Please pay close attention to the story of my last night in Havana, a Saturday night, or you will have the wrong impression. Foremost, keep in mind that the Ambassador's program scheduled all of the arrangements. The itinerary stated in innocuous terms, "An opportunity to study the pre-Revolutionary culture of Havana will be offered by going to the 'Tropicana,' a nightclub extravaganza in existence since 1939."

Before the news reaches Mertzon that I was at a fleshpot over in Cuba every night, nothing in those words implied the delegation was going to be led into an open-air, elevated floor show featuring 100 long-legged gals kicking over their heads. One hundred long-legged gals dancing in costumes brief enough to make a bikini seem as big as a hoop skirt. Make further note that the ringside seats were no more comfortable than the back row. I moved down closer to hear the music better. I found premium seats as hard as the cheaper ones, plus the bouncer fusses if you rest your chin on the edge of the stage.

The next morning, culture studies switched to a professional meeting in the San Juan Valley three hours away from Havana. Located in a national park, 1000 ex-farmers and families had been moved to live in a huge apartment complex. We were told the farmers experimented with growing tobacco and coffee and worked in forestry projects on park lands. The most likely scenario, however, was that the farmers had been kicked off the land and were maintaining the park roads and facilities. After seeing the chaos of a million Chinese removed from Beijing to Lower Mongolia and one half million citizens being shipped from Jakarta in Indonesia to the wilds of New Guinea, my hunch is these displaced families prove the hardships of a totalitarian regime.

Walking around while the delegation visited an apartment, I talked to a young man carrying a fighting rooster in a sack on his back. He liked living in the complex over a farm. He assured me his family had more food than the people in Havana from the gardens and the open acres in the park. The Americans descending upon us made him fidgety. A delegate wearing a Che Guevara beret approached before he could retreat. This "Che" costumed fellow demanded to know the sack's contents. I intervened and answered, "Un gallo fino," or "a fighting rooster." "Che" wanted to photograph the rooster until I warned that the cocks wear razor-sharp blades on the feet, honed to an edge that'd slash a man's shutter finger to the bone. Satisfied, "Che" saluted and left.

From Sunday on, we toured more of the outlands. Stood on the farming sites approved for public viewing by the State, like pathetic chicken hatcheries and dreary packing sheds. We saw dark-hided Vietnamese water buffaloes imported to cover Castro's blunder of buying Canadian Holsteins to move to the tropics. (He planned on air conditioning the dairies.) We caught glimpses of the scrawny native cattle, weighing 300 pounds at yearling age. (Citizens caught butchering a beef without the State's permission face five years' jail time.) Time-shattered paper mills closed from lack of parts or capital. Nuclear generators left uncompleted from the 1992 exodus of Russian capital. Yet we all stood around smiling and asking polite questions.

The Castro myth ended after a guide showed her food ration book to the delegation. (It would take an international court to settle the moment the guides shut off propaganda and start hustling for tips.) Cheerfully, she admitted adults are allowed monthly rations of six pounds of rice, six pounds of beans, six eggs and five pounds of sugar, plus one tube of toothpaste and a bar of soap every two months.

Late that same evening, we stopped at a state-owned "peso store." Dim lighting added to the gloom of the sparsely stocked shelves. Unable to hear the clerk interviewed, I found a blackboard on the projected arrival of the month's allotment. Delivery on rice and beans, the staples of the Cubans' diet, were two weeks away. The space for eggs and oils was blank. The one chicken per child up to 12 years of age was postponed to next month.

Before boarding the bus, the guides defended rationing by explaining that workers able to earn dollars bought whatever they wanted in the more expensive "dollar stores." Unintentionally, she clarified why a professor of etymology hustled a carnival game at a tourist spot. Also, why doctors covet jobs in resort hotels and why Elian Gonzales' father worked in a resort hotel. Made clear, too, why tour guides are so fat and sassy from the tips they receive.

Back on board, people slept rocked by the rhythm of the road. Out the window, darkness allowed candlepower light to peep from stained glass panes. Stunned, I calculated how close I came to consuming two months' ration in the past eight days. How smooth the spiel flowed to this point. We Americans live in such grand abundance, we can't even recognize poverty staring us in the face.

December 21, 2000