tells of Lesnik's political activism, friendship with Castro, and early efforts to generate revolutionary propaganda when the bearded rebels took to the mountains of eastern Cuba.

Lesnik hosted a Cuban radio program after Castro's forces toppled dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, but became disillusioned as Cuba deepened ties with the Soviet Union. He finally declared on the air that he was no communist, and motored to the United States in January 1961 aboard a small boat with 13 other former rebel collaborators. His wife and two daughters arrived two months later.