Between warm afternoon showers, thousands of shirt-sleeved Cuban men and cotton-frocked girls trooped down Havana's laurel-hedged Prado. In brazen defiance of the armistice decreed for election week, they shouted the names of rival mayoral and congressional candidates. Sound trucks blared the notes of a conga, then broke out with political exhortations. In the Parque Central, dusky ti-1.trope performers attracted a crowd, then made campaign speeches from their precarious perches. In the sweltering evening, a great neon campaign sign, towed by an amphibious jeep, swam ghostlike along the harbor front.
But election...