Beyond Buena Vista, Venceremos, and the thought police.

IT IS APRIL 2003. On our first night in Havana, my husband and I wander the shabbiest quarter of the Old City in search of the Orthodox synagogue. We find it just as a small group of observant Jews are finishing a communal meal and beginning the Havdalah service that marks the end of Shabbat. Conspicuous in his long black frock among the casually dressed Cubans, a thin, pale, and remarkably young Lubavitcher rabbi from Israel gathers the group to prayer.

There are no rabbis on the island so Israel sends one over each year during Passover. Canadian Jews send the gefilte fish, matzoth, and kosher wine. The three synagogues in Havana--one Conservative, one Orthodox, one Sephardic--scramble with shortages and rationing to cobble together a meal for the sixty to eighty people who show up at each temple for the Seder.

There are less than 1,500 Jews in Cuba. Most of the pre-1959 population of 20,000 were entrepreneurs and shopkeepers--economic categories not welcome under the new regime. So they left. But Fidel Castro accommodated those who remained. Jewish schools were allowed to stay open when other parochial schools were closed. And when the rest of the butchers in the country were nationalized, Havana Jews were permitted to keep their private kosher butcher.

This butcher's shop is located around the corner from the synagogue where we sit for Havdalah. The congregation this night is mostly older folks and as the service ends a grand father hands my husband a crumpled note in English. "I am old and my pension is small," it reads. "Could you please help me with a dollar?"

Touched by this modest request and prepared with a pocket full of one-dollar bills, my husband obliges. But before he can turn to leave, he is surrounded by two dozen outstretched hands and a jumble of voices spilling out details of personal distress. Embarrassed and trapped, my husband peels off bill after bill and hands them out to most everyone in the small group. We then make an awkward getaway and spend the rest of the evening trying to square the economic hardship, which we were prepared for, with the free expression of religious belief, which we were not.

WE ARE ALL CAPTIVES OF STEREOTYPE when it comes to this forbidden land ninety miles off the coast of Florida. A hell hole of repression where the righteous are rounded up and thrown into squalid prisons or a noble revolution where the humblest campesina goes to school and the peasant owns the land his father tilled for United Fruit--it's all in black and white, when it's not a smear of scarlet and chrome yellow caressed by the smoky rhythms of the Buena Vista Social Club. It is the Yankee's fantasy of Cuba.

Since my husband and I got a license to travel here and flew on one of the special charters that cross the straits from Miami to Havana, not only have we slipped past the economic embargo that the United States has enforced against the island since 1962, we have penetrated the embargo on ideas that has kept people on both sides in the dim shadows of ignorance for over four decades. Here we discover the human face of Cuba that expresses all extremes, in ways that stun and puzzle.

I already had some idea of how the embargo on understanding works before leaving the United States. When I tried to learn about the island nation I found that the old boogie word "communism" acts as a silencer on public discourse and what little is known about Cuba is filtered through the lens of prejudice and propaganda.

"U.S. government agencies lean on American newspapers to avoid 'sensitive stories' about Cuba that they haven't authorized," confessed one New York-based journalist to me. "Write the 'wrong' message," he added, "and Treasury can refuse our people a visa to go down and cover a big story there." Evidently stories about Jews quietly observing Shabbat are not on the approved list.

What Americans do get from the mainstream press are intermittent reports about Castro's abuses or the latest defection by a Cuban baseball player, all of it lubricated with the shrill anti-Castro editorial pouring out of Miami.

The leftist press paints another sort of uncritical portrait. See idealistic young Americans from the Venceremos Brigade cutting cane beside their Cuban brothers. See a Cuban-style peace corps of doctors and engineers helping out in war-torn central Africa.

None of this propaganda prepares us for the ordinary Cubans who we meet--cabdrivers, street vendors, and farmers in their fields, students and artists, musicians and professionals, housewives, hustlers, and grade school children. People like Arturo J. who, due to Castro's agrarian land reforms, now owns the tobacco farm where his grandfather worked as a field hand for foreigners who monopolized the industry before the Revolution. Or Osvaldo M., who was sent by the government to study in Leipzig for five years and is now an unemployed filmmaker in Havana. Or Ramon R., a thirty-four-year-old street hustler and single father, who has taught himself five languages and who asks if we can send him books by Herman Melville and Mark Twain.

No last names here, because you don't have to spend much time in Cuba for the paranoia to leak in. But the caution bred of living under a capricious dictator coexists with enormous native vitality, imagination, and good humor. Despite the wretched economy, the infuriating foreign travel restrictions, and a mocking self-censorship in all opinions of Castro, these men and women show an astonishing capacity for living with ambiguity and improvising as they go along.

AFTER SEVERAL DAYS EXPLORING HAVANA we rent a car and head west. Along the road to the Vinales Valley, we pick up and deposit three teenagers on their way to school, a mother with her small children off to market, and two sisters going to a funeral. One of our passengers, Jose, a middle-aged man in no particular hurry to get home, pulls out his guitar and serenades us for twenty kilometers.

Though alerted to hitchhikers by the car rental agent, we are astonished at their numbers. When the Soviet Union collapsed, oil shipments from Cuba's old ally dried up and public transportation swiftly broke down. The roadsides became jammed with men, women, and children who evolved hitchhiking to a communal art.

Riders are patient and drivers are cooperative. We never see a vehicle that is empty of passengers. As one young father explains to us, "In the United States you have everything and share nothing. In Cuba we have nothing and share everything."

In Vinales we meet Anibal D. who, for a while, had been one of these hitchhikers. He'd been teaching European languages at a provincial university when the busses stopped running and he was forced to thumb a ride between his home and school, twenty-eight kilometers each way.

"I'd leave home before dawn and return after dark. It was four or five hours a day of commuting," says Anibal, who eventually quit his university job and set up an independent tour guide business. Castro has loosened up on small enterprise and we meet quite a few entrepreneurs.

"Do you get to keep the money you earn from tours?" I ask.

"The government pays me a monthly wage and I turn over to them all the fees collected from my foreign clients," he winks, "except whatever tips my guests offer." In dollars, of course.

Since 1993 all payment by foreigners--for meals, hotels, taxis, bottles of rum, and ice cream cones--is in U.S. dollars.

(This longstanding currency policy would be reversed by Castro in November 2004 due, officially, to the "external economic aggression" of the Bush administration. But the timing suggested retaliation for a July 2004 U.S. cutback in visits and money transfers by Cuban Americans to their families on the island--which might well have been a response to the imprisonment of seventy-five dissidents in 2003--which was a reaction by Castro to alleged "regime change" conversations between the chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana and Cuban activists. And so it goes in this hemispheric cold war tennis match.)

Cubans are paid in and do business among themselves with (nonconvertible) pesos, valued by locals at about twenty-seven to the dollar. But there is no currency trade.

An American, Dutch, or French tourist who buys an ice cream cone from a street vendor will hand over one U.S. dollar. A Cuban buying the same cone from the same vendor will pay one peso. What appears to be an outrageous swindle is actually a sensible intersection of ideology and economics.

A Cuban physician, to put this in perspective, earns perhaps 800 pesos a month--little more than $30. Housing, food, utilities, education, and medical expenses are free or heavily subsidized by the socialist state. But 800 pesos doesn't leave this doctor with a lot of walk-around cash to buy basics like toothpaste, soap, a new bicycle tire, or a pair of shoes, not to mention the occasional movie.

So it's always a big deal for Cubans to get their hands on dollars. (Despite the 2004 currency crackdown, Cuba hasn't entirely abandoned its dual economy, and citizens may continue to hold U.S. dollars in cash and bank accounts. Hence the traditional advice to visitors to bring a large wad of singles into the country.)

Cubans like Anibal have devised clever ways to cushion the blows of the system and many have shown stupendous initiative in developing marginal businesses. Some rent out rooms in their homes while others turn a rooftop patio into a speakeasy restaurant. Give the government an official cut and the government turns a blind eye to tourist gratuities.

Anibal isn't getting rich. "I figure it would take me twenty years to save enough to buy a car," he smiles wanly. But his business gives him coveted access to foreigners and their loose change. And whatever his financial ups and downs, the government provides him and his family the basic necessities of life, including a home and medical care.

Everywhere we go we witness this coexistence of want and security, frustration and possibility--the disorienting ambiguity of Castro's Cuba. Young people hang out on the streets of Havana during the workday due to high unemployment, but Cuba has one of the most educated populations on the planet. Few Cubans ever enjoy the fruits and vegetables grown on the island because these are essential commodities in its shaky international trade, but Cuba is coping with petroleum and fertilizer shortages with a model organic farming program. The average Cuban doesn't enjoy American levels of consumption, but no one lives in the squalor typical of most Latin American countries, and you don't see waste. I watch a travel agent meticulously tear a small sheet of paper into business card swatches so that she can write down an address for us on one tiny piece rather than squander the whole sheet.

North Americans often hear tales of people fleeing the regime. Sonia, who rents us a room in her home, describes her daughter's sudden flight to California while on an economic exchange program in Central America. "She didn't tell us in advance what she planned to do because it would be dangerous for us. So we knew nothing," weeps this middle-aged mother of four, "until the government sent around an official to ask questions." Many sad stories blot the memoirs of Cuban Americans and their families back home.

But nowhere in the United States do we hear about the old Cuban Jews at a synagogue on a Saturday night, davening to their hearts' content; or about the crowds of men playing chess and trading pigeons in the newly restored Plaza Vieja on a Sunday afternoon; or about the teens who swarm in Graham Greene's Plaza del Cristo at midnight, pouring rum into paper cups, sharing cigarettes, and doing what teenagers up to no good do everywhere.

We read that Cubans don't have free elections. But walking the streets of Old Havana on a warm spring evening, we see two dozen men and women gathered around a makeshift desk outside an apartment building. They are lodging complaints with their local elected representative and debating the best way to get a new water main for the block. Every neighborhood has a Comite para la Defensa de la Revolucion that works with other CDRs in the barrio to serve local needs and fight for barrio interests in the municipal assembly. While Castro and his confidantes endure at the top (the celebration of his eightieth birthday August 13, 2006, was postponed after he underwent surgery two weeks earlier) every Cuban has a voice in their governance at the bottom. I make a mental note to tell this to my town supervisor.

TO COMPREHEND CUBA we must know its history. One year after Christopher Columbus landed at the eastern tip of the island, the pope "gave it" to Spain. For the next 466 years Cuba was controlled by foreigners who slaughtered the indigenous people, repopulated the work force with African slaves, and monopolized all industry and agriculture, notably sugar and tobacco.

Thomas Jefferson was the first of several United States presidents who tried to buy Cuba from the Spaniards. When the diplomatic route failed, North American investors simply purchased the plantations. At the turn of the twentieth century the United States picked a fight with Spain ("Remember the Maine"?) and finally seized political control of the island.

Now Cubans had been struggling for independence since the early nineteenth century. After the United States won what we call the Spanish-American War, it awarded the people nominal independence with a proviso that "the United States may exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence," whenever it wished. The United States did not want Spain, England, or anyone else canoodling with its backdoor neighbor ever again. Washington then endorsed a string of Cuban presidentes who had two goals: to get enormously rich and to protect North American business interests.

Political corruption, savage repression of dissent, and crushing poverty had been the status quo since the Spaniards claimed Cuba in 1492, and it was no different under the regimes of the U.S.-backed leaders. The last, Fulgencio Batista, collaborated with the Mafia, terrorized the citizens, and made off with $300 million, it is said, when he fled the Revolution in 1959.

Fidel Castro has been accused of torturing and assassinating all political opposition and of bungling the economy. Given the country's long tradition of violence and poverty, these sins aren't news. What is new about the Castro regime is that it made Cuba, for the first time in 466 years, independent. And keeping Cuba from becoming a Yankee colony is Castro's obsession.

How do Cubans feel about their situation and sacrifices? Those who gained economically from the Revolution, like Arturo J., are grateful. Young people who buy bootleg American movies and watch television broadcasts from Miami grumble about the stuff they don't have. Most others are weary and torn.

While Castro would have his people live in caves rather than surrender to the capitalists, ordinary Cubans have watched the rest of the world become enveloped by multinational corporations and the accompanying economic gifts they bring. Like children at the window of a sweet shop, their mouths water. They may understand the crippling price of walking into that sweet shop, but still their mouths water.

MY HUSBAND AND I sit with the French Ambassador at a communal Passover meal at Havana's Sephardic Synagogue and try to untangle the mess. We all find Cuba to be a brave social experiment fighting the odds to survive in the shadow of an omnivorous empire. We agree that the experiment has produced magnificent achievements and dismal failures. We lament the embargo on ideas as well as goods that screens out these contradictions and cloaks the true face of Cuba.

Our meal of overcooked fish and mashed potatoes lacks the variety and abundance of a typical Passover feast. But the fellowship is all that really matters. The ambassador has brought a box of the finest cigars for the president of the synagogue who graciously shares them, and bottles of rum magically appear. We debate. How do you get rid of the embargo and open the door to Cuba without handing the island over to the corporate pirates who sip mojitos in the bar at the Hotel Nacional and plot the pimping of Havana's Old City for McDonald's, Wal-Mart, and The Gap? How do you allow the Cuban people unrestrained access to the consumer culture of the north without forfeiting the humane values of the socialist vision?

Will Arturo J's tobacco farm wind up back in the hands of multinational agribusiness? Will Osvaldo M. end up making television commercials for Bud Light? Will Cuba become just another winter vacation spot for rich gringos? Will the young, the old, the economically marginal, and the sick learn the grim realities of ruthless capitalism and be left to fend for themselves as have the young, the old, the marginal, and the sick in the United States?

We have no sure answers but are grateful to have a chance to peek through the curtain and see a small bit of our Cuban neighbors' glorious, heartbreaking, and complicated truth.

Anita Micossi is a sociologist and member of the faculty of Bard College's Prison Initiative program in the New York State prison system. She is also a journalist and columnist whose work has appeared in Forbes, Ms. Magazine, the Israel Economist, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Boston Globe. A technology needs-assessment project among neighborhood arts and cultural groups in Havana allowed her and her husband access to Cuba.