The question first:
Is this op-ed piece available in Cuban libraries?

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/5535665.htm

"CARLOS ALBERTO MONTANER
When fearful, Castro fills up his prisons

It happened again. In recent days, Cuba's political police cracked down on the opposition democrats and detained nearly 100 people ''on personal orders from Castro,'' a clumsy excuse offered by Lt. Col. Pichardo, an officer who alternates his profession as psychologist with the dirty task of jailer.

The agents vented their anger on independent journalists and librarians, human-rights activists and political leaders who seek a peaceful evolution toward democracy, some of whom are linked to the Varela Project. Cuba's most notable poet, Raúl Rivero, was caught in the raid. Also, the economist Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello and the liberal leaders Osvaldo Alfonso Valdés and Héctor Palacios.

Many of the detainees probably face years of imprisonment. If so, they will join several hundred political prisoners previously sentenced. One of these is a young blind lawyer, Juan Carlos González Leiva, who before his definitive incarceration served as particularly amusing entertainment for the communists. They used to kidnap him from the street, take him to a remote place, beat him up and take his white cane. The ''game'' consisted of guessing how many hours he would take to rejoin his terrified wife.

Why this new repressive action? Actually, it's a routine. It's the way Fidel Castro exercises and retains power.

In the mid-1990s, dozens of Cubans were suddenly jailed. At the top of the list were Vladimiro Roca and three fellow authors of a valuable document titled The Homeland Belongs to Us All. In 1991, as the Soviet Union collapsed, something similar happened, and dozens of notable dissidents, led by writers María Elena Cruz Varela and Fernando Velásquez, were locked up for several years in foul cells.

In 1985, alarmed by perestroika, Castro placed Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa and Col. Tony de la Guardia in front of the firing squad and ordered the arrest of dozens of officers suspected of ''reformism.'' In 1980, following the arrests of Gustavo Arcos, Ricardo Bofill and Elizardo Sánchez -- pioneers in the struggle for human rights on the island -- thousands of Cubans were beset by mobs that beat and humiliated them for weeks for the ''crime'' of wishing to leave the country legally.

In 1975, when Cuban troops went to Angola to fight a war of conquest on the Soviet's side, Castro's ire descended simultaneously on the universities, unleashing an intense persecution of ''antisocial'' students -- that is, anyone who exhibited any symptom of ideological independence. In 1971, the ''Case of Heberto Padilla'' -- an exceptional poet whom the authorities crushed emotionally and forced to publicly disown his poems, friends and beliefs -- gave way to the First Congress on Culture, an obscene consecration of intolerance that declared war on any manifestation of intellectual freedom.

In the 1960s, when the regime set out to pulverize all ''depraved'' Cubans in its revolutionary effort to build ''the new man,'' it imprisoned thousands of homosexuals, ''rockers,'' and Jehova's Witnesses, Protestants and Catholics who practiced their faith. Earlier, it had crushed the ''microfraction,'' an alleged conspiracy by communists hostile to Castro's chaotic method of governance.

Thus, we are not witnessing an exceptional phenomenon but a methodically conducted strategy that allows no more than five years between episodes of fury and rabid persecution.

How useful are these episodes to Castro? Simple. The roundups are set off when Castro perceives that he's losing all control of society. Whether his victims are democrats, revisionist communists or indifferent human beings, it's all the same to him. When he detects them, intuits their existence or perceives that the reins for controling the people are slacking, he unleashes his hunting dogs to sow terror and impart the proper lesson.

It's even possible that he believes -- as Lenin, one of his favorite personages, believed -- that terror, especially the terror inflicted on the innocent, is the most efficient way to induce collective obedience. Because no one can feel safe from forms of punishment that have lost all relationship to the forms of behavior previously banned.

When a vague fear seizes the conscience of people, those who experience it become trembling and obsequious little pets -- exactly what Castro expects from them. This much should be understood: Brutal repression in Cuba is not a consequence of the confrontation with the United States or of the violation of the law by some Cubans. There is no need to look for rationality or cause and effect.

Castro's repression is the fundamental method of control used to maintain absolute authority in the tyrant's hands. It has been so for 44 years, and he is not going to give it up -- no matter the economic or moral sanctions exerted against him. He is convinced that in repression dwells his ability to remain in power.

It is thus futile to expect -- or ask Castro for -- a change in his ways of governance. That would be as absurd as to try to persuade a tiger to become a vegetarian."