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It was lunch hour inside the Ministry of Commerce in old Havana. In a small cafeteria, in a building that dated back to the 1800s, workers ate baked fish, rice and beans, soup, salad and cake, off white dishes on tin trays.

They washed down the food and cut the sweltering heat with cold water from sweating metal pitchers placed on each of the 20 tables. Like many of the basics in contemporary Cuba, the meal was subsidized and cost each employee only a few cents.

A clerk there, a 58-year-old man with crooked teeth and thinning hair, spoke about why life was better with a Communist government running his country.

“Before the triumph of the revolution, ” he said in a gravelly voice, “it was a dictatorship here. Only a small group of people” – and he held up one hand with the fingers bunched together – “had money, jobs, power and opportunity in life.”

“Now there’s liberty, ” he said, and he grinned. “People have jobs and money. Hospitals are free. I have two sons – one is studying economics at the university and the other electronics at technical school.” He patted his pants pocket. “I didn’t have to pay a cent for their education.”

“I come from a poor family of farmers. We had no chance before. Things are much better now.”

This is one of the faces of Cuba.

— — — A mile or so away from the Ministry of Commerce, a middle-aged woman sat on her bed in a small room with soaring, 20-foot ceilings where she lived with her two small children.

In the fading light of the afternoon, she spoke of feeling oppressed in a country where people were jailed for saying the wrong things, where neighbors watched each other for “counter-revolutionary” activity and sentiments, where private enterprise was forbidden and foreign travel restricted.

She spoke of tiring of the interminable meetings of the Committee in Defense of the Revolution – one of the thousands of local block committees which monitored the actions and the ideology of their members.

She spoke of Cuba’s president, the former guerrillero who 30 years ago gained international fame by ousting a dictator and successfully standing up to the United States – then the strongest nation on earth. “Fidel Castro is a greater leader, ” she said softly. “But he is only a leader.” Lowering her head, she said, “I feel like a pigeon in a cage here.”

This is another face of Cuba.

— — — Through Castro’s leadership and Soviet subsidies, Cuba now has universal education and literacy; it has a widespread system of modern hospitals and rural clinics staffed by Cuban doctors using Cuban manufactured medicine; it has full employment; it has eliminated hunger and malnutrition.

Anyone who has traveled through other Latin American capitals and seen the filth, the beggars that gather like flies, and the miles of cardboard shacks on the outskirts of town, knows this is a remarkable achievement of which other Third World nations can only dream.

PRICE OF CHANGE

A price has been paid for this transformation, although Cuba is still a nation of surprising charm and sensuality. Its denizens still dance the rumba, the conga and the cha-cha-cha. They spend a surprising percentage of their income in restaurants and state-owned cabarets, where high-kicking dancers in sequined bikinis and two-foot high feather headdresses grind alongside throaty-voiced singers. Havana, despite the halt of roulette wheels and the extinguishing of the neon trim that once laced its skyline, remains an intensely beautiful city. One of terraces flung out over streets filled with aging American automobiles of the 1940s and ’50s, of columns with vines slithering up over wrought-iron railings. A city of fading pastel colors, of chipped mustard-yellow plaster around salmon-pink doors with eggshell-blue trim.

The real loss has been the elimination of what Marxists contemptuously label “bourgeois freedoms.” It is a country where word, deed and even thought are controlled to an astonishing degree. Cuba is not an El Salvador, a Guatemala, or a Chile, where citizens are tortured, shot and “disappeared.” But Cuba is one gigantic company town. To get along, one goes along.

In the past few years, the tight rein held on dissent has slackened a bit. Several hundred longtime political prisoners have been released.

As for the press, Castro has urged journalists to be more critical and “less boring.”

THE `PURE’ PATH

Still, there is nothing approaching the glasnost of the Soviet Union. And instead of perestroika, Castro has begun a campaign of “rectification, ” in which capitalist tendencies that have sprouted up – such as the private farmer’s market in Havana which was shut down in 1986 – are weeded out.

Castro, contrary to most other Socialist-bloc countries, has chosen to continue along the path to “pure” communism. Castro can take such a route because most Cubans support him and his decisions.

The stoutest “Fidelistas” are the formerly poor and disenfranchised of the rural countryside. Prior to “the triumph of the revolution, ” – the phrase heard over and over here – Cuba was a country of some wealth compared to the rest of Latin America, but with vast inequities in its distribution. Much of the rural population lived in huts of palm and wood, worked three months out of the year during cane-cutting season and seldom saw a school or a doctor.

Today, the closest thing Havana has to a slum is a barrio of wooden shacks on dirt streets by the Almendares River on the edge of Havana. Cubans call the neighborhood El Fangito – the muddy place – because the river periodically rises and floods the homes.

From a distance, these plywood shacks look distressingly poor. Up close, one discovers electricity, running water, TV and refrigerators. Still, some vestiges remain. Outside one house, an old woman washed clothes in an iron cauldron over a wood fire.

Most residents say they will soon move to new apartments they are building themselves as part of “microbrigades.” Under this program, begun a year ago, workers leave their regular jobs to build housing, day care centers and clinics. In return, they receive salaries and also the right to an apartment when the work is done.

YOUTHFUL CONCERNS

The level of “Fidelismo” among the youth is a topic of concern to party elders. They fear youngsters who have no memory of the fall of Batista in 1959, or the victory over the United States at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, may lack fervor.

The youth are, perhaps, beguiled by the Madonna songs played even on government radio stations, the Hollywood movies, such as “Rocky, ” shown at government movie houses, and the fashionable clothes seen on the many tourists who come to Cuba.

Much of the youth remains committed to communism and the ideal of a new society. At Che Guevara High School, for example, the young women were as giddy in their adoration of Fidel and Che as American teenagers are of rock stars Sting and Bono.

But other young people are quite apolitically tired of the ever-present lines where one waits to purchase anything from a new bathing suit from a meagerly stocked store, to a shot of the thick, sweet black coffee drunk here.

“I’ll tell you what’s good about my country, ” one youth told me: “The sun, ” aiming a finger at the burning sky; “the sea, ” pointing toward the aqua-green water before him; “the girls, ” motioning toward the supine, bikini-clad bodies around him; and “the tobacco, ” holding up the stubby unfiltered cigaret he was smoking.

“That’s it, ” he said.

I asked him what would happen if he talked like that to a neighbor.

“If they’re finks, ” he said, “then” – and one hand quickly clasped the wrist of the other hand in the familiar gesture meaning police arrest and imprisonment.

Fidel’s position on dissent and expression are defined in a famous speech, later named the “Word to Intellectuals, ” which he gave in June 1961 before a group of writers, scholars and artists at the National Library. In one much quoted sentence, Castro declared that “within the revolution, everything. Against the revolution, nothing.”

Twenty-seven years later, it is still the guiding principle on civil liberties. Protection of the revolution is foremost. Interviews with top government leaders reveal a different conception of what human rights are.

DEFINING HUMAN RIGHTS

“I believe that our people are freer than the poor people in your country, ” said Jorge Enrique Mendoza, a close adviser to Castro who fought with him in the Sierra Maestra mountains in 1958. For 20 years, he was editor-in-chief of Granma, the nation’s top daily newspaper, which is published by the Communist Party.

“I don’t believe that an unemployed person can be free, ” he said, “or a sick person, or someone who cannot go to school.

“I am not going to debate with you about party (Communist) control of the press. It is certain. But we believe we represent the interests of the people.

“One can criticize specifics, but to make propaganda about capitalist ownership is not permitted. I would like to see a capitalist newspaper that attacked the basis of the capitalist system.”

In the area of religious freedom, a slightly wider circle is being drawn around what is “within the revolution.”

The publication in 1987 of “Fidel and Religion, ” has radically altered the status of religious faith here. In the 300-page book, which is transcription of conversations between Fidel and Frei Betto, a Brazilian Dominican friar, Fidel talked favorably of his Jesuit upbringing and says, “I think one can be a Marxist without ceasing to be a Christian.”

“The fact that this book exists, ” said Monsignor Manuel deCespedes, the archbishop of Havana. “Is a very positive fact. Before the book was published, it was taboo to talk about religion.”

Wearing a black gown, and with a bald head and a quiet manner, deCespedes was the very image of a fatherly priest at an interview in his office in old Havana. He has established a close working relationship with Castro in recent years and deCespedes handles the complexities of being a Christian in a Marxist state with finesse.

On the one hand, he says, “I am not a Communist, ” but on the other, he says, “a good Christian is not anti-anything.” This diplomacy has meshed with the government’s increasingly tolerant attitude.

The archbishop ticked off the figures that show how church participation has grown in the last few years. Church attendance is up. Baptisms in Havana have tripled, from 7,000 in 1979 to 21,000 in 1987. Formerly only the elderly attended Mass, now 10 to 20 young people are seen at each service. Last year, the church was permitted to import 30,000 copies of the Bible for the first time.

On a recent Sunday in a beautiful old cathedral in Havana, a priest gave mass to about 75 people of all ages. Before the service, a group of teenage boys said “repression” against religious practice did not exist, but a certain amount of discrimination did.

“We don’t tell our friends at school about our faith, ” said one 17-year-old, “because they would stay apart from us if they knew.” He noted that because of his religious faith, he could not be a member of the Union of Young Communists.

Despite their loss of status, they supported their government and country. “Some people think Catholics are counter-revolutionaries, ” said an 18-year-old. “But that’s not true. We will pick up a rifle and defend our country when necessary. We are with the revolution.”

PUBLICIZING ABUSES

Until recently, Castro has never allowed an organized opposition group to exist. The exception, since Spring of 1987, is the Cuban Human Rights Committee. The group is officially illegal, but allowed to operate in a limited fashion.

“This small handful of people have had a tremendous impact, ” said one high-placed western diplomat. “For the first time, Cubans have a source outside the government to publicize abuses by security forces and police.”

It’s leader is one Ricardo Bofill, 45, who has spent 13 of the last 20 years in jail for such crimes as “enemy propaganda.”

Thanks to a massive campaign against him in the Cuban media, including a three-hour television documentary and full-page spreads in Granma, most Cubans are familiar with Bofill’s “beady” black eyes and scrub-brush mustache – and with some of his accusations.

The article in Granma on Bofill was a good example of current Cuban journalism, managing to pack every paragraph with a few pejoratives, lest the reader hesitate in forming an opinion. “Faker, ” “swindler, ” “liar, ” “crook” and “bastard, ” were some of the most often repeated.

Bofill insists such tactics have helped his cause by giving it publicity. He operates from a small apartment in Guanabacoa, a ragged suburb of Havana of light-industry and plain, one-story housing, and has few recourses.

He cannot leave his home, he says, because he is attacked by stone-throwing government police dressed as civilians when he tries to walk to the bus-stop.

Significantly, Bofill, once a professor of Marxism, looks toward the Soviet Union under Gorbachev as the best example of change for Cuba.

“These are the materials one has to read, ” Bofill said, holding up copies of Moscow News and New Times, both Russian magazines translated into Spanish, “to find a path for Cuba to follow.

Bofill does not deny the social advances made in his country. But, he said “you can’t separate public health and public liberty.”

“To judge the achievements of this country, ” Bofill said, “you have to measure them in an integral form. For example, in South Korea and Taiwan, tremendous advances were made economically. “But they were still dictatorships.”

So in Cuba, the debate between the right to eat, and the right to speak and think as one pleases, continues.

That Bofill is not in jail proves the government’s tight grip on dissent has opened slightly. But the sledgehammer attacks against him in the official press prove the parameters set on dissent are still in place: Direct criticism of government policies is not permitted.

In a recent article in The Nation, Professor Rene David of San Carlos Seminary in Havana was quoted as saying that Cuba has not “achieved the difficult balance between equality and liberty necessary for a more authentic fraternity.”

Fidel, because of his overthrow of Batista, the subsequent social advances he made and his personal charisma, has built up an enormous reservoir of goodwill that has yet to be exhausted. For the time being, most citizens will continue to follow where he leads them.

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Alex Marshall, a free-lance journalist, recently returned from a trip to Cuba sponsored by the Columbia School of Journalism and Prensa Latina, the Cuban news agency

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