By Eugene Robinson
Washington Post Staff Writer

HAVANA--The metaphor is too tempting to resist. Cuba equals waiting.

Evidence is everywhere. Look at the scores of Cubans one sees gathered at major intersections, waiting for buses that will finally arrive an hour later, already packed
to the roof. Look at the line of hopefuls standing on the median strip of any avenue, waving languidly at passing cars, patiently trying to hitch a ride. Look at the
crowds in the entertainment districts, too poor to afford to go into any of the nightclubs or restaurants, lingering outside and waiting for something interesting to
happen.

This is how it was 10 years ago. And 10 years before that.

Talk to Cubans and you get a feel for the waiting that's less visible. There's the divorced couple, for example, who are still living together while they wait for one of
them to find another place. There's the elderly woman who's putting off a trip to the market, waiting for a check from relatives in Miami.

It all fits together so neatly, this metaphor. Cubans are waiting for this and that, and meanwhile all of Cuba is waiting -- waiting for change to begin, the change that
everyone knows will come someday.

It's been a decade now since the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc collapsed, and with them the economic scaffolding that supported Fidel Castro's regime. Former
brother-countries in socialism are lining up to join the European Union and NATO. Russia has embraced capitalism with the fervor of the converted (albeit with little
regard for the rules of the game), and even China, stalwart China, is now a place where everyone wants to get rich and quite a few are succeeding.

And meanwhile Cuba waits. There's plenty of sugar, rum, education, trained doctors and free time; almost everything else seems in short supply. Try to find cold
medicine in a pharmacy, or decent meat in a state-run store. Housing, for most people, is cramped and decrepit. Fidel Castro is 75 years old, still healthy, still more
popular than many outside Cuba would like to admit, still resolute in his chosen path. Cuba waits.

A young cabdriver announces proudly that in the spring he will graduate from the University of Havana with a degree in mechanical engineering. "What will you do
then?" his fare asks.

"Are you crazy? I'll keep driving this cab," he replies. "If I can get a job in engineering, I'll earn $15 a month. I'll earn that much in tips tonight. You'll tip me $2, right?
So I'll just get my degree, and I'll wait."

With time in such surplus, Cubans have raised killing it to a minor art form. Television is limited to two channels, neither of which is exactly HBO, and neither of which
is on for the whole day. There aren't many movie theaters, and Cuban kids have yet to become addicted to video games. For the most part, Cubans must do things
the old-fashioned way and entertain one another.

Rene Peña, a noted fine-art photographer, was sitting with three friends one recent Thursday evening at Sofia, an open-air cafe at the corner of 23rd and O streets,
one of the few spots in Havana where you can almost imagine you're in Barcelona or Madrid.

They all seemed to be drinking Coca-Cola, an anomaly that was clarified when one of Rene's friends, a professional salsa dancer, furtively withdrew a bottle of rum
from his jacket and spiked the glasses of Coke. They had bought the rum off-premises for a few dollars less than they would have paid at the cafe and sneaked it in.
The waitress pretended not to notice, and for this studied ignorance would receive a dollar tip when they left.

Rene was in an ebullient mood -- his newly opened show at a gallery in Old Havana had been well received -- and he suggested that later we all move next door to a
jazz club called the Vixen and the Crow.

This launched 10 minutes of rapid-fire wordplay about vixens and crows that loses everything in translation. It was just a way to pass the time, in the knowledge that
eventually something else would happen to send the evening in another direction. What was striking was how much they sounded like the aimless, wordplay-addicted
characters from the books of the great Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante, whose chronicles of pre-revolutionary Havana are largely set in this very
neighborhood. Much of the city is strikingly unchanged from the day 43 years ago when Castro arrived to seal his triumph. We almost could have stepped onto the
street and found ourselves in 1959.

Three days later, thousands of Cubans flocked to the outskirts of the city to kill a Sunday afternoon at Lenin Park.

Most of the park is woods and trails, a perfect place for picnicking, trysting or just escaping the city's frying-pan heat. At the center, though, is a grandstand where on
Sundays the main attraction is the rodeo.

It's strictly an amateur affair. The "cowboys" all have day jobs and animals are workhorses, freshly unhitched from the taxi-carts they pull around the rest of the week.
This afternoon the air was redolent of manure as teams of cowboys competed in riding contests -- lancing a small ring that hung from an overhead wire, dashing from
one end of the arena to another, riding around a circle in a comic, horsy version of musical chairs. The undisputed star of the show was Gervasio Moliera, all 285
pounds of him. Moliera was a gifted clown and an excellent horseman on his (necessarily) swaybacked little mare. When he wasn't riding, he was pulling on a bottle
of rum that was circulating among the contestants.

The crowd mostly just sat. These were city folks, with many of the women in heels or sandals unsuited for negotiating walkways mined with manure. The rodeo, to
them, meant nothing more than another way to pass the time. That was what it turned out to be for Moliera, too -- he looked pure country but he was a city kid, from
Havana, and the rodeo, he said, was "just something to do. We win sometimes, we lose sometimes. But I tell you, friend, if I don't get my rum, I don't ride."

Just about everywhere you look, if you look hard enough, you can see the Cuba-as-waiting metaphor come to life. But metaphors can be misleading. And sometimes
they can be plain wrong.

Those people waiting for the bus stand there while 50-year-old Fords and Chevys and 20-year-old Soviet-made Ladas wheeze past. But mixed in with the traffic are
increasing numbers of South Korean cars, Daewoos and Hyundais, and the occasional new Peugeot, Fiat or Mercedes. The taxi and rental-car fleets have been
modernized, and every year it is harder to sustain the time-warp sensation that so many visitors to Havana have savored.

What was once (and in theory still is) a classless society is being deformed by the dollar. It used to be illegal for Cubans to hold dollars, much less spend them. Now
it's not only legal but necessary, and this reality has created strains -- those who work in tourism or who get money from overseas relatives are a new economic elite.
Some people have more dollars and some have fewer, but everyone in Havana manages to get his hands on at least a few of them from time to time, and when they
do they go straight to the private-enterprise markets, where there's an ample selection of food.

I asked Peña, the photographer, how he made ends meet. "I sell my work, mostly to people in the States. I earn dollars. But I still have to watch every dollar. I have
to support so many people -- my mother, my father, my wife, my daughter, other relatives." He shrugged. "Well, what can we do?"

One difference now for an artist like Peña is that there is a healthy stream of American tourists coming down each year, despite the U.S. government's restrictions on
travel to Cuba. Another difference for him is that his work, much of which deals pointedly with racism in Cuban society, can now be exhibited in a well-trafficked
gallery that fronts on one of Old Havana's grandest squares.

European chains keep putting up new joint-venture luxury hotels -- and now the Chinese are building one in central Havana as well. One longtime resident told me of
his disappointment that his daughter, still a teenager, now has a baby of her own. But he was proud that she has continued to attend classes at a special technical
school that prepares students for jobs in the hotel and restaurant industries. After years of ambivalence toward tourism, the government and the people are now
embracing it.

Everybody is trying to learn English -- cabdrivers, waitresses, bureaucrats, even the touts on the street who try to sell you contraband cigars. It is common for
someone to interrupt a conversation and say, "Listen, I'm sorry, but could we please speak English so that I can practice?"

Castro now talks about racial inequalities in Cuban society, and about an orderly succession after he's gone, and about a desire for better relations with the United
States. He keeps Cuba a one-party state and imposes a degree of repression that goes far beyond any accepted international norms. Still, it is also true that Cubans
can say and do things today that they could not have said or done in the past. Officials say Castro is spending all of his time working -- belatedly, to be sure -- on
Cuba's economic and infrastructural deficiencies, and on his own legacy.

This is not quite the way Cuba was 10 years ago.

It turns out that metaphor sometimes obscures. You look around and see that -- while you were waiting -- more than you realize has changed.

                                               © 2002