The reason, says Wilkinson, is that the post-Fidel era has already begun. For the past few years, Cuba has been tiptoeing into its next phase, planning agricultural reforms, engaging in joint ventures, building tourism. It is extremely difficult to obtain hard facts since the governance is still in the hands of a tight inner circle, but according to Wilkinson, much of the farmland is being turned over to private use (if not outright ownership), and agricultural representatives from nineteen U.S. states have visited the island. There is a healthy flow of European Union delegations, and recently the British architectural firm Foster & Partners and the French construction firm Bouygues were reported to be proposing significant developments. There also appear to be Canadians everywhere, and there's a lot of talk about building golf courses to lure upscale tourists. A decade ago, tourism surpassed sugar as the top foreign-exchange earner. The number of Europeans and Canadians adds up to two million tourists a year. American visitation has dropped by as much as eighty percent in the past five years, to as few as 25,000 travelers, thanks to the hassle of (illegally) connecting through a neighboring country to bypass U.S. passport controls, and—a huge inconvenience—the fact that Cuba withdrew the U.S. dollar from circulation in 2004.

Fidel has become a spectral voice in the background, providing a kind of ideological comfort to older, more sentimental citizens if not to the seventy-five percent of Cubans born since 1959. Even his writings, firmly fixed in the zeitgeist of another era, and his so-called reflections, which appear in the propaganda rag Granma, tend to dwell on decades-old events. Some have suggested that his is a death-in-rehearsal, his appearances reduced to staged photo shoots with handpicked acolytes such as Hugo Chávez, and published interviews with the likes of Naomi Campbell.

We haven't exhausted the subject, but the conversation in the Floridita inevitably ends and we stumble out into the steamy night. Van Gruisen and I decide to jump in a cab and we head for one of Havana's two Casas de la Música, in the manicured suburb of Miramar.

There is nothing manicured about this Casa. It is heaving with Havana hookers, most hanging around the entrance, pawing and cajoling every Western male who arrives, hoping to be paid in forex for their services. The muscle-bound bouncers ask if we want girls, and before we can answer, two highly perfumed women are at our side. We politely demur and slip inside unscathed. The audience is split between locals and foreigners, and only half the foreign men have hookers with them. (It is a reasonably safe assumption to make about any smoldering young woman in the company of a gringo with a paunch and a silly smile.) The live bands start later; in the meantime, the crowd is dancing to Armando, a DJ who plays salsa, timba (a fast-paced contemporary version of salsa), and Latinized hip-hop. The locals dance like wired Twyla Tharps, while the tourists move like bank managers who've had too much to drink, which of course many of them probably are and have.