The post-Fidel era began in Cuba even before Castro stepped down. While traveling there remains a challenge for Americans, Cuba has been condoning some private enterprise (gingerly) and building tourism (boldly). John Graham samples the travails and treasures of a country at the tipping point

It is Wednesday night at Havana's Floridita bar and the place is already mobbed with tourists who seem perfectly happy to eat the mediocre food and pay six dollars (twice the going rate) for a watery daiquiri while listening to a pretty average salsa band working its way through "Guantanamera" for the zillionth time with a fixed grin on its collective face. At first glance, this could be a touristy tavern anywhere in the world—a long worn-oak bar, rickety tables—but it's Havana and the Floridita is no ordinary tourist trap. This is where Hemingway famously drank up to twelve Papa Dobles (giant daiquiris) a day while amusing visiting Hollywood hotshots like Spencer Tracy and Ava Gardner; and in case you doubt that, there are photos of him all over and a life-size bronze statue leaning on the bar at his favorite spot in the corner.

Because Havana has been caught in a time warp for half a century, it is not difficult to imagine Hemingway here, standing precisely where José Villa Soberón's bronze stands, before shambling off down the Calle Obispo toward his room at the Ambos Mundos hotel. The same 1950s cars are wheezing along the streets, the same buildings stand, although in vastly increased states of decrepitude, and this bar is still serving Papa Dobles well into the tropical night. Old Havana is a living, breathing movie set, a soundstage for a Spanish-language film noir.

This particular evening's cast of characters is an eclectic group of drinkers. Leonardo Padura Fuentes, author of popular detective novels, is engaged in animated conversation with the English academic Stephen Wilkinson, an expert on contemporary Cuban culture. Then there is Eliades Ochoa, the cowboy hat-wearing singer-guitarist of the Buena Vista Social Club, with his spiritual successors, Israel Rojas and Yoel Martínez, leaders of Buena Fé, a young music group; and Nick Van Gruisen, out from Britain as a supporter of the World Monuments Fund, talking to David Soul, ex-Hutch of Starsky and Hutch and more recently the star of the West End musical Jerry Springer: The Opera.

The conversation swoops and falls as the Cristal beers and daiquiris flow. Soul is planning a one-man show on Hemingway's last days in Cuba. Padura's most recent novel, Adiós, Hemingway, concerns a murder on the grounds of Finca Vigía, the writer's home. Van Gruisen, meanwhile, is lamenting his failed attempts to meet up with Eusebio Leal, the official behind the architectural restoration of Old Havana. You have it all here—art, music, literature, architecture . . . and rum. Welcome to Havana.

The topic of conversation that surfaces with predictable frequency is, of course, Fidel Castro, who had recently stepped down after nearly fifty years of rule. The Comandante en Jefe has been one of modern politics' greatest survivors: He was thirty-two when he took power and is now eighty-one, and during that time, ten American presidents have come and nine have gone, some of them instrumental in ordering a number of the six-hundred-odd assassination attempts that Fabian Escalante, his former security chief, claims were made against him. So one would imagine that Fidel's announcement would reverberate through the Cuban capital. But it doesn't. There are no big demonstrations, no public displays, no sign of Fidel's internal enemies raising their heads above the parapets to denounce him.