When viewed from the cardboard shacks and open sewers of Port-auprince, Haiti's capital, Fidel Castro's socialist system looks like Utopia: education, shoes, food, housing and healthcare for all.
If your vantage point is Miami Beach, on the other side of Cuba, then the island seems like one large jail, where freedom of expression and the right to travel are denied and queues turn everyday life into a re-enactment of the stations of the cross. "Jesus only had to do it once," a Cuban woman reminded me, as we waited an hour in stifling heat for a couple of bread rolls.
If you're sitting in a crumbling apartment block in Old Havana, you can switch on a radio and hear pizza ads from Miami promising "extra pepper at no extra cost" and 10-minute delivery. In Havana it can take an hour before you reluctantly receive the gooey sludge-bomb which passes for pizza.
While outsiders praise or bury Cuba on issues of human rights or healthcare, the locals are driven to despair by bad pizza and the promise of Miami's dream world. That you could die slowly on the pavement outside a Miami hospital if you have no health insurance, or live out your days in a cardboard box in Haiti is dismissed as anti-yankee propaganda.
Since the revolution in 1959, Cubans pay a maximum house rent of 10 per cent of their monthly salary, enjoy primary healthcare from a doctor who lives on the same street, pay three pence a day for a canteen meal, get a subsidised pair of trousers each year and other benefits arising from the equal distribution of scarcity. The Cubans have also won a place on the global stage. Castro's government sends relief teams to disaster-struck Mexico and doctors to South Africa.
Cuba's social contract demands obedience from its citizens to a strict set of rules. There will be no public displays of criticism, no open expression of gayness, no attempt to organise anyone outside the home, especially at work.
The transgression of these rules makes for a lonely existence, for imprisonment or exile. If you tell this to a union organiser in Colombia or a miner in Bolivian they would laugh out loud. Is that all?
In their countries dissidence is sanctioned with summary execution. These countries are recognised as democratic, enjoy cordial international relations, access to credit and export opportunities. Cuba faces blockade, invasion and ostracism, while the US government bullies sympathetic countries which trade with the struggling island.
It is common to hear critics of the regime describe the US embargo as Castro's greatest ally, both as a distraction to account for Cuba's economic hardship and a pretext to demand ever greater sacrifice and unquestioned loyalty.
The success of the Cuban revolution sparked socialist experiments throughout the region, which met with US marines, CIA-sponsored coups and genocide. Bolivia's nationalist general, Juan Jose Torres, backed popular worker assemblies in the 1960s until he was deposed and assassinated by Gen Hugo Banzer, who ruled through terror from 1971 to 1978. Banzer now rules Bolivia once more, this time dressed up as a free-market democrat, winning with just 10 per cent of voter preferences in last year's elections. As country after country was threatened by mass social movement, dissidents were wiped out in Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile.
But Cubans don't live in Bolivia or Colombia, their relatives are in Miami or Madrid, their life expectancy is 75 and they have little interest in the problems faced by Haiti or Peru. They complain of frustrated ambitions, of having no choice in the clothes they wear, the places they go, the jobs they do. Their wages are worthless, as the economy is linked to the dollar and an "adjustment" package bites every bit as hard as IMF-brokered deals in the region, albeit with two differences - the US trade embargo, and a social welfare net, diminishing all the time yet still substantial enough to offset growing unrest.
The education system teaches everyone to read but there is no information available, bar the awful daily newspaper Granma, wafer-thin but somehow always having enough space to reproduce Fidel's lengthy speeches.
Cuba's achievements are subjected to scorn, but education is a declining tradition elsewhere in the region, where the average length of schooling is just five years. Castro once said that "ideas must be able to defend themselves"; that "a people sufficiently educated is capable of making a correct judgment without fear of coming into contact with ideas that could confound them".
The Cuban people have the confidence and the education to judge the merits and faults of their system, but Castro fears change and lacks the confidence to open up an internal dialogue. The longer he holds off broad dialogue with the nation the more dramatic the final unravelling of this socialist experiment will be.
Until then people in the jungles of south-east Mexico or the landless camps in Brazil will dream of Castro's workers' paradise while Cubans will dream of pizza in Miami as they hustle dollars from revolutionary tourists, who dream of a more just society, before returning to safe European homes.