Dissident says change is slow, but coming to Cuba.

Tall, bald, distinguished --and wearing a guayabera shirt in a sea of business attire --Rene de Jesus Gomez Manzano, a defense lawyer and famous Cuban dissident, accepted a resolution from the International Law Section honoring his work to advance freedom and human rights in Cuba.

Gomez Manzano accepted on behalf of others in Cuba "who are striving to defend human rights in our country."

Standing ovations greeted him at the section's Executive Council meeting during the Bar's Annual Convention.

Being in the Boca Raton Resort and Club was a far cry from the Cuban prisons that have three times housed Gomez Manzano, who co-founded one organization dedicated to getting the Cuban government to follow its own laws and a second that published a paper on human rights calling for political and economic reforms.

His visit to the meeting was arranged during the recent trip to Cuba organized by the section. Outgoing Chair Peter Quinter pledged, "The Florida Bar International Law Section stands with you in your fight against totalitarianism and for human rights in Cuba and throughout the world."

After the presentation, Gomez Manzano, in an interview with the Bar News, discussed conditions in Cuba, the new U.S. diplomatic initiative to resume normal relations, prospects for better human and economic rights, and the possibilities for Florida lawyers on the evolving island nation.

"I hope that when our country finally and really opens its economy, then it will be possible for members of The Florida Bar to help establish an alliance of U.S. investors and Cuba. I think personally this could only be done when the Cuban government really opens for foreign investment," he said.

"Right now, they are endeavoring to do so, but they are doing that in a slow and very limited way. I think that the moment has not come yet for this improvement of relations, and therefore I think the moment for real participation of American lawyers, especially Florida lawyers, hasn't come."

President Obama's proposal to reopen normal diplomatic relations "has had good aspects," Gomez Manzano said, noting it has served to undercut decades of rhetoric about a nearby implacable foe causing all of Cuba's ills.

"For more than half a century, the communist propaganda has insisted the fact that supposedly we have the great enemy 90 miles north of our shores, and the situation in our country is bad because of them. Of course, that all is false; those are false statements. But right now, after...