The dollar dictates

BY 8 a.m. downtown Havana is bustling with activity; the sun is mercifully mild and a cool breeze floats in from the Malecon - Havana's ocean-front boulevard. Schoolchildren roam the streets and parks; decked out in red and white uniforms, their screams fill the air. People lean out of doorways, hang out of balconies, chat to neighbours, while the inevitable queues begin to form for bread and other rationed goods. This old part of the city is a wash of colonial splendour, with large patios, flowers, fountains and facades painted in pastel shades, reconstructed with UNESCO funds.

Walk a couple of streets away from the thoroughfare and the reconstructed elegance gives way to Old Havana's heavily-populated neighbourhoods where rubbish lies uncollected, clothes hang from the balconies and the stench of urine seeps through peeling plaster and cracked pillars. An outsider would be forgiven for wondering if this part of the city had been bombed. On entering one of the apartments I felt my way through the pitch dark hallway, finding the lift didn't work and the lightbulbs had been stolen. Sweat poured off me as I limped up to the fifth floor where Luis Morales opened the door of his apartment, unchanged since my last visit five years ago.

Luis, his sister and nephew were embarrassed, dressed in rags and in bed. The fridge door swung open, utterly empty, not a scrap of food. "I get up in the morning, pace the flat, wondering where I'm going to find food for today," explained Luis. "My head starts to hurt from thinking about it so I lie down."

In August 1994, young Luis joined thousands of Cubans in a spontaneous riot after boats were prevented from leaving the island, an uprising quickly put down by the government's "Rapid Response Brigades" - troops made up of workers loyal to the government. The only hope of salvation lies with the foreigners walking the streets with wads of dollars in their pockets - the magic key to survival in Cuba.

"With dollars everything is possible," said one young woman later that day, inviting me to invite her to lunch in one of the dollar-only restaurants, air conditioned and packed with food unavailable to Cubans. That was then. When Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and the other barbudos (bearded ones) marched triumphant into Havana in January 1959, they got a hero's welcome, ending the Batista dictatorship which had turned the island into a playground for US mafia figures, where blacks were forbidden from using the beaches and peasants lived in virtual slavery on large, US-owned sugar plantations. The revolutionary government broke up Batista's army, launched a sweeping land reform programme, froze house rents and nationalised US companies after assessing their worth on the company's own tax returns.

News of the Cuban success story spread like wildfire and inspired liberation movements throughout Latin America. Successive US governments set about destroying the revolution, plotting assassinations, economic warfare and armed invasion, all failing as Cuba became one armed popular militia, capable of withstanding all aggression. The US Interest Section in Havana (the US has no embassy) gives out copies of Orwell's Animal Farm and the Miami Herald these days, while exile groups drop leaflets over Havana and the US government revealed recently that an air strike on Cuba was discussed last February after Cuba shot down two civilian planes that violated their airspace.

Back in the 1960s, Fidel Castro talked the population through each new aggression, explaining every sacrifice. Raul, a "child of the revolution," told me that nowadays Cubans like to "save electricity" when Castro comes on TV, too busy improvising ways to make a dollar to listen to another round of "socialism or death," from a 70-year-old who once told Cubans to distrust all leaders over 60. Yet even now, as the Cuban economy has run aground and Soviet aid has disappeared, healthcare and education have been eroded yet remain unequalled anywhere in the region. Next door in Mexico, which enjoys US, European Union and World Bank favour, 162,000 children died last year of curable diseases, according to UNICEF.

Cubans heap abuse on Castro but have not forgotten the benefits of the revolution, longing for a change which does not throw out the entire system. Since Castro decriminalised the US dollar in 1993, Leonel Diaz, a shady character with a smooth tongue has been flogging cut-price beer, cigars and lifts to the beach. In a single day last week, Diaz earned $170, the equivalent of a Cuban worker's annual salary. The blossoming private sector rewards the hustlers and punishes the most loyal, the doctors, teachers and technicians whose peso salaries add up to $10 a month. Cubans have enjoyed the most comprehensive welfare system possible in an undeveloped country.

Pepe Esquenazi, whose home I stayed in, gets a meal each day at work, usually meat, vegetables and dessert, adding up to less than three pence. A volume of Latin American literature costs the same, unlimited use of gas costs the same per person per month, while a 16-hour journey across the country sets you back all of $2.

The Pride of Resistance - in a speech delivered to Pastors for Peace, a US group who broke the embargo bringing computers to Cuba last month - Castro defended the revolution's human rights record, saying there has not been a single person tortured" in 37 years. The following day I met two individuals who had been tortured in the previous six months. In the town of Palma, in south-east Cuba, Radames Garcia de La Vega scoffed at Castro's words.

Last June Radames was accused of "operating a clandestine printer, illicit association, conspiracy to commit crimes, resistance and disobedience" and was sentenced to five years internal exile, 700 kilometres away from Havana. A young programming engineer, Radames co-authored a project on university reform, "University without Frontiers", which attempted from within-existing power structures to lay the foundations for debate among Cuban students.

In accordance with Cuba's 1977 constitution, Radames and two friends sent six copies of the project to the respective government departments seeking official recognition. The charges of operating a clandestine printer followed. Radames was given shelter by sympathetic students in Havana university, where he promoted the autonomy project, only to be arrested and imprisoned for two months.

"I felt freer in prison than outside" said Radames, "giving up the mask is a liberating experience." Radame's colleague Nestor was beaten by police and is in exile at the other end of the island.

THE long train journey from Havana to Santiago covers most of Cuba, from the low pasturelands filled with neat rows of Yuca, beans and rice to the mountains of the Sierra Maestra, which sheltered the bearded guerrillas in the tough years prior to victory in December 1958.

Yolanda Ramirez sat beside me, on her way back from a dollar expedition to Varadero, Cuba's top holiday resort. Yolanda explained how her daughter had just given birth to a beautiful baby, Karina, whose father was one of the thousands of Germans visiting the island in search of rum, rhumba and romance. Happy Hans will never know that he has a child in Santi Espiritu, a small town in the centre of Cuba.

As we passed by Florida, a small village close to Santiago, people scavenged in the local rubbish dump, a shocking reminder that the ration system has fallen behind people's food needs, forcing them to contemplate options which were unthinkable even five years ago. Back then an old man on a park bench shouted terrible abuse at me after I offered him a bread roll. In Santiago I met an old man who spent 65 years fighting for revolution, describing Cuban socialism as "the most democratic in the world". Maria de La Carmen Torre, a retired teacher told me how she taught in a hedge school before the revolution and watched proudly as a guerrilla commander closed an army barracks and turned it into a school. "I loved my pupils and I loved my revolution," she said.

"You go to bed a passionate revolutionary, you wake up wishing you could get the next plane out of here," a gay activist told, explaining the contradictory feelings gripping many Cubans. The older generation still recalls the Batista days, but young people seem utterly bored and indifferent, with nowhere to go and no hope of realising dreams and ambitions. Cubans are proud of their history and their nation. Castro has put Cuba on the world stage, exerting an influence far beyond its size, from South Africa to Harlem, Belfast and Chiapas.

On my last day in Havana, an unmarked taxi drove me from the suburbs to the centre, one more entrepreneur chancing his luck with the law. A cyclist caught my eye, riding perilously through the traffic, breaking the lights. When we turned the corner he lay sideways, facing us, blood streaming from his head, apparently dead. No one stopped, the taxi moved on.

"I can't get involved in this," growled the driver, as the four Cubans in the backseat suddenly erupted.

"What happened to our human values?" said one woman.

"Ask him," the driver said, referring to Cuba's maximum leader. Everyone began to talk at once, relating their own experiences of arbitrary officialdom. When we reached the centre, everyone got out in silence and disappeared into the busy streets, leaving a strange sensation behind, a bad taste of dark times ahead.

"I hope I die before Castro does," the caretaker at the Museum of Clandestine Struggle told me, as uncertainty looms over the coming years.