There is no sense of fin de si ècle as Castro leaves the scene, but Cuba's new leaders will have to respond to expectations of economic reform, writes Conor O'Cleryin Havana.
A pianist plays Gershwin in the elegant Cafe del Oriente in Old Havana, while waiters in dark suits move gravely among the pillars. At a table Ricardo Alarcón, in open-neck guayabera shirt and bearing an uncanny resemblance to the actor Jason Robards, reminisces about his role as leader of the student strike in 1958 that preceded the revolution, and about his subsequent career as Cuba's top diplomat to the United Nations.
A confidant of Fidel Castro and the second highest ranked communist official in the cabinet, he tells us that Castro is slowly recovering from intestinal surgery and is performing physical therapy daily. He may live for a long time yet.
A popular joke on the Caribbean island is that Fidel once declined a gift of a turtle that lives to more than 100 years, saying, "The problem with pets is that you grow attached to them and then they die on you".
But it is clear from the conversation around the table that El Commandante is not resuming command, however long he lives.
The transition to a new leadership has already taken place.
As the 69-year-old former diplomat appreciatively fingers a long cigar, passers-by in the Plaza de San Francisco de Asis peek through the window. Many cannot afford to enter. Havana is a bit like Moscow in the waning days of Soviet power, a capital city where socialism co-exists with a few expensive restaurants. Cuba is a country where there is no Coke or Pepsi, no McDonald's, no designer stores, and no traffic jams. Hitch-hikers line the suburban roads, a practice safe in Cuba because of the low crime rate and officially encouraged to make up for lack of public transport: several times I see police stop official cars to make sure they are giving people rides. A government advertisement on television shows a man ignoring a hitch-hiker as he drives to a medical clinic, only to find he had failed to pick up the doctor.
While shops are poorly stocked and many buildings are in a state of decay, there are signs of economic growth. On the streets, modern Peugeots, Toyotas and Ladas vie with the oversized American cars of the 1950s that rattle around in various states of decay. The best- preserved of the long-tailed Chevys and Buicks now operate as theme taxis for delighted tourists.
Despite Castro's worries about its destabilising effect, tourism is today the engine of Cuba's economic recovery. Two million foreigners come to Cuba every year, mostly from Canada and Europe, and spend the equivalent of €1.5 billion. The colonial mansions, churches and cobblestone plazas of Old Havana are being restored. With 30,000 working-class inhabitants, the narrow streets pulsate with live salsa music from corner bars. "As restoration proceeds, tourism increases and the money goes on more restoration," explains city planner Miguel Coyula, as we walk beneath the iron-girded balconies of Plaza de Armas, where Havana was founded in the 16th century.
Joint ventures with French and Spanish firms have produced hotels and restaurants of international standard - in price if not in cuisine. The rooftop bar in the Ambos Mundos Hotel, where Ernest Hemingway stayed, is as overpriced as any popular tourist hangout in Europe. Under the reforms, Cubans have been allowed to open private restaurants in their homes, which also cater to foreigners. Known as paladars, they are officially restricted to 12 chairs (widely ignored) and modest menus: serving lobster, for example, is not allowed. The best include La Esperanza, an elegant suburban villa with family pictures on the dining room wall, and La Ferminia, a courtyard cafe set among potted plants. Though taxed heavily, the paladar owners are among Havana's nouveau riche, as they charge hard currency.
Cuba operates a two-tier money system. Foreigners must exchange their money for convertible pesos known as divisas. Cubans can get divisas in several ways: from the tourist business, by operating paladars, or by converting dollars sent by relatives in the US. This has resulted in a parallel black economy and has created disparities that raise questions about the sustainability of the system. The emergence of private enterprise in the Soviet Union in the form of co- operatives legalised by Mikhail Gorbachev spawned a criminal mafia. This has not happened yet, and whatever happens Cuba is likely to steer clear of a Russian-style privatisation programme.
To curb the emergence of a new consumer-oriented elite, the distribution of imported goods in Cuba is restricted. A Cuban must get approval to buy a car or a computer. A university professor can import a laptop but cannot buy one privately on the island. Salary levels are a hot topic. A Cuban doctor's average monthly pay is about €40. "A doctor should get more per month than a good tip for a taxi driver," acknowledges Yilian Jiminez, director of Cuba's comprehensive health programme. "Little by little we are correcting this." Cuban leaders have been careful to show they share the privations of the masses. Ricardo Alarcón arrived at the Cafe del Oriente with no security guards in a boxy Russian-made Lada.
The punitive US embargo complicates things further. Cuba cannot buy any equipment abroad that has 10 per cent American-made components. Any ship docking in Cuba is banned from US ports for six months and has to pay a risk tax.
Cuban tourism groups abroad have been refused rooms in US hotels in Norway and Mexico. Banks in Switzerland and Britain have been warned against doing business with Cuba's finance ministry. US citizens can only visit Cuba under special licence and Cubans living in the US may visit relatives only once every three years. All Cubans want the latter restriction lifted. Ricardo Alarcón tells us how once when en route to the United Nations in New York he was lobbied by Cuban Americans - no friends of Castro's government - at Nassau airport to raise the issue of visiting rights. He spoke to a US diplomat in New York who was so nervous about talking to the enemy that he referred to a briefing book for all his responses - and was totally stumped, recalls Alarcón gleefully, "when I raised the question of the travel ban on behalf of Cuban Americans".
During the Special Period in the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed and its subsidies to Cuba ended, public transport came to a halt, all building stopped, and many people went hungry. Castro was forced to convert agricultural collectives into private farms and allow small businesses to start up. "This was the moment when the US embargo was tightened, when they thought to bring us to our knees," says Jiminez, a striking woman in her 40s with long black hair. The economic recovery has several elements besides tourism and services, she explains. Trade deals have been forged with India, China and Iran. Nickel mined in Cuba is fetching high world prices and the island has developed a world-class pharmaceutical industry. It has discovered enough oil to meet half its basic needs of eight million tons a year and the other half is provided by Venezuela at $25 a barrel, less than half the market price.
Through necessity Cuba leads the world in energy conservation. Some 30,000 young people were mobilised recently to distribute energy-saving bulbs to every house and destroy the old ones. "Consumption of electricity went way down," claims Jiminez in her Havana office. Also, every household was required to buy Chinese pressure cookers and Castro worked out a way for people to take hot showers more efficiently.
"Most importantly," remarks Jiminez, "health care was maintained at the same level during the Special Period." The Cuban system of health care, based on family doctors and preventive medicine, is unmatched in the developing world. A baby born in Cuba can expect to live to 77.6 years, a year longer than in the US. There is one family doctor and nurse to each 90 or so families. Every Cuban, healthy or otherwise, is given an annual check-up and all treatment is free. "The population is, by and large, well, and no other country does this," says Dr C William Keck, a visiting American dean of community health sciences and a director of the US non-profit organisation Medical Education Co-operation with Cuba. "The general level of health is higher than the US and the health statistics continue to improve." Free education has meant that Castro's generation can see their grandchildren qualifying as doctors and scientists. "My grandfather is a campesino (rural dweller), and he says if everyone becomes a university graduate there will be no more people where he lives," says Jiminez, laughing.
Cuba produces so many doctors that they have become an important national export and link with the developing world. There are 29,000 Cuban doctors, nurses and dentists working in 69 countries, and as far away as South Africa and Pakistan. In an act of solidarity with President Hugo Chávez, Cuba has sent 14,000 medical professionals to work in poor areas of Venezuela. The US response to Cuba's medical diplomacy has been to offer free passage to the US to any Cuban doctor who walks into a US embassy abroad. Few have accepted.
To make its international programme sustainable, Cuba established a Latin American School of Medical Sciences in 1998 in what was the naval academy, situated on a sandy Atlantic beach outside Havana. It is currently training, for free, 10,000 low-income students from 29 countries. Student Narsisco Ortiz's story is typical. He tells me how, as a child in the Dominican Republic, he suffered from asthma but there were no doctors to treat him and he became determined to work in health care. He grew up in New Jersey but could not afford medical school.
After six years training in Cuba he will return to the Dominican Republic as a community doctor.
Two years ago Chuck Feeney, founder of Atlantic Philanthropies, asked on a visit to Cuba why so few people knew about the achievements of Cuban physicians. When told a book might be written about it, he replied: "Nobody reads any more, make a movie!" The result is a moving 90-minute film called ¡Salud! (Health), which portrays the work of Cuban doctors in different countries, and which its producers, Acadamy Award nominee Connie Field, and Gail Reed, an American journalist based in Cuba, are hoping to distribute around the world this year.
Whatever is the fate of post-Castro Cuba, its people will certainly not give up free education and health care. But some change is inevitable, as became clear in a week-long visit with a small group from Atlantic Philanthropies. Asked about the development of Cuban-style democracy, Ricardo Alarcón remarks that "democracy was evolving before the revolution and will evolve after Fidel; it is not the work of one man". The new leadership clearly will have to respond to expectations of significant reform. They look to the Chinese model, where capitalist practices were introduced on the understanding that people did not challenge the political system. There is, however, no sense of fin de siècle as Castro fades from the scene. "We are not like eastern European countries; their revolutions came through tanks," explains Alarcón's aide, with a grin.
The key to prosperity is improved relations between Cuba and the United States. On the surface nothing has changed. Outside the American diplomatic mission on Havana's Malecon, US president George W Bush is portrayed on a billboard as a protector of Luis Posada Carriles, a former CIA agent implicated in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner in which 73 people perished, who is currently facing only minor immigration charges in the US. It is worded: "The Assassin - coming soon in a North American Court."
Cuban officials make a point of complaining to visitors about five Cuban agents; Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González and René González, who are serving long sentences in the US for spying for Cuba. Framed photographs of the "Five Heroes" hang in Havana's hotel lobbies. They were monitoring anti-Castro activists in Florida and informed Havana that a group was planning illegal flights over Havana to drop leaflets. Ricardo Alercón tipped off the Clinton administration during secret contacts. But he was betrayed. The FBI did nothing to stop the flights - two planes with four Cuban exiles aboard were subsequently shot down over Cuba - and instead the Cuban agents who provided the information were identified and arrested.
But tensions are starting to ease. Raúl Castro, Fidel's brother and head of the Cuban armed forces, has offered to have dialogue with the US since assuming command last August. A 10-strong bipartisan group from the US Congress visited Havana in December, raising hopes of détente. As chairman of the Foreign Relations Sub-committee on Western Hemisphere, Senator Chris Dodd is expected to introduce legislation that would ease the embargo, with reciprocal moves from Cuba such as the release of political prisoners. The secretary of the Cuban Communist Party for international affairs, Fernando Ramirez, tells us he believes there is a majority in both houses of the US Congress willing to lift the embargo, but in the short term he sees no significant movement. Rather he looks to a new alignment of the left in Latin America.
The problem is partly one of perceptions, underlined by another anecdote popular in Cuba. During Pope John Paul's visit in 1998 his cap blew into the sea. Fidel Castro walked on the water to fetch it. L'Osservatore Romano reported that the Pope had enabled a miracle to take place. Cuba's communist newspaper Granma hailed Fidel's "heroic act". The Miami Herald reported: "Castro can't even swim!"
Conor O'Clery's biography of Chuck Feeney will be published by PublicAffairs, New York, in the autumn.