Boy of Their Dreams; Fidel's Faded Capital Makes the Most of What It Doesn't Have

                  By Eugene Robinson
                  Washington Post Staff Writer

                  HAVANA—On a busy corner not far from the soaring, graceful, grimy
                  dome of the old pre-revolution capital building, dozens of people are
                  waiting as the camello pulls up--a super-long bus whose swaybacked
                  profile reminds everyone of a two-humped camel. The bus is already
                  jampacked, but somehow new riders manage to squeeze aboard. It's
                  stifling, claustrophobic, unbearable-- except that people bear it with little
                  complaint because the camello is cheap and for many there is no other way
                  to get home, or to their second jobs, or wherever it is they must go.

                  One woman who managed to find a window seat is reading Granma, the
                  official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party. The lead story today,
                  as on most days, is about the boy Elian Gonzalez.

                  In decrepit and gorgeous Old Havana, a blast of dance music announces a
                  party--in this case, a wedding reception. The venue is somebody's house.
                  Furniture has been removed from the little sitting room or pushed against
                  the walls. The place pulses with merengue and salsa and rum-soaked
                  laughter, and the energy of so many dancers that they'd never fit if they
                  didn't take care to dip and sway in unison. The party continues long into
                  the night, spilling into the narrow street, open to anyone who cares to drop
                  in.

                  A middle-aged man walks past wearing a faded T-shirt: "Free Elian," it
                  says.

                  In a struggling neighborhood far from the city center, a group of friends has
                  converted the back yard of one house into an open-air gymnasium. There
                  is a full circuit of weight machines, ingeniously cobbled together from scrap
                  steel, weathered planks and baling wire. This afternoon, two women are
                  busy performing their daily leg presses and butterflies. Some of the
                  improvised machines look a bit dangerous. But the more immediate peril is
                  a brisk wind that occasionally sends ripe mangoes plummeting from the
                  leafy canopy above.

                  On one wall, gradually losing color and definition: a poster with the likeness
                  of Elian.

                  In the United States, the case of Elian Gonzalez has gone through the full
                  media cycle: First it was everywhere, now it's nowhere. But here in Cuba,
                  after nearly six months, Elian's image and story have become something
                  like wallpaper.

                  No public gathering at all--certainly, no public gathering deemed worthy of
                  broadcast on state-owned television--seems complete without mention of
                  Elian. Fidel Castro's May Day speech, at which he dissected the Elian case
                  at great length, is aired again and again, as if the aim were to have
                  everyone in the whole country learn it by heart. And almost every day at 5
                  in the afternoon, television here presents a two-hour "round table" where a
                  shifting cast of talking heads analyzes and reanalyzes every incremental
                  nuance of the story. Castro himself often shows up, and on one recent day
                  he sat in the audience, raising his hand like any other companero when he
                  wanted to make a point.

                  No issue of Granma or Rebel Youth or any other state newspaper is
                  complete without one or two Elian stories on the front page. If the Cuban
                  government's message to its citizens these days could be reduced to one
                  word, that word would be Elian.

                  But despite his ubiquity, Elian generally occupies no more than the
                  background of any Cuban scene. The foreground tends to be dominated
                  by the fervid intensity with which Cubans live their lives, with which they
                  work and play.

                  Cuba has recovered considerably from the crash that followed the
                  dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc--which meant the end
                  of generous subsidies. There was a time, in the early 1990s, when hungry
                  city dwellers had to hitch rides out into the countryside to barter with
                  farmers for food. Castro allowed limited economic reforms, invited limited
                  overseas investment, and welcomed American dollars. The time of
                  desperation is over.

                  But the recovery has been only partial. Witness Havana's decrepit housing
                  stock--graceful and crumbling old mansions have been subdivided into
                  dark warrens of little apartments, and the high-ceilinged apartments
                  themselves further subdivided with improvised sleeping lofts called
                  barbacoas. No one looking for a place to live in Havana would conclude
                  that this is a booming economy. Almost every building needs plaster or
                  paint or both. The whole infrastructure of the city needs urgent attention
                  that the government can't afford. Fleets of tanker trucks cruise the
                  potholed streets, for example, delivering drinking water the low-tech way.

                  Still, everyone has a place to live, however run-down. Everyone gets free
                  education--unlike in almost any other Third World country, you don't see
                  children roaming the streets during school hours--even if the school
                  buildings are decaying and there aren't enough books and supplies.
                  Everyone is offered free medical care, even if there isn't nearly enough
                  medicine. The safety net is still there, but it is torn in places and much
                  easier to fall through.

                  For ordinary Cubans today, survival means not just having to work, but
                  having to hustle. For officials who believe in the Cuban revolution and its
                  goals, that means trying to chart a true socialist path for a nation that has
                  little time to parse slogans or memorize speeches, a nation suddenly on the
                  make.

                  Any foreigner walking down the Prado, the leafy boulevard running from
                  Havana's Central Park to the sea, is constantly approached by young men.
                  "My friend!" they call. "Mon ami!" They will try language after language
                  until they get a response, then they offer to help you buy cut-rate cigars
                  smuggled out of the factory, or find a good private restaurant where
                  unauthorized but tasty seafood is served, or negotiate Havana's steamy
                  night life--whatever. If you don't want to buy anything, they are happy to
                  stand there talking to you until some want or need suggests itself. If you still
                  aren't buying, they want to make an impression for the future. "Remember
                  me," they say. "Next time."

                  This is the main hustle in today's Cuba: the pursuit of the U.S. dollar, which
                  is not so much a parallel currency as a super-currency here. Most prices in
                  Havana stores are denominated in dollars. If you live in central Havana and
                  you want to buy a refrigerator or a stereo or Nike tennis shoes, you buy
                  them with dollars.

                  State salaries and pensions that are still paid in Cuban pesos almost, but
                  not quite, suffice to buy heavily subsidized necessities in state-owned food
                  stores. That may be enough for older people who are content with their
                  lives. But anyone with ambition--and generally, that means anyone who is
                  young--has to have dollars. Young people gravitate toward tourists for the
                  same reason that Willie Sutton gravitated toward banks.

                  Many of these young people who hang around the tourist hotels turn out to
                  be bright, engaging, resourceful. When you ask them about politics, a few
                  are bitter about the way things are--"The whole world is passing us by, and
                  things here never change," one young man complained. But most seem to
                  be basically apolitical. Castro's post-revolutionary Cuba is the only Cuba
                  they have ever known; the regime is part of the landscape. The open
                  question is how to get over, how to advance. How to get some of those
                  dollars.

                  At the intersection where the Prado meets the Malecon, the curving
                  esplanade along Havana's famous seawall, there are two billboards with
                  likenesses of Elian Gonzalez. "Return Our Boy," says one; "Return Elian to
                  the Fatherland," says the other.

                  About a half-mile farther down the Malecon is the spot where, long after
                  midnight, Havana's subculture of gay men and lesbians gathers. At 3 a.m.,
                  hundreds of people are there--laughing, smoking, cruising. It's a lively
                  scene, these days tolerated. Participants said individuals are sometimes
                  hassled by the police, who in some parts of Havana are stationed one on
                  every block. But basically they're left alone, provided they stay within
                  established limits.

                  This partial, conditioned tolerance extends as well to other subcultures.
                  One recent night, in a gritty neighborhood far from the graceful Malecon,
                  scores of dreadlocked Rastafarians gathered at a school auditorium for an
                  evening concert by reggae bands in honor of the anniversary of Bob
                  Marley's death. Havana's relatively few Rastas tend to hang out together,
                  and this concert was by far the biggest event of the week.

                  When one of the bands launched into Marley's great love song "No
                  Woman No Cry," the audience sang along phonetically. It was like a
                  reggae concert anywhere in the world, perhaps except that the smoke
                  filling the auditorium was all from tobacco.

                  "We can't really practice the Rastafarian religion as it's meant to be, since
                  they won't let you smoke marijuana in this country," said Daniel Rosales, a
                  reggae promoter and producer, when asked how the government reacted
                  to him and his friends. "They don't really hassle us at all, but we have to
                  keep it tied to the music, to culture. As long as it's arts and culture, that's
                  fine. If they see anything that looks like a movement, then there's trouble."

                  Liberty-with-limits may be just half a loaf, but it was hard won. The arts
                  here are allowed to put artistry first, before revolutionary mission. That
                  basic precondition for the creation of art was once a matter of bitter
                  struggle, especially during the period, a generation ago, when many of the
                  parameters of censorship were challenged and some were ultimately
                  transcended. Castro and his system are sacrosanct and off-limits.
                  Situations that Castro and his system wrought--overcrowding in Havana,
                  salaries that don't go far enough, the hustle for dollars from tourists or
                  relatives in Miami--are rich artistic fodder.

                  "It was a struggle of culture versus structure in the 1970s," said Alicia
                  Perea, who heads the Cuban Institute of Music, a government agency. "I
                  think culture won."

                  Back on the Malecon, near the gay gathering spot, a discotheque called La
                  Pampa plays nothing but American hip-hop and young Cubans greet each
                  other with "Whazzup," just like the Budweiser guys.

                  A bit farther along the seawall, right next to the U.S. Interests Section--the
                  closest thing to a U.S. Embassy in Cuba--is a brand-new amphitheater that
                  Castro recently ordered built, probably the sleekest and best-kept
                  structure in Havana. Its purpose is to serve as an "open tribunal" for
                  speeches and demonstrations calling for the immediate return to Cuba of
                  Elian Gonzalez.

                  Cuba's overall situation might be qualified as dour, but Havana is far from a
                  dour place.

                  In Central Park, a group of men gathers every morning this time of year
                  and eventually swells to 100 or more. All day, every day, with pointed
                  words and aggressive gestures, they talk trash about baseball. It's
                  passionate and pointless, an entertaining way to pass the time.

                  In historic Old Havana, the streets ring with music--music that spills out of
                  taverns, that comes from stereo stores or floats down from the balconies.
                  Cubans without a pocketful of dollars are not welcomed in the tourist bars
                  where bands play Cuban son, so they stand outside and listen anyway,
                  dancing in the street.

                  A young Cuban woman stops to dance merengue with an old blind man
                  who spends every day in his spot on Obispo Street. He bows to her,
                  deeply. Passersby applaud.

                  Days have an improvisational feel, like a long jazz riff. You might start by
                  intending to telephone someone, but find that at this particular moment the
                  Cuban telecommunications system is not inclined to connect your
                  telephone with his. In fact, sometimes a caller gets a recorded message that
                  says, in effect, "We can't connect your call, so maybe you should just go
                  over there."

                  So that's what you do. And maybe you see the person you wanted to see,
                  but maybe you don't. Maybe you run into somebody else along the way
                  who sends you in a completely different direction.

                  Nighttime fun begins late. At Havana's top-rank music halls, where tourists
                  and locals go to hear the great Cuban bands and dance the night away,
                  headliners rarely take the stage much before 1 a.m. Revelers rarely leave
                  before 3, and then often to go to some other spot and dance some more.
                  Exactly when habaneros sleep remains a mystery.

                  On weekends, people go to the beach--not all the way to famed
                  Varadero, which has become a deluxe tourist colony, but to closer
                  beaches like Santa Maria, with its white sands and its honky-tonk feel.
                  Workers can sometimes win a week's free beach rental for exemplary
                  performance.

                  After school, children play stickball in the streets. Sometimes a home run
                  bounces off a passing car, or a passing pedestrian's head. Nobody seems
                  to mind.

                  Few other places can so effectively sustain the illusion of being elsewhere
                  in time. Sit in the lobby of the Riviera Hotel, a glorious Mob-era artifact,
                  and look out at the Malecon and the sea as a '58 Chevy goes by, followed
                  by a '59 Chrysler, followed by a '54 Dodge, and you feel transported. You
                  feel as if Meyer Lansky might walk into the building any minute--or that
                  Castro's band of revolutionaries, fresh from victories in the hills, might
                  storm in and declare the workers liberated.

                  Watch state-run television and you are taken back to a time when people
                  spoke without irony of "workers" and the "bourgeoisie," when the fight
                  against "imperialism" was a worldwide struggle, when Marxist analysis was
                  considered a vibrant school of thought.

                  Talk to Cubans on the street, though, and the illusion becomes vapor. It is
                  hard to find anybody in the city--certainly, anybody under 40--who speaks
                  the archaic language of revolution with any enthusiasm or skill. The
                  language of the streets belongs to the wider world, the post-Cold-War,
                  postmodern world of U.S. culture and capitalist values. One recent
                  afternoon, a young Cuban man walked through Old Havana wearing a
                  T-shirt that said on the back, in English, "DON'T ASK ME 4 [expletive]."

                  The government makes use of the Elian case to teach messages about
                  socialism and solidarity. People respond, overwhelmingly. But they seem
                  to respond much more to the human aspects of the situation, and to
                  national pride, than to the political lessons being taught. Instead of seeing
                  an icon, they see a little boy.

                  On a recent Saturday, hundreds of people paid 5 Cuban pesos
                  apiece--with a much higher price of $5 apiece for foreigners--to gather in
                  the courtyard of a Havana bar for an afternoon of performances by a
                  traditional drumming group and an all-woman salsa band.

                  It was less a show than a party, with the audience as much a part of the
                  action as the entertainers. In the front row sat a group of older women,
                  senior citizens, who delighted the crowd with sexy dance moves and saucy
                  flips of their hair. A few even ventured onstage, impelled by whoops of
                  encouragement. Whole families were there, mothers bouncing young sons
                  and daughters in their laps to the beat. Couples managed to dance salsa,
                  complete with spins and twirls, in an aisle no more than a few feet wide.

                  Then one of the singers with the drumming group started a
                  call-and-response rhythm with the crowd.

                  "Elian, tu eres la felicidad de Cuba," he said.

                  "Elian, tu eres la felicidad de Cuba," the crowd answered.

                  The chant went back and forth, over and over, growing in power. For a
                  moment it felt more like a revival meeting than a party. The voices grew
                  stronger and stronger and stronger; the world outside seemed farther and
                  farther away.

                  "Elian, you are the happiness of Cuba."