Castro's Final Hour: The Secret Story Behind the Coming Downfall of Communist Cuba.

Castro's Final Hoar: The Secret STORY behind the Coming Downfall ;of Communist Cuba, by Andres Oppenheimer (Simon & Schuster, 461 Lpp., $25)

PULITZER PRIZE-winner Andres Oppenheimer is the best writer on Latin America at the best newspaper in Latin America: the Miami Herald. Through contacts in Cuba, he was able to spend six months of the past two years there, without trading objectivity for access. He was followed by secret police only twice, and the officials he interviewed were aware that he "was not a fellow-traveler, and never pretended to be one." The resulting book is the most complete and objective treatment yet of Cuban society in collapse. It is not a timetable for Castro's fall, but an acknowledgment that the Cuban revolution is all over but the shouting.

That the five hundred Cubans Oppenheimer interviewed are ruthlessly oppressed and impoverished is nothing new. But once the Soviets announced they would take payment for exports only in dollars, Cuba was cut off from Eastern-bloc goods; the invasion of Panama deprived it of its only means of circumventing the U.S. trade embargo. Cubans were suddenly left without beer, cooking oil, fish, cereal, or butter. Clothing factories shut down for lack of zippers; ketchup could not be exported for lack of jars.

Under Castro's "special period in time of peace," Cubans now work by candlelight one day a week and plow their fields with oxen. Women attract flies because, lacking shampoo, they wash their hair with egg yolk and honey. Pizzerias chain their utensils to the tables. A third of the workforce hold "non-productive" jobs, and Oppenheimer describes their ludicrous lives: "Nelson" is a musician for the Havana Psychiatric Hospital  Symphony Orchestra. Angel Delgado, the Andres Serrano of Cuba, was sentenced to six months in prison for dumping (quite literally) on the party organ Granma during an art show called "Sculpted Object." Nitza Villapol, the Julia Child of Cuba, must now adjust her recipes to the food supply, with recipes for potato salad, mashed potatoes, and potato jam.

While the masses face their privations with Schweikian gallows humor, party higher-ups are paralyzed by fear. When Oppenheimer told Culture Minister Armando Hart that artists had described him as open-minded, Hart screamed, "They told you that? Who told you that? That's crazy! I don't consider myself tolerant at all! I'm more radical and revolutionary than anybody!"

Much of the fear among Cuba's ruling classes comes from the 1989 execution of the country's most decorated war hero, General Arnaldo Ochoa Sanchez, along with master spy "Tony" de la Guardia and two others, for drug trafficking. Or, more accurately, unauthorized drug trafficking, for the Castro government has long accepted kickbacks from Colombian dealers for use of Cuban airspace. De la Guardia, who had set up dozens of shell companies abroad for Castro, foolishly allowed Cuban exile Reinaldo Ruiz to carry cocaine through Cuba. It wasn't drug dealing per se that Castro objected to, but the fact that the drug enterprise had become so vulnerable to surveillance. Ruiz's ring was penetrated by U.S. Customs, and de la Guardia was implicated. Drug money could fund a conspiracy, and Ochoa seemed a likely candidate to lead one. He was on the closest of terms with Castro, among the few who could address him using the familiar tu; but they had fallen out, and Ochoa had been heard to criticize him in private.

Still, what Ochoa was convicted of was something everybody did. Because Cuba's wars were so drastically under funded, its generals became blackmarketeers; the practice was necessary to avoid being charged with neglecting the troops. What makes the Ochoa trial, in Oppenheimer's mind, the most important event since the revolution is not that it reflected Castro's insecurity, but that it abrogated the informal rules by which Cubans kept starvation at bay in a society in which everything was illegal.

Instability at home did not compromise Castro's adventurism in Nicaragua and Panama, which Oppenheimer shows to have been far more wideranging than was previously suspected. Although Castro hated and distrusted Noriega, he sent eighty thousand weapons to Panama two months before Noriega's February 1988 drug indictment. He set up an alternative intelligence service to pinpoint CIA agents who could be taken hostage in the event of an invasion. (However, he refused to give Noriega SA-7 anti-aircraft missiles, fearing Noriega would shoot down a civilian airliner.) But Oppenheimer's most astonishing revelation is that, in the wake of the Grenada invasion, Castro drew up a plan to "regionalize" the Nicaraguan war if the U.S. committed troops. Under the plan, Cuban forces in Nicaragua would have invaded southern Honduras; the Sandinista army would have crossed into El Salvador, and joined with the FMLN guerrillas to march on San Salvador; and the Sandinista air force would have bombed defenseless Costa Rica.

It is an irony that the most ideologically rigid of the Communist states is saddled with not only the inefficiencies of Communism but also the problems the Western Left associates with capitalism: zero production and pollution; a repressive government attitude toward sex and an AIDS problem; a public discourse full of feminist jargon and a society where the only women who have any money are the jineteras, or hard-currency prostitutes. It appears that Cuba in its death throes will resemble Rumania: not only will its revolution come to an end with machine-gun fire in the streets, but when the guns go silent, well-wishers will discover a society so brutalized and corrupt it will take generations to repair.