The Albania of the Caribbean.

After thirty years of Castro, Cuba is in miserable shape

private squalor, public squalor, slogans instead of food

But its population is the most tightly controlled in the Communist world,

and Gorbachev will not dare crack down on what Fidel himself calls

COMMUNISM is my religion!" rhapsodically announced Silvia Rodriguez, a young Cuban office worker, her eyes alight. "And Fidel is my god!" Companera (comrade) Silvia is Deputy Chairman of Committee for the Defense of the Revolution Number 7, Zone 133, of Bayamo, a city of 123,000 near Santiago in eastern Cuba. She is a person of some importance in a world tightly controlled by Cuba's network of CDRs, or block committees, with the authority to make life unpleasant for those below her in rank. Her opposite numbers in Havana could withhold people's food rations, for example, if, during Gorbachev's visit, these underlings failed to volunteer to be bused to stations along a twenty-mile route outside the city to applaud the Soviet president. Not to do so would demonstrate patently unsocialist behavior, and the CDR would conscientiously take note.

On a visit to the Moncada Barracks in Santiago-which Fidel Castro and 123 men attacked in 1956 in an abortive first attempt to take power-I was told by an ardent guide: "We must teach our children to love the Revolution and Fidel!" By her enthusiasm, I should imagine the guide might rank high in her own CDR. For there is a CDR for every single city block and every agricultural production unit in all Cuba. Silvia Rodriguez's CDR in Bayamo, with a membership of only 59, has its own officers responsible for "ideology," for "vigilance," for "defense." A Cuban's entire life is under the surveillance of his CDR, which in addition to food rations also controls his employment and leisure time,

Comrade Silvia is accustomed to scarcity, penury, and rationing (of nearly everything), ripping up old sheets to use as sanitary napkins, with one new bra or one pair of panties per year (not both), having known this in Cuba all her life. The third richest country in Latin America before Castro, a step or two behind Argentina, with an unusually high literacy rate and number of doctors per capita for the region-and a longer average life expectancy than Spain, Greece, and even Japan-Cuba has been driven straight down by Castro's version of Communism and is now near the bottom: a beggar nation, destitute, dependent on Moscow for the $5-billion- to $8-billion-a-year subsidy that barely keeps the economy afloat, even though it makes up a full fourth of the country's gross national product. My figures for Cuba's economy, health services, and education before Castro are from such sources as the United Nations Statistical Yearbook and UN World Population Trends and Policies, available to anyone; but "Fidel" and his people lie shamelessly to visiting journalists, and such journalists, particularly those from television, repeat Fider's lies mindlessly.

CUBA IS FILLED with banners: SOCIALISM OR DEATH, MARXISM-LENINISM OR DEATH, COMMUNISM OR DEATH, EVERY CUBAN MUST KNOW HOW TO SHOOT AND SHOOT WELL (signed: FIDEL), DOWN WITH IMPERIALISM, WE ARE INVINCIBLE, DEATH TO THE INVADER. Small notices on walls read: MILITIAMEN: FOLLOW ORDERS SWIFTLY. WE MUST RESIST THE ENEMY WITH ALL THE FORCE OF THE REVOLUTION. The banners are very unlike the vanguard-of-the-proletariat slogans that used to shine atop every public building in Moscow until, in the age of glasnost, a year ago, the Russians got embarrassed about them and took them down. Having revisited the Soviet Union only four months ago, I was struck by the differences in style between the two countries: Castro's regime being in every way more personal, florid, flamboyant, bombastic; Cuba's population more tightly controlled. Scholars say Castro's boyhood idols were three: for faith, Primo de Rivera, Spain's military dictator of the 1920s (Castro's father was a Spaniard); for tactics, Adolf Hitler; for passion, Mussolini. And Cuba today has a vibrant fascist flavor, its ruler a Latin American caudillo whose jealous hatred of the United States has provided him with a powerful protector, if not a model, in Moscow. Since glasnost and perestroika have broken out in the Soviet Union, Cuba's ideological link with Moscow is even weaker, since in his own country Castro is fighting both greater freedom and Soviet-style economic reforms tooth and nail, clinging fervently if eccentrically to "moral incentives," "purity of doctrine," himself alluding to Cuba as the "Albania of the Caribbean."

In the mountains of the Sierra Maestra, where in 1956 Castro launched with 82 educated guerrillas his second revolutionary venture-this one successful-I witnessed a contingent of uniformed schoolchildren chanting in unison for almost a quarter-hour: " Viva el marxismo, vi-va! viva el comunismo, vi-va! Viva Fidel vi-va!" The decibel count on the vi-vas was at deafening, sieg heil level, but the performance was much admiredby a visiting U.S. delegation, particularly by some who oppose the Pledge of Allegiance. "How unself-conscious they are!" one woman said glowingly. "In the States they'd be so self-conscious!"

Havana, Cuba's capital, gives new meaning to the words "shabby" and "dilapidated." The whole city, once a Miami-plus-gambling with a tremendous tourist trade, is now ratty and ramshackle, gone appallingly to seed. Whole families live in single rooms. Courtyards are squalid. Even in the so-called "dollar zone," forbidden to all but authorized Cubans, the "luxury" hotels have rusty bathtubs, peeling walls, windows that are unwashed, often broken. If closed, windows will not open. If open, they will not close.

Life in Cuba is more than austere. After thirty years of Communism, still rationed are: beans, rice, salt, sugar (Cuba's principal crop), cooking oil, butter, milk, coffee, bath soap, laundry soap, detergent, cigars (Cuban cigars), tobacco, and of course all meats. A "parallel" market exists, in which foodstuffs are sold freely-but with huge lines and at huge prices. The monthly family allotment of evaporated milk lasts a seven-year-old child two weeks. Milk for the remaining two weeks sets the family back about ten pesos (in a country where the average monthly wage is 145 pesos). Most basic items of clothing are rationed. On the parallel market, a man's short-sleeved shirt costs from 42 to 47 pesos. The average Cuban workingman, if he devotes his entire pay packet for a month to buying shirts, can buy three. An ordinary electric fan, imported from People's China, costs six hundred pesos-a workingman's total salary for four months.

We're talking here about ordinary Cubans. Amidst this penury, Cuba's cuadros dirigentes (ruling cadres) live like millionaires, lacking for nothing: automobiles, fine foods, an abundance of stylish clothing for the women, distributed in closely guarded "Party" shops. They live in opulent luxury amid a destitute population. Such privileges do not make these people liked, and in the vernacular they are called mayimbes. Do not look for this in your Spanish dictionary. It is a word of African origin which, interestingly enough, has surfaced in Cuba only under Castro and was translated for me variously as "ruling class," "power class," "bosses," and-reportedly its African meaning-"vultures." It is not a polite term. The mayimbes, nearly all white in a country now roughly half black, can freely patronize tourist shops and restaurants that take only dollars. Whereas, according to Granma (Cuba's Pravda), an ordinary young Cuban was recently sentenced to a year in prison for having two American dollars in his pocket. In Moscow, taxi drivers are only too happy to be paid in dollars, but drivers in Havana are afraid of being caught with them. The fear level in Cuba is high. My official handlers told me ordinary Cubans were free to visit me at my hotel, but offers to buy unofficial Cubans a drink at the bar of the Hotel Capri in Havana were nervously refused. Two young Cubans, only, accepted and sat in the bar miserably. "We're shivering here," one said. "You think they haven't seen us, but they have."

A few years back Castro experimented with a Cuban "farmers' market," the free sale of produce from private plots. Now, the Soviet Union has had such "peasant markets" for decades-long before perestroika-but Castro, reportedly irritated by even modest pockets of affluence accruing from a form of private enterprise, quirkily slammed his farmers' markets shut in 1986 and since has opposed all reforms rigidly. "Those in the Cuban Communist Party who favor perestroika and glasnost," he declared in a speech to high Party officials only two months before Gorbachev's visit, "belong with dissidents and counter-revolutionaries." Cuba, he affirmed resoundingly, is the last bastion of "true Marxism." Castro is reported, moreover, to have called Moscow News, a prime organ of Soviet glasnost, "more counter-revolutionary than Radio Marti"the U.S. Government's Spanish-language broadcast service beamed at Cuba. In fact, Castro has made the Spanishlanguage edition of this subversive Moscow News virtually unfindable in Cuba. Returning to the Soviet menace in his speech to Cuban Party officials, Castro declared: "We are between two powerful enemies, the United States and the Soviet Union." The characterization of Moscow as an "enemy" produced a considerable shock effect. But Castro wasn't through: "And I don't know which is more dangerous for the Cuban Revolution: the eagle in front of us or the bear we have at our back." HIS SET THE STAGE piquantly for the Gorbachev visit to Havana, which predictably ended in a Caribbean hurricane of all-purpose statements. Gorbachev condemned the "export of revolution" to Central America by military means, but also condemned the United States for supporting the region's democratic governments (is this "exporting revolution"?). The Soviet president, in a speech to Cuba's rubber-stamp parliament, made the case for economic reform-but whether he will cut back on the huge amount of aid Moscow sends to Havana we will only find out in time. Castro, in a 46-minute introduction to Gorbachev's speech, made the case against economic reform. The most characteristic public event at the summit was when Castro leapt to his feet at a news conference to praise Gorbachev for recognizing that every nation must find its own road to socialism. But whether Gorbachev really thinks this, or plans to reduce Soviet aid in order to induce Cuba to follow his lead in reforming its bankrupt economic system, we do not know.

With Soviet foreign interventionism in sharp decline, most visibly in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, Gorbachev and Castro seem genuinely at odds on foreign policy. Despite his agreement to withdraw Cuban troops from Angola, Castro gives no signs of really abandoning his frenetic "internationalism" or relinquishing the glamor and prestige which, despite Cuba's desperate economic situation, he still enjoys in the Third World as the leader who with impunity shook his angry fist at the Colossus of the North. Whatever his objectives, Gorbachev is rational and prudent. Fidel Castro is neither. Cuban dissidents I managed to see during my stay in Havana believe to a man that Castro did his best to start a nuclear war to prevent the withdrawal of Soviet missiles during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. And everyone agrees that it's Castro's temperament never to put his foot on the brake, always on the accelerator. Not that it has ever paid to underrate Castro's acumen. Even the people who hate him most, who despise his capricious, neo-fascist rule and deplore what he's done to both Cuban freedoms and the Cuban economy, are in awe of his tactics and timing. Fidel Castro is a hard man to coerce, and he's never been outwitted yet.

For a long time now Castro has been holding his own people hostage, letting

it be said that the human-rights situation in Cuba will improve only if Washington will call off the embargo, "normalizing" relations with Havana. The new wrinkle-brought on by the Gorbachev-Castro summit is the assumption in naive American circles that Gorbachev is now privately carrying water for Washington, that in the interest of improving relations between the U.S. and Moscow he is pleading Washington's case with Castro, urging him to stop being an over-age international enfant terrible, cutting back on Cuban support for MarxistLeninist military forces in Central America. But speculation among Cuban dissidents, some of whom have known Castro personally since the Moncada days, is that if Gorbachev were to try to pressure him, Castro, wroth, would do "terrible things." Facing defeat, they say, Castro is capable of the wildest, most irrational actions. Samson in the temple, they say, bringing down the temple on his own head. A man like this is not easy to pressure.

Leaving out ideological debate on Communist reform, Moscow's budgetary problems, "deviationism," "dogmatism," and the "Albanian model," I for one am not convinced Gorbachev will even try all that hardto give Washington a kinder, gentler Fidel. Cuba, for all Castro's troublesomeness, still offers Moscow great advantages: military intelligence, electronic listening posts, basing facilities for Soviet vessels. And it offers one last asset, perhaps the greatest: the Cuba card. We play the China card against Moscow? Moscow plays the Cuba card against us. Before Gorbachev emasculates Castro-or tries to-he will want something in exchange from Washington. Something big. Something huge. Cuba is a wildly insubordinate "colony" of the Soviet empire, plotting against its Moscow patron, insulting it daily, but it's a great Soviet asset nonetheless. Gorbachev knows it. And Fidel knows it.