CUBA--Havana International Airport looks like a regional airstrip in a town of about 10,000 people. After I pass through the glass customs window I walk towards an old man in a nondescript uniform, standing alone, seemingly waiting for me. He holds out his hand for my passport, opens it, and studies my photo closely.

"Catia Kennedy" he says consideringly, pronouncing my first name as if I was Russian. "That's you, is it?" He swings his eyes back up into mine with such directness I am taken aback. He stares deeply into me, past my eyes, it seems, right into my head.

"That's me," I say. Had I been a CIA operative under the force of that gaze, an El Salvadoran bomber, a carrier of contraband, I would have sagged and confessed instantly. Señor Soul Searcher. His eyes go on assessing me.

"Any relation to El Presidente Kennedy?" he says, and suddenly there is a light in the eyes my slight paranoia has prevented me from seeing.

"Luckily for Cuba, no," I answer. The eyes wrinkle, and my mouth stretches into an answering grin, I feel my spirits lift. I'm here!

"You go ahead, Catia," he says, shaking my hand. "Welcome to Cuba, amiga. "

There's that tropical heat, exciting because some part of our brain associates it with indolent holidays, those shiny palm trees, the huge lettering you see instantly which proclaims that the people you are about to meet believe in revolution. There's the inevitable taxi driver who speaks Miami-accented English, making more money driving his Chevy to and from the airport for dollars than he did as a research chemist. How does he think things are going? He meditates on the question as he drives through the crumbling, swarming streets of Old Havana, the architectural New World masterpiece falling down around the ears of its inhabitants. "Well," he says, "we're toughing it out. "

It's disconcerting, his perfect U.S. accent. He could be a complacent Miami businessman, commenting on business downturns as he turns the steaks on the grill on the sundeck. Disconcerting because the thing he's referring to that the Cubans all around U.S. are toughing out with such astonishing resilience is el bloqueoa - the U.S. blockade. Cubans just like him with accents just like him, living in Miami, have lobbied the U.S. government for years, with a viciousness against their country which could only be described as rabid, to choke Castro's Cuba to death.

In flagrant contravention of United Nation rulings, in treatment it wouldn't dare mete out to countries like Iraq, Iran, China, Korea or any number of regimes it claims are totalitarian and practise human rights abuses, the U.S. continues to single Cuba out as its own special whipping boy. It withholds trade revenue, medicines, and humanitarian aid to an island of 11 million people. It bullies other countries into doing the same, using its economic trade might as thumbscrews.

It has done everything in its awesomely aggressive power to destabilise and disrupt a tiny place that dares to uphold a different political system than its own.

And for over forty years it has boasted that Cuba is going to collapse any day now, thereby justifying its aggression towards it, justifying the billions of U. S. dollars spent and lost in attacking it. No ridiculous socialist state could possibly stand up to the irresistible glory of capitalism, and to prove it we'll surround it with trade embargoes and boycott everything it tries to produce. Yep, any day now. Not possible, socialism. So what are you guys waiting for? Don't you know we won the goddamn Cold War already?

The taxi driver chuckles softly when I ask him if he thinks Cuba is ever going to succumb. It's a laugh I'll be hearing a lot of over the next few weeks. "Never," Cubans will say to me dismissively, waving aside the possibility like a mosquito. We flash past a billboard that shows a ranting Uncle Sam on one shoreline, his face distorted with greed, shaking his fist at a Cuban soldier smiling quietly to himself on the other shore. "We are not at all afraid of YOU, Mr. Imperialist!" says the caption. I want to admire its outrageous insouciance, its defiance. But all I can think of is how close those shorelines are.

* * * *

Old Havana looks like Rome must have looked as the clock wound inexorably down on the Empire. There's no money for street repair, far less restoration of three hundred-year-old buildings. From out of dank hallways and busted-open basements billows the smell of rot, broken sewage pipes, garbage. Curving marble staircases that stink of piss and timbers that are greenish with decay. Across the road from the splendid Capitolio building, grand public buildings have been long since turned into apartment blocks. Washing flaps on sumptuous crumbling old balconies in egalitarian pride. Art deco wrought iron creaks precariously out over the street, suspending T-shirts and socks on string clotheslines.

Oh, it's easy to fall in love with this, this picturesque poverty, and wax lyrical about citizens entering the finery of Batista's capital and taking it over, living in marble-floored bank buildings and leveling everything that stank of hierarchy and privilege. It's easy for us to do this, because we don't live here.

We are first-worlders, so we have a problem distinguishing form and content. We love the idea of it, the symbols, the props - we would prefer to see these than the reality of hauling water up to the fourth floor on a pulley every day of your life. To living in a collapsed ruin for a year waiting for a new apartment. We glory in the concept, but we would not put up with it ourselves for an hour - that's the job of the poor, while we take photos and claim the politics as our own.

Everywhere I walk in Old Havana, every person I talk to, I feel a country's eyes as shrewdly gazing into my soul as the old man's at the airport. This is who you are, is it? I can't stand the honesty of the scrutiny. I look away, forgetting my name.

This is the reality of life in Cuba: joining a line snaking around a city block for something you don't even know which might await you at the end. Cheese? Milk? Ice-cream? Soap?

And here comes a foreigner, strolling down to the air-conditioned hard currency shop with your annual salary in their pocket as today's spending money. They will buy in dollars whatever it is you'll wait three hours for today. They will spend eight year's of your salary this afternoon on cigars, in a special dehumidifying box, a further three year's salary. They will sneer at you and try to bargain you down for their dollar taxi fare, even though they understand you cannot buy pens, soap, laundry powder, paper, meat or a thousand other things without dollars. That your national currency, the only one you're supposed to have access to, is worth next to nothing. It won't buy you entrance to restaurants, nightclubs, or supermarkets, you can't buy an airticket with it. Simply by dint of being from somewhere else, somewhere that has succumbed to the imperialism that makes your life a misery, they will go straight to the front of the line.

The Cubans catch my eye as I walk past. They are dressed in cheap but exuberant clothes, they are black, white and Creole, tall and well-built and handsome, and waiting patiently in this queue to buy a piece of cheese or see a Cuban film. Without exception, they each offer me a dazzling and sincere smile. They do not rob me for my dollars, spit, scream or lash out at me. In the vast majority of instances, they don't want anything of me but to walk along with me for a time, talking, finding something in common we can laugh about. It is much worse, somehow, this open eager warmth, than a resentful slap in the face. When people shake my hand and nod, looking into my eyes, I can hardly speak.

* * * *

Look, I know there is nothing new about this, that Westerners go to poor countries all the time and wallow in guilt and angst - it's probably one of their reasons for going. With one breath we mouth the truisms, with the next we reveal that we bought coffee on the street for 10 centavos, can you believe it?

But Cuba is different. Everybody is educated. They write their addresses for me in neat, well-practiced handwriting, they can discuss history and politics as you're sitting on the bus, shouting over the din of the labouring diesel engine.

They all have access to health care and attention, birth control information, adequate cheap clothing and reasonably nutritious food. Pride and self-esteem is immediately evident in their bearing and confident manner.

These people are not oppressed. They are not downtrodden East Germans, terrified to make eye contact in case you are the Secret Police. They are not yelling for fatwah and burning effigies of the U. S. President. The women, rather than being in purdah for fear of stoning, are breathtakingly flirtatious and confident, striding down the street, wiggling their hips to salsa that pours out of doorways.

No, these people are impoverished because they are being punished. What is oppressing them - or doing its best to - is the strongest economy in the world, desperate to see them suffer until their system collapses.

Why do we come here, to be tourists? To see it for ourselves? To marvel or shake our heads? To see that this is what it boils down to, that you can't have marble stairs without broken drains, equality without military service, resistance without food shortages? To see that people are waiting in a kind of limbo here, wondering what the end of the line might bring?

In the opulent 'fifties pharmacies, the long curving shelves are empty, or displaying a few lovingly arranged bottles of cough syrup, hand-stoppered in brown bottles and all costing less than five U.S. cents.

Medication is part of the embargo, never mind that lives might be lost for the lack of it. Never mind that it flouts international laws of humanitarian aid.

Department shelves and display windows advertise what they have inside: a few rolls of toilet paper, stock cubes, a pile of bicycle tubes, dusty thermos flasks made in China fifteen years ago.

In their houses, full of 1950s furniture and dusty artificial flowers, people display proudly plastic bottles that once contained shampoo, after-shave and bath oil. I look at these empty bottles and bare pharmacy shelves, drink precious coffee made with powdered milk, pour buckets of water down the toilet like everybody else here except for the tourists in the hotels, and I think of a catalogue I saw recently for a U.S. bird feeding company that advertised 70 different kinds of seed combinations for bird feeders, including ready-processed suet with seventeen different nut flavours. I think of dumped medicines lying in warehouses that governments will use to pass off as aid relief in the Horn of Africa, the cornucopia of items I expect to find on my plate if I order salad.

I think of everything I assume for myself as necessities, and what I feel is not exactly guilt, but a kind of nausea. We are letting this happen, in fact our governments (and therefore by default us, since this is how our democracies are meant to work) are causing this, and our response to it is to buy a postcard. That's you, is it?

Even this self-disgust is predictable; anyone who bothers to read anything or think for five minutes about world affairs would feel the same. I can't revel in the defiance of modern-day Cuba any more than I can take credit for their revolution. My culture, my assumptions, and my excesses are, in fact, part of what gives them such hardship. It's no point loving the form and ignoring the content. Cuba just makes you more aware of this uncomfortable but simple fact.

* * * *

So there I am, walking down the street nursing my forty-nine flavours of effete Western capitalist guilt, past queues of people and crumbling buildings and fat self-satisfied European men strolling with stunning Afro-Caribbean prostitutes down the tourist promenade of Obispo. and I hear faint laughter, music and applause.

I follow it to a side-street where a smiling crowd is clustered around a doorway. Inside small children are performing a dance, Creole and Black children in Caribbean-style costumes as their parents and friends sit around smiling and clapping. They dance in a gloomy stairwell in improvised costumes.

The ones I watch all the way through are two little girls, about eleven years old but already with that wicked flirtatious joy, skipping around to a Creole love song. Their arms twine wondrously up towards the smiling faces arranged along the stairs, they bump their narrow hips with abandon. , singing along to a tape: "This is the STORY, (shimmy shimmy bump) of what might HAPPEN (shuffle clap clap) to two young LOVERS (shimmy clap clap) underneath the MOON!"

Their languid hands gesture upwards, two black, two brown, both with white palms and pink shell nails, and the audience gives a small ecstatic sigh. For a second or two, we are transported out of that dark, gas-smelling hallway. We are on a Caribbean beach under a moon like bowl of cream, watching brown-skinned lovers do what lovers do next to a glinting midnight ocean. Shimmy shimmy shimmy, go the girls' hips.

The adults' faces shine. They applaud wildly as the girls bow deeply. Boys in straw hats come out for the next piece, the Banana Boat Song. Smaller brothers and sisters are invited up, and none of them refuse. The three year olds, grinning delightedly, watch the steps and concentrate. A sea of black and white and brown little bodies move gracefully in unison - an object lesson in how culture is inherited.

When it is finished I am invited in for cake and fruit drink. I speak to the dance teacher, a tall gentle man who studies at the University and teaches the local kids for free in his spare time to perform little concerts like this. I tell him I teach youth theatre myself in Australia, and we stand grinning at each other, both knowing exactly how the other feels, especially in a moment like this when the kids are flushed with triumph at their own power, jumping and hugging each other, fathers wiping their eyes and mothers full of surprised delight. We eat too-sweet cake, exchange addresses, and laugh at the kids.

Twenty-five metres away from us, on Calle Obispo, girls display themselves to the sleazy European men for dollars, tourists stroll past the empty Johnston's Pharmacy and Cubans line up with their ration books for their allocation of today's bread.

In one of the department stores (for the first time in forty years, as the U. S. media is so fond of reiterating,) there are Christmas decorations like battery-operated Santa Clauses and tiny dioramas of fireplaces dusted with snow and stockings hung over the hearth. Nobody born here can buy anything in this shop, even if they had enough money. They have the wrong currency.

I wish I could say they walked scornfully past this crass window, ignoring its cheap seduction, knowing they had more annual holidays than the vast majority of North Americans over Christmas anyway. But that would not be true. It would be the rewrite I'd prefer, that I'd be more comfortable with. But the glass of that store was a map of smears from fingers, hands and faces pressed from the outside, gazing at the jerking Santa and the snow, something alien and incongruous that might or might not prove to be the thin edge of the wedge.

They are heads and tails of the same coin, these contradictions. To experience them in Cuba is to ride the ultimate emotional rollercoaster, by turns sickening and inspiring, gut-wrenching and exhilarating. These swoops and swings will occur within minutes of each other, will appear suddenly like a quiet contradiction to the knee-jerk assumption you have just finished making.

* * * *

Attainability. Access. Contact. Young Cubans in the city say how frustrated they are, how they want to travel. I meet someone who works in one of Cuba's three television stations, who tells me she's been applying for an overseas scholarship for seven years, that she feels so cut off from what's really happening in her profession. "We have one camera at the station, Cati," she says, "the others are broken and there are no parts." And where would she be able to study, if she was granted a scholarship? Her intelligent face makes a wry grin. "Nicaragua," she answers.

She turns, frowning, and looks out her front door into the street, rocking on her chair. We are drinking tiny deadly cafecitas, liquid caffeine, and she throws hers back in one sip. "Nicaragua," she repeats to herself. "You know, there are more doctors here per head of population than anywhere else in the world," she says, "and they don't have any medicine to treat people with. " She rocks harder and gives a short explosive laugh. "The three things wrong with Cuba," she says, counting them off on her long well-manicured fingers . "The blockade, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Fidel's age. "

* * * *

"Hey, where you from, beautiful?" calls a stallholder at the food market. Everybody seems to have the same fruit and vegetables for sale at much the same prices, just like home. He stretches his hand out for a dollar and gives me twenty three worn Cuban pesos in return. The dollar is folded up and goes into the breast pocket of his shirt. "Australia? It's nice there, right?" He gives me a perfect white smile, proud of his English. "And what do you think of here? My country, it's the BEST, no?" His shirt is so thin it's beyond worn - it's almost transparent across his broad polished shoulders. I buy papaya, yucca and bananas. I want to buy rice but there are no plastic bags and I have only brought one shopping bag for everything.

"Come back any time!" he calls as I go. "I'm always here!" The smile blooms again - a lifetime diet without candy and Coke and excellent free dental care, I think automatically as I drift away. And I wonder if I'm being overly romantic if I say I have heard lots of people of many nationalities express patriotic pride but never with this joyful laid-back undefensiveness, this simple invitation. He wasn't boasting. He just loved it.

Cubans are well-educated, so they know a lot about Latin America and the rest of the Caribbean. Even when they complain about Cuba, when they say they wish it was more "open", they don't fail to recognise that unlike a vast majority of the world's citizens, they are fed, educated, clothed and given medical attention, despite medicines themselves being in short supply. They don't all claim their country is the best, but they all concede that in comparison with a great many of their neighbours, they're doing OK. Queuing for food is not the same as stepping on a landmine or being herded into refugee camps.

"20 million of the world's children sleep on the street every night:" proclaims one billboard, "not one of them is Cuban. " It takes a poor country to recognise these benefits as privileges and something worth fighting for. A large number of El Salvadorans and Nicaraguans, for example, see Cuba as a paradise. North Americans, on the other hand, have neglected to notice that their own free or affordable access to health, transport, education and legal rights have been slowly eroded away. The country that denounces Cuba as a violator of human rights, though, while it can't offer its citizens free emergency medical care or legal representation, can of course offer seventeen varieties of mail-order nut-flavoured bird suet.

* * * *

Out in the campo [countyside-ed.], we are invariably met with courtesy and hospitality. I wonder, if I met a Cuban on a bike in the Australian countryside who spoke (at best) garbled English, whether I would necessarily hail them and offer them scarce food and homemade beer and floorspace to sleep for the night? Would I call the neighbours in, offer to kill one of the chickens, wave away their offers of help preparing a meal? Would I extend my hand on a dark road to a stranger, wish them a Happy New Year and invite them to my house, just over there, on the hill, should they want to visit later?

"To international solidarity," say the Cubans when they toast glasses with you, "to amistad [friendship-ed.] and understanding". And they mean it. They look at you clearly in the eyes, and they want to know if you mean it too.

Down goes the rum, on goes the Cuban music. God, they can dance, the Cubans. They dance and play the maracas in two different counter-rhythms and when they catch each others' eye they break out in big infectious grins of joy. Jazz afficionados sit and nod meaningfully when musicians hit their stride; the Cubans jump up.

I was traveling with a Scottish friend and her husband who after many rums on Christmas Eve at a party in Havana put on a fast and furious Highland Fling, and danced it. The Cubans sat and watched in astonishment all through the first verse, blinking at this unfamiliar tempo and melody line.

At the second chorus they got up out of their chairs and hit the floor with triumphant yells. They did the Highland Fling, and they did it better than my Scottish friend. They did it so it spoke sex. There's no other way to describe it. In a moment the tiny apartment was pounding with yips and cheers and spinning arms and hair. Midnight occurred as we came together to do that strange dance in that strange place, laughing and grabbing arms, and I hope again I am not romanticising things by assuring you that in that moment, nobody there needed a battery-powered Santa or fake snow.

On Christmas morning, Vilma in the next apartment has an asthma attack. Her husband helps her out of her room, stiff with terror, and runs off to find a taxi to take her to hospital. I help her down the slippery, worn marble stairs to the street outside, listening helplessly to the tiny desperate sounds of distress she makes as she tries to breathe.

She could die from this, from something that requires only a plastic inhaler and a measure of Ventalin. Merry Christmas, love from the Blockade. Her eyes stare straight ahead, focusing on getting to the door.

"God, Vilma," I say as I guide her down, one step at a time, "if there's anything I can do, anything, if you need dollars to pay or if I can help you find medicine, just tell me. " I feel near to tears with horror and frustration. "I'll do anything," I say again, and Vilma's arm tightens on mine and her trembling hand goes to her mouth, she kisses her fingertips and opens her hand towards me. Her breath gasps in and out with agonising abruptness, not nearly enough breath to provide oxygen, not nearly enough air to survive in this decrepit, airless hallway.

* * * *

Almost three weeks later, I am back in Havana airport. Having been in a country not set up for constant consumption and constant recreational shopping opportunities, the departure area with its dollar shops looks and smells like an exclusive boutique. Sumptuous rows of compact discs line glass display cases and jewelry, magazines, alcohol and the ubiquitous cigars stack the shelves of the shops there. You can buy last-minute Che T-shirts (the revolution you can wear!) and postcards of Valadero and mountains of carved black wooden figures. A promotional video showing stretches of white beach and bikini-clad Afro-Caribbean girls cavorting on it plays on large televisions overhead. Everywhere accepts MasterCard. [U.S. law prohibits the use of U.S. credit cards in Cuba-ed.]

It has to be said, this is the Cuba the Cuban government would like you to experience. It wants you to peel off a few notes of currency from a country it resents and resists - several hundred, in fact. It wants you to spend that currency in carefully government- controlled places where the coffee will cost $4. 00 instead of 10 centavos and you'll never hear a Cuban make a toast to international understanding.

The Cubans you'll hear there, in the hotels and guided tour groups and as you get off the air-conditioned bus, will be begging you for soap and pens and quarters. They will look wretched and guilt-inducing. They will not look like they believe in revolution, or like they think their country is the best. But perhaps in a way they will actually comfort the tourists who choose to travel like this, perhaps they are even part of what they have come to see.

But the Cubans want "openness", and an increasing number of foreign visitors want it too, not the strange sanitised holiday destination touted as a safe quarantine for visitors here, and the Cubans are young and vibrant and forceful and Fidel Castro is an old man.

"Goodbye to the hopes of the imperialists," he once wrote; "what's happened has happened. Those who have fallen have fallen, those who have died have died. And still, the Revolution continues onward. "

It continues against all odds, and that infuriates some and inspires in others a kind of vengeful glee. It continues onward, and I get on the plane and find myself pleading a kind of prayer: let it survive the lifting of the quarantine, for that is certain to happen, let it watch and learn and not be too hasty in throwing things away. Let it believe in revolution, not a Che Guevara T-shirt.

Yes, I bought music while I was there, and I took photos. But what rises to my mind every day now, when I consider the things which will soon crystallise into memories, are images of people's hands.

Hands taking mine to show me how to stumble through the salsa, hands hard as leather from working on the finca [i.e., from farming-ed.] offering me bananas and a handshake, hands reaching eagerly for dollars, the amazing and uplifting sight of hands of all skin colours, from pitch black to brown to white, resting on a long lunch counter as their owners waited for the single item on the menu - fried eggs in a bread roll - before moving politely on for the next people waiting in line to sit, Vilma's hand thanking me as she laboured for breath.

But most of all, I think of the hands of those two little girls, telling the story of what might happen underneath the moon - the mischievous graceful tilt of their hands as they crooked them into the air. My emotions are torn when I think of them, dancing with such bravado and flirtatious pleasure under the stairs. Up stretch their hands, and I want it all to be possible - not just what they are reaching for, but what they are already holding.

_____________

Cate Kennedy is a prize-winning Australian fiction writer.

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