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As Castro's Revolution shuffles through its 29th year, many Cubans are surprisingly ready to voice, however quietly, their impatience with a system that still seems stranded in its noisy infancy. Almost no one would deny that health and education, both free, have improved considerably since the days of Dictator Fulgencio Batista. Grinding poverty has been erased. Drugs and prostitution, which flourished when the place was a raffish offshore playground for Americans, have now gone underground. But in the face of those advances, the man in the Havana street is still unable to speak or travel as he pleases. Money is more than ever in desperately short supply. "Cuba is suffering an economic crisis of massive proportions," says a foreign diplomat. "Here is a country with no free press, no opposition parties, no capital flight, a controlled economy and $4.6 billion from the Soviets each year -- and they're still, in hard-currency terms, almost bankrupt."
That chaos is everywhere apparent. Though Cubans have to pay only about 10% of their salary for rent -- often barely $10 a month -- they must spend twice as much just to buy an imported deck of playing cards. Block-long lines of people wait nine hours through the night and six hours more to get into the Centro department store, still commonly known by its prerevolutionary name, Sears, where government surplus items are sold at extortionate prices ($2 for a small bar of chocolate). "We have some good news and some bad news," runs the local joke. "The bad news is that everyone is going to have to eat stones; the good news is that there are not enough to go around."
With money scarce, and goods even scarcer, a diplomat observes, "crooked deals multiply until they ensure that the economic plan can never work." Some people take photos, fix jalopies or do typing on the side; others simply try to resell the goods they manage to procure. The rampant finagling is only encouraged by a bureaucracy with so many hands that none is likely to know what the others are doing: in a Havana telephone directory, the list of ministries takes up 77 pages.
Though talking to foreigners is forbidden, a tourist alone presents an irresistible target. A phone rings in his hotel room, and a girl the visitor has never met professes eternal love, leading, no doubt, to a quickie marriage and a ticket out. A government worker takes him aside and asks, with great diffidence, if he would mind very much having his passport stolen. "Nobody is happy, but everyone is afraid to speak out," observes a habanero. "Nobody trusts anybody else. A few years ago, a generation arose that wanted reform. ( Now the main preoccupation is keeping quiet. People are waiting to see what will happen when Fidel goes."
One dissident recalls a late-night knock at the door. A mild-looking young official stood outside with a request: "We want you to come and do three months of military service." "If I do," said the dissenter, "I will lose my job." "No problem," said the recruiter. "We will take care of you." The uninvited visitor ultimately agreed to go away, indicating that some free choice still exists in Cuba. But that the summons can come at all shows just how fragile that freedom remains.