HAVANA – To many exiles and their allies, President Raul Castro is a brutal dictator who locks up dissenters in gulag-like jails, snuffs out political discourse and condemns his people to socialist poverty. Cuba’s supporters see the government as heroic, its sins justified by the behavior of its giant enemy to the north, and offset by the fact it provides health care and education that most developing countries could only dream of. As often is the case, the truth lies somewhere in between. President Barack Obama said on Friday that he began his historic call with Castro earlier in the week by delivering a 15-minute lecture on human rights and political freedom, adding: “This is still a regime that oppresses its people.” Even so, he said that US policy had failed to change Cuba for more than a half century and it was time to try something new. Human rights activists welcomed the overhaul of US-Cuba relations, but added that the Communist government has much to answer for, including a denial of freedom of speech, the banning of independent labor unions and a lack of fair and competitive elections. “I believe that President Obama is making the right decision, but that does not mean that our serious human rights concerns with regard to Cuba have gone away,” Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director for the Americas division at Human Rights Watch, told The Associated Press.