By Jeff Jacoby

                  (First of three columns)

                  HAVANA''THIS IS THE real Havana,'' Miguel said as we turned from Avenida
                  Simon Bolivar to a gritty side street cratered with potholes. ''Here you see how
                  Cubans live. Tourists don't come to this street.''

                  Well, they might if they were simply walking around, as I had been when Miguel
                  came up to me a half-hour earlier. It was my first afternoon in Havana and I was
                  taking advantage of some unexpected free time to explore the city. I had gotten no
                  more than half a block from my hotel when a muscular black man in a bright orange
                  sweater fell in beside me and asked, ''Hello, my friend, where are you from?''

                  This, I would learn in the course of a week spent in Havana, is absolutely normal.
                  Every time I stepped outside, a young Cuban would approach me, sometimes with
                  a black-market offer - ''Amigo, you want cigars?'' - but often just to talk.

                  Miguel's English was good and he told me that he would love to work as a guide or
                  translator for tourists. Not only because such a job would be appropriate to his
                  skills - he is a university graduate and speaks three languages - but because it
                  would give him a way to earn US dollars. In Castro's Cuba, living without dollars
                  means living in poverty. But Miguel has none of the connections he would need to
                  get a into the tourism industry, and so he works instead as a security guard at a
                  cigar factory. It is a mindless job that pays 225 pesos per month - about $9, a
                  typical Cuban salary.

                  Miguel opened a door. ''Here is where we buy food with pesos,'' he said. Inside is
                  a dingy, windowless room. There are no aisles or shelves, only a single counter
                  behind which are a couple sacks of rice, a couple more of beans, some oil, and
                  what look like packets of a juice mix. Above the counter, a chalkboard lists the
                  rationed staples that Cubans are supposed to be able to buy, with prices next to
                  those that are available. Milk isn't available. Neither is laundry soap. Or toothpaste.
                  Or salt. Or matches. Not even on the ration list are fruit, green vegetables, cheese,
                  and meat.

                  All of these can be had in Havana - in the state-owned stores that cater to
                  customers with dollars. Or in the tourist hotels that attract the hard currency the
                  regime craves. While Miguel's family hasn't eaten eggs for months, the dining room
                  in my hotel features a chef-staffed omelette station with a wide array of fillings.
                  Miguel has never seen it, of course: Cubans may not go beyond the lobbies of
                  tourist hotels, a rule enforced by the security police - who are everywhere.

                  But there are things here that even dollars can't buy.

                  The hotel gift shop offers a selection of government-approved reading material -
                  books with titles like ''The Salvador Allende Reader'' and ''The Fertile Prison: Fidel
                  Castro in Batista's Jails'' - but unlike every other hotel I have ever been in, it carried
                  no English-language newspapers or magazines. I asked the concierge if there was
                  any place I could buy some. ''Not in Cuba,'' he replied.

                  Like all communist governments, the Castro dictatorship recognizes just one view
                  of the world: its own. It is the only view published in Cuban newspapers or aired
                  on Cuban radio. The papers and radio stations, of course, are all owned by the
                  government. Cubans hungry for opinions other than Castro's have to tune in to
                  Radio Marti - or approach foreigners in the street.

                  Talk to Cuban officials, and they will rhapsodize about Cuba's ''socialist equality,''
                  in which everyone is treated alike and there are no egregious disparities in wealth.
                  But move around Havana with your eyes open and you see the reality. For
                  Communist Party big shots there are beautiful neighborhoods like Miramar, with its
                  elegant mansions and gorgeous gardens. For ordinary Cubans there are the
                  crowded, crumbling apartments of Centro Habana, where families live in squalor it
                  would be hard to find in an American slum.

                  Billboards all over Havana extol ''socialismo'' and ''revolucion'' and ''dignidad,'' but
                  the truth is that 43 years after Castro's socialist revolution, Cuba's dignity is in
                  tatters. Educated Cuban women, desperate for dollars - or to meet a foreign Prince
                  Charming - become prostitutes. Educated Cuban men on bicycles haul tourists
                  around in rickshaws. Havana swarms with well-heeled foreigners, but to me, it was
                  a city full of sadness and frustration.

                  On my last day, I visited 19-year-old Lazaro, who lives with his mother and three
                  siblings in an oceanfront apartment. It is a single room, grimy and desperately in
                  need of paint, furnished with a stained divan, a small metal table, and a battered old
                  refrigerator. There were no lamps, no rugs, no beds, no oven. The family sleeps on
                  a few mattresses in a dark, airless loft. Out of his mother's hearing, Lazaro asked if
                  I could help her out. ''My little brother needs milk,'' he said, ''but my mother has no
                  dollars.''

                  NEXT: The dissenters