As we started speaking about my visit, Father José María removed the telephone cord from the receiver in one deft, well-practiced move. I knew that move well from my youth in Communist Poland, when it was wise to assume not only that every telephone line was bugged but that each telephone could serve as a listening device. We were on the outskirts of one of Cuba's provincial cities, in a tiny reception room with decrepit furniture and peeling paint. Even though Fr. José had a rotund face that radiated good humor, there was an otherworldliness in his manner, like that of the Solidarity priests I knew in the old days in Poland. The Cuban secret service's favorite extermination method is simply running someone over with a police car, and Fr. José has had a couple of brushes with death recently.

But having faced martyrdom, he had clearly passed the threshold of fear. "What's this?" I pointed to an unframed painting with animals in jolly colors and a bold red hammer and sickle in the center. The Communist symbol was upside down, with a broken white line in the middle of the sickle leading up to a hut perched on top of the handle of the hammer. "It's an allegory of George Orwell's Animal Farm by our local artist," he explained. "The road markings on the sickle are meant to say that the road of the revolution leads to the pigsty."

Fr. José then explained how he would distribute the 500 doses of antibiotics donated by the Solidarity trade union that I had brought to prisoners, among them opposition activists who had received long sentences following the crackdown on dissent two years ago. (Medicines are crucial because one of the milder persecutions the regime metes out is spraying the cell walls with foul water, which gives inmates skin diseases in a matter of days.) Assistance like this, in addition to alleviating suffering, also gives the parish more clout, making it an enclave of civil society outside the regime's control. The regime knows this, of course, which is why all of Fr. Jose's requests for a permit to build a community center have been refused. Instead, the Communist government gives support to the local version of voodoo, which has fewer subversive foreign links.

In the Communist Bastion

I had arrived in Cuba as a tourist, bearing my Polish passport. My luggage was searched minutely. My heart raced when they discovered the box of antibiotics but, curiously, they didn't even ask me for whom such a large quantity of medicine was intended. Instead, the young customs officer focused on the copy of Playboy I had put next to the drugs. The centerfold perked him up and he called for his superior. Should we confiscate? I understood him asking. The older man let it pass; I was grateful to be thought of as just another degenerate Westerner.

My destination was one of the resorts on Cuba's southern coast, within driving distance of Guantánamo. Like other havens for foreigners, the resort was surrounded by a fence with guards on all sides, natives admitted as staff only. The clientele were mainly elderly Canadians and Europeans of the sort who enjoy organized gymnastics on the beach. There was something East German about the ambience: regimented entertainment and the identity checks at the gate. To my surprise there was Internet access for the foreigners. It was viable but slow, reputedly on account of scrupulous key logging by the Cuban secret service. I eavesdropped as one of the tourist groups staying at the hotel received a pep talk from an official minder, who berated them about the 636 attempts on the life of Fidel Castro that the CIA has supposedly organized. (Surely, they cannot be that incompetent?)

For a former inmate of the camp of progress such as myself, visiting Cuba was peculiar. I felt 20 years younger at the sight of a grubby collective farm named after Lenin. Groups of Communist Youth in red ties such as I had myself resisted wearing at school lined the streets. Communist slogans by the roadside were familiar too--ambitious in rhetoric, pathetic as advertising. Above all, acres and acres of land with no master and therefore littered and overgrown. "Commies love concrete," P. J. O'Rourke observed after a visit to Warsaw, and nothing has changed. And it's not the concrete you see in Italy, the kind that contains so much marble dust it looks like reconstituted stone. Commies like their concrete poured slothfully, creating a patina so dull it positively soaks up light. I had been brought up in Poland on a Communist housing estate, which was bad enough, but here, in the tropics, houses with flat roofs, their concrete walls overgrown with mold, look even more preposterous. Inside there are unplastered walls, weak bulbs hanging on their own wires, doors as rough as a barn's. TV sets and ghetto-blasters stand in rooms that are otherwise medieval in their primitiveness. One gasps to think how hot it must be under those flat roofs at the height of summer without air conditioning.

You can tell you are in a Third World country when you see crowds of young men standing around in village squares with nothing to do. Another indicator is the slums. Whereas at the time of the Batista regime 200,000 people lived in shacks--as I read in a propaganda text put out by the Cuban government--today most of the population of around 11 million seems to be living in shantytowns. Some of them have paved gutters and the odd electric lamppost, but they are still recognizable as slums: open sewage, roofs made with bits of asbestos, old tires for fences, chickens. Most of the productive capacity of the country seems to be idle. The west of the island is an expanse of brown: A recent drought, along with slash-and-burn fires, seems to have finished off what Communist mismanagement had left. In the greener east, I scanned the countryside, flying low for several minutes in a commercial jet: Roughly half the farm buildings seemed abandoned, just skeletons overgrown with weeds.

"What would happen if socialism were introduced in the Sahara desert?" we used to joke in the Soviet days. "There would be shortages of sand." Cuba, once the sugar superpower, is now an importer of sugar. Castro has acknowledged the problem, only to dismiss it: Sugar production is more trouble than it's worth, he argued in a recent speech. (He had once envisioned a crop of 10 million tons per annum.) Paradoxically, Castro may be right about the costs of sugar production. Even if your labor is cheap or free (concentration camps were first invented by Spaniards in Cuba, and labor camps still operate), it can't be very competitive to produce anything with U.S. technology of the 1930s or roughly equivalent Soviet technology of the 1960s. The country long ago defaulted on its long-term sovereign debt, as well as most of its commercial debt, and has ceased to report its economic statistics. Cuba has been lauded recently in The Atlantic Monthly for going back to natural farming, with oxen replacing tractors--which must seem really cool if you are an environmental activist residing in New York or Stockholm. It is also pleasant to ride on Cuba's country lanes with practically no traffic--unless you have to wait in the heat for a truck with an open hold, which is how most country people seem to commute. Critics of consumerism would also find Cuba an inspiration; apart from bits of uniforms and some old cans there is literally nothing to buy in the country's non-dollar-convertible stores.

Echoes of Greatness

What's odd to a first-time visitor is that this grinding poverty coexists with apparent good cheer. I had always associated Communism in its last gasp with houses unheated in midwinter, rude waiters, and Slavic gloom alleviated by heroic doses of vodka. Here, people are friendly, the girls are pretty, and a breeze from the ocean air tempers the sun. And the music! Sitting on the terrace of Hotel Casa Granda in Santiago--the place frequented by Mr. Wormold in Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana--you can hear superb live music from all points of the compass.

Havana is even more impressive. If, like me, you loathe modern architecture, here's a 19th-century city Le Corbusier and his imitators didn't get a chance to destroy. Naturally, it's also a slum--peeling façades, crumbling plaster, smelly doorways and staircases--but it's a slum whose previous beauty and prosperity can still be imagined. Old Havana, with its 17th-century forts, solid townhouses, and spacious squares, resembles Málaga or Genoa. You have to go there, in short, to see why Cuba inspires such passion and to feel the rage at the loss of what might have been.

Although it is an extraordinary thing for a Pole to admit, it began to seem to me that Cuba has paid too high a price for independence. If, 120 years ago, Cubans had done nothing, they would today be the richest place in the Caribbean and possibly all of Latin America. As a Spanish colony they would also be enjoying at least an associate membership in the European Union, with all its privileges. They would have avoided a century of war, revolution, and unnecessary military spending. Think of a place nearby that chose to accommodate itself with its mother country: Bermuda is clean, self-governing, self-confident, with a per capita income of $36,000.

There are, however, signs that the Cuban regime may be fraying. The first decision of Uruguay's new leftist president was reestablishing diplomatic relations with Cuba. One would normally expect Castro to attend the inauguration of such a friendly figure, but he didn't go--so perhaps his health, or his grip on power, is more precarious than we know. On the other hand, someone who competes with the Queen of England for the title of the longest-serving head of state clearly knows a thing or two about the art of survival. His potential rivals, like the veteran general Arnaldo Ochoa, faced the firing squad before they themselves knew that they could threaten him. The ogre continues to anticipate events: One EU ambassador related to me a heated exchange between the Castro brothers at dinner at the Russian ambassador's residence. Raúl argued for dumping the command economy and going the Chinese way toward capitalism. Fidel reportedly responded that, in Cuban conditions, that would lead them to death on a lamppost in a matter of months.

A New Policy 

Castro obviously still manages to manipulate nationalism to his advantage; this emotional current, in Cuba as in many other places, clearly trumps the desire for democracy or even a better life. Nationalism, or perhaps even more narrowly a refusal to kneel before the United States, seems to be Castro's only ideological prop. Contrary to his official propaganda, every time he had an opportunity to normalize relations with the U.S. he did something to scuttle it: American hostility and the embargo probably serve his interests just fine. I posed the question of the embargo to Fr. José María. "We appreciate the intention," he replied. "But if it hasn't worked for 40 years, it means it doesn't work and it's made the lives of two generations of Cubans a misery." Other dissidents make a different calculation, but the view of someone who lives on the receiving end of both the Castro regime and U.S. policy carries weight.

The standoff between the U.S. and Cuba seems ultimately not just political, but also psychological. Cubans seem to think that they get noticed by big brother only when they stick him in the eye. Americans seem determined to put the little one in his place. How else do you explain the silliness of barring your citizens from visiting a country you are not actually at war with, or of imposing fines for importing Cuban cigars? We didn't cease to enjoy caviar even at the height of the Gulag. The law should not be an ass, and the U.S. can afford to be pragmatic in its policy toward a country that no longer poses a threat. As Mark Falcoff points out in his brilliant Cuba: The Morning After, to keep the embargo while granting Cubans privileges in immigrating to the U.S. is politically self-contradictory: It gives the regime an excuse for failure while simultaneously helping it get rid of its internal opposition.

Everybody else's policy toward Cuba has less to do with the island and everything to do with the U.S. It is therefore no surprise that Spain's new leftist government sent as its ambassador to Cuba a former politburo member of the Spanish Communist party, and that under Spain's pressure many EU countries have ended their "cocktail wars" with Cuba and no longer invite dissidents to their national-day parties. Given Cuba's abysmal credit rating, the $1 billion that France, Germany, and Spain lent it last year is a straightforward subsidy of the regime.

But if neither Old Europe's appeasement nor the U.S. embargo is likely to succeed in changing the regime, perhaps we need a coordinated transatlantic approach that would build on methods that have worked in the past. Human contact across the Iron Curtain was crucial in maintaining the conviction on the other side that democracy and free markets are superior to Communism: Fulbright scholarships that were granted to dissidents and nomenklatura alike helped to create alternative elites and weaned Communists off their zeal. In James Cason, the Bush administration has an imaginative leader of the U.S. interests section on the island, but one suspects that the message he is so energetically conveying would be more credible to some Cubans if it weren't coming directly from the U.S. government.

Regimes change only when their own cadres no longer care to fight for them, and we cannot convince the Cuban nomenklatura to change if their only alternative is hara-kiri. The EU needs to get tougher, but the U.S. also needs to shift--to start wielding the embargo not as a matter of law, but as a political instrument. Its sudden lifting, for example, perhaps at the first signs of a post-Castro regime's introduction of market reforms, would shake Cuba's political system to its foundations.

Unless something gives soon, there's a third force that might complicate our calculations. China has made significant investments in Cuba's nickel industry, and diplomats in Havana report frequent Chinese military delegations in civilian disguise. Cuba has always needed a patron, and who better than a semi-Communist dictatorship on a long-term collision course with the U.S.? The relationship makes sense for China. One day she may be in a position to make the U.S. a reasonable offer: You support a troublesome island off our coast, and we support a troublesome island off your coast; let's both call it quits. The U.S. needs to act before it comes to that.

Radek Sikorski is a resident fellow and executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative at AEI.