And in the middle of all these nervous complaints, guitars are being strummed along the beautiful Malecón, the corniche that stretches its arm around the fading tropi-colored buildings of Central Havana, and girls are asking you to marry them to get them out, while an old man requests pictures of Jackie Robinson and Ava Gardner. In the absence of almost everything, people fill the emptiness with sex, with music, with flamboyant embroideries. All the time that they are supposed to be working for the government, they are busy working around it, keeping the island afloat somehow through sheer resourcefulness and determination and genuine, unscripted compañero-ship alone. The party subverts the Party at every turn.

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 than the Devil you know" had a keener or more anguished implication.



Diego Giudice/Archivolatino/Redux

It is presumptuous, I know, to speak of a country and a predicament not my own, and I leave to political pundits the job of telling us that Cuba is a sometime socialist utopia and longtime repressive hell. For me it has always been, more than anything, a human place, and even after six eventful trips there I find that I have seldom seen people so disenchanted, so passionate, so engaged in all the possibilities of every moment (because so exiled from the chance to change anything deep down). Strangers ask you for jobs with the CIA, or offer you jobs with the Cuban CIA. A kind man with watery eyes approaches you in the cathedral and asks if you will take a letter to his mother in the United States (I did so, and only just before sending it, looked inside to find that it was in fact addressed to a desk officer at the State Department). Everything is permanently dancing and shifting, and nothing is going anywhere at all.

Like almost every foreign visitor who has set foot on the island, from Christopher Columbus to Thomas Merton, and from Graham Greene to yesterday's bedazzled new fiancé, I fell almost instantly under the island's spell the moment I arrived. Perhaps what I really fell in love with was a unique mix of vibrancy and ambiguity. The day I returned from my first trip, I went to my travel agent in Santa Barbara and bought another ticket, to go down a few weeks later (through Merida, Mexico, and in years to come, I would go through Canada). Going to Cuba became my annual way to remind myself of what stood (and slouched and shimmied) outside abstractions and ideologies, a political and emotional and moral conundrum that asks you what you will do with smiling new friends who say they are happy to be thrown into prison because they can get food there, and with relics of the American Empire that preserve old American dreams more lovingly than anything in America does.

My very first morning in Havana, as I surveyed a futuristic building along the once-modern boulevard of La Rampa, stranded there now like a crumpled IOU, a Cuban with Chinese features leaned in and whispered a hello (he could tell I was a visitor, despite my scruffy clothes and dark complexion, by the fact I was looking at the ghostly showpiece). Minutes later I was following Carlos into a cavernous, dusty apartment in Central Havana, being introduced to "brothers" who looked less like him than I did and then bumping back across town to his two-room apartment on a rooftop in the Vedado district. Kids were conducting heated conversations on Michael Jackson's skin color, a rooster (called Reagan in honor of his speech patterns) was strutting about calling reveille, a boom box was blasting Madonna's "Like a Virgin," and Carlos was asking me what I really thought of William Saroyan and whether Spinoza had it over Leibniz.

Twenty minutes later, he was asking me if I wouldn't mind giving him my passport so he could go off to the land he'd been dreaming of for all his 35 years. It was a variation of the appeal I heard from almost every Cuban I met—better the reality you don't know, in this case, than the one you do—and four or five visits later, I did at last help Carlos escape, as a political refugee (and without parting with my passport), to America. So quick-witted and enterprising and sophisticated a spirit could only flourish, I knew, in the Land of Opportunity. Yet when he touched down in New York, and later in Miami, Carlos saw drug dealers for the first time, and homeless people, and gangs. In America you can do anything, he told his friends back home in Havana, but you can also be nothing, with no family or community or overarching vision to hold you up or to rebel against. You're better off, he told them, to their shock and disappointment, in the Havana that you know.

Cuba was—still is—a cluster of sunlit streets with shadows everywhere. It is a proudly patriotic island that, like nowhere else in the Americas, draws Madrid and West Africa and the Antilles together, so you are seeing Truffaut while talking of the Mets, with Yoruba deities being placated in one corner. It is as physically beautiful a place as exists on earth, it wins more gold medals per capita at every Olympics than any other nation, and it is famous for its oppressions and the hatreds it inspires, an intense family dispute that has been going on now for half a century or more.

As the hundred-millionth rumor of his departure hisses across the Central Havana rooftops, Castro himself appears to be giving way to something even more chaotic and repressive, thanks to those who have hated him, or followed him, for longer than is healthy. But the Cuba that I, and more and more Americans, know seems unlikely to follow any script, except insofar as it can jeer at it and riff on it and embellish it with the confidence that little on this loose-limbed island listens to either 19th-century German philosophers or 21st-century American potentates. Cuba is the home of a permanent revolution against all the ideas we have of it.

Pico Iyer is the author of numerous books, including Cuba and the Night, a novel; Falling Off the Map, which includes a nonfictional account of traveling through Castro's Cuba; and The Global Soul, a study of the world today.

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