CUBA: There He Went Again.

Students of the long careers of Jimmy Carter and Fidel Castro reacted glumly to the news that the former president would visit the dictator's island. Castro has a talent, honed over long practice, for bullying and snowing credulous guests. Carter has a talent for credulity, based on his vanity and self-righteousness.

The trip got off to a bad start, with the former president contradicting the State Department on its report that Castro has been developing biological weapons that could be used by terrorists. Why shouldn't Castro do such a thing? When Carter was president, his armies served as Hessians of the Soviet empire, garrisoning Communist regimes in Africa. Why not help friendly thugs now? But Carter chose to see no evil.

Once he was in Cuba, he did the celebrity-tourist things. He threw out the first pitch at a Cuban ballgame, under Fidel's watchful eye (Castro's link with baseball must be the most touted connection between sports and politics since French kings boasted about their skills as huntsmen). He toured an AIDS clinic. In his speech to the Cuban nation over Cuban TV, he flattered his hosts by parroting their propaganda about literacy and health care. When Castro took power, Cuba was the wealthiest nation in Latin America; reading and medicine would have become more widespread with increasing capitalist prosperity, without censorship and socialization. Carter also called for an end to the American trade embargo on the regime.

But he then surprised his critics and, no doubt, his hosts, by referring explicitly to the Varela Project, a petition to the National Assembly calling for a referendum on civil rights. Though the Cuban constitution, like the Soviet constitutions of old, nominally acknowledges such rights, Carter explained that "other laws [in fact] deny these freedoms to those who disagree with the government." Prisoners know perfectly well that they are in a jail, and the more cynical jailers know it too. But jailers do not want their prisoners to be told, and they resent the insult of being told themselves. Carter did, and for that he deserves credit.

He will never be a hero in the struggle for human rights in Cuba. That honor belongs to the brave Cubans who push against their tyrannical regime, incurring threats and imprisonment. They make their case boldly and nobly, and with a deeply ingrained wit -- who would think to hold a dictator to the letter of his constitution? Castro is used to the world's garlands, from fellow one-party rulers, from Europeans, and from American liberals. But thanks to the Cuban freedom fighters' pushing, more and more of those garlands will contain thorny questions. One day, the pricks may draw blood.