Ronald Reagan was preparing an invasion that was going to rescue the whole island next week. Fidel was about to be airlifted to a new home in Miami, the guest of his secret patrons and supporters, the U.S. government. The soldiers were already lining up for Bay of Pigs II, and a new constitution had been drawn up for the island that was going to emerge tomorrow. There was a shortage of everything except rumors—wild and impossible imaginings, crazy stories and flights of inspired imagination—the first time I set foot in Havana, in the spring of 1987, and the only thing I could be sure of was that none of it was likely to come true.

I was walking down streets called Virtues and Solitude, Hope and Liberation, toward a capitol building that was a perfect replica of the one I had just seen in Washington, D.C. (though, Cuban friends assured me, a little bit larger). I had flown into José Martí International Airport, named in honor of the Cuban revolutionary and exile whom Fidel Castro had made his alter ego and official hero—even as the Cuban exiles and passionate Castro haters in Florida also claimed him as their hero, a fighter for an independent Cuba while exiled in America. Three months later I would be standing with a large crowd in the tiny town of Artemisa while a torrential midsummer rain drenched us all and, at the far end of a soggy field, a bearded man in fatigues talked and talked in a lucid, forceful Spanish that even a 5-year-old (or a visiting journalist from Time magazine, myself ) could follow. Castro had already been president for 28 years at that point, and across the waters all his enemies were convinced that he was ready to give out at any moment (his own people, many of whom had never known another leader, mostly seemed to believe that he would never die, any more than a bad dream or vision dies).

The only visitors I saw then, along the tropical, yawning, carless streets, in the Mafia-built hotels still creaky with hand-operated elevators, along the seawall where kids sat looking out toward America 90 miles away, were eager Bulgarians, North Koreans traveling in pairs, like missionaries, and Soviets who kissed their fingers and thanked the heavens they didn't believe in as they watched near-naked dancers sashay past during Carnaval (rescheduled by the Revolution to coincide not with the Christian period of austerity but with the anniversary of Fidel's first strike, on the Moncada barracks, in late July 1953, and a different kind of quasi-religious privation). And when, four years later, the Soviet bloc collapsed and even those visitors and supporters fell away, a "special period" began, which meant that I found even more of nothing in the Cuban shops, and the Soviet-sponsored bare shelves were replaced by Soviet-deserted bare shelves. More books came churning out: Castro's Final Hour, Cuba the Morning After. The island of waiting was on the brink of transformation.

Fifteen years on, the stories are still the same, even though the evergreen Cuban leader, now 80, really does at last seem to be saying his good-byes. By now, however, he has already survived ten U.S. presidents, outlasted more than three dozen assassination attempts (by some counts), and endured the hundred-millionth rumor of his impending demise.

The story of Fidel's reign is as paradoxical as that of any revolutionary, bearing out the uneasy global truth that every son turns into the father he rebels against. Castro came to power to rescue his island from the tyranny of the dollar and widespread prostitution and has somehow, after decades on his throne, turned his island into a place where the governing obsession is the dollar and prostitution is everywhere. His main ally in all this is, perversely, a Washington that, by maintaining an economic blockade on the tiny island, allows Castro to present himself as a genuine David standing up to Goliath and a lone voice of independence who is an inspiration to revolutionaries everywhere. The beauty of Cuba is the complication of Cuba, a tragic place of infectious effervescence where fading buildings that are collapsing and filled with nothing but dust are lit up with an energy, a vitality, even at times an ebullience, like nowhere else I have seen in a lifetime of traveling.

Imagine Brazil compressed into a small, clawlike island with fewer people than Greater Mexico City. Picture New Orleans reborn with an African beat and European intellectuals, so that you can hear drums beating from every park as darkness falls, while inside the bare rooms the kids you meet are as definitive on Franco and Camus as they are on Shakira and Oliver Stone. When you land at the airport at two in the morning and walk out onto the long, jungly roads, with nothing but huge billboards—empty promises—hovering above you, you can still feel a buzz, a spirit, an intoxication in the air that makes you really feel that, as the billboards weirdly say, it is always the 26th of July (1953).

Nearly all the figures you are likely to meet in Cuba are, of course, the ones most drawn to foreigners, desperate to get out; the ones who have spent their entire lives hating Castro, as restless teenagers will hate the puritanical father who grounds them for the next 48 years. Yet even they, in my experience, will always assure you that their leader is brilliant, supple, and craftier than any other character on the global stage. He has turned their specklike homeland into a major international player, and he has created excellent doctors (albeit they have no aspirin to give out) and wonderful schools (with no textbooks on offer). The only thing worse than having Fidel in power, they sometimes tell you, is having anyone else. If he is succeeded by his younger brother, Raúl, Cuba will suffer under an even more oppressive tyranny run by a man as brutal as Fidel—perhaps more so—but with little of his fire or intelligence. If the country is taken over by the exiles from Florida, who have been redecorating for 50 years an island that no longer exists, it will become disfigured in a different direction. Never has "better the devil you know" had a keener or more anguished implication.

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