After a couple more daiquiris, Van Gruisen and I decide that if we're not going to dance—and we are white men who really can't dance—we'd like to try another brand of music, so we head for La Zorra y el Cuervo, a basement jazz club near the Hotel Nacional. It reminds me of the Manhattan joints of the '60s and '70s, with people in black-rimmed glasses bopping their heads to post-bebop free jazz with a Latin tinge. The band leader is Yasek Manzano, a trumpet virtuoso and one of Cuba's many gifted young musicians. He provides a cool and cerebral end to our hectic night in a vivid, thrilling city.

I am here because I have fallen in love with Cuba and, more specifically, with Havana. Head over heels, if I am honest. This is my second visit in three months, and halfway through this daiquiri-infused night, I am already planning my third. But lest you regard me as a sentimental fool, let me couch my amour in a little pragmatism. Unlike Jack Nicholson, who arrived here in 1998 and proclaimed Fidel "a genius," I see a place that possesses a magnificent legacy architecturally, culturally, and spiritually but that has been suppressed and held back by fifty years of Socialist torpor. Far from being a genius, Fidel was a political anachronism for decades before he resigned. Holding on to l'illusion lyrique (the early, idealistic phase of the revolution) far beyond its sell-by date, he has dragged his talented, free-spirited people down with him. The Habaneros earn an average of sixteen dollars a month (plus meager state-financed rations), and although most have enjoyed a good education and many are skilled, there is little work for them outside tourism and the few service industries.

This has turned many of them into full-time hustlers—as we discovered on our city tour. Following a visit to the Partagás cigar factory, our guide led us to a cloakroom and presented boxes of Cohiba Siglo VIs for thirty-three dollars. It was an offer difficult to refuse, but we later found similar cigars for a quarter the price. Cubans don't call this stealing. They use the word arreglar, which, literally translated, means to rearrange, or búsqueda, which means a search.

That said, isolation has bequeathed Cuba a fascinating otherworldliness. Instead of corporate advertisements smeared across the landscape, billboards display revolutionary slogans—VENCEREMOS ("We Will Win") and PATRIA O MUERTE ("Country or Death")—and giant portraits of Che as sainted revolutionary and Reagan, Clinton, the Bushes, et al as counterrevolutionary Satans. Tramps, beggars, and hookers are everywhere and are accepted as part of society. Forty-nine years (and counting) of stultifying socialism have created spectacular indifference to the concept of service—so much so that you can almost see the steam rising from tourists waiting for a plate of food or a drink.

Ironic, too, is the fact that the revolution's economic failures have saved Habana Vieja ("Old Havana") from the wrecking ball. In the last years of his rule, President Fulgencio Batista was planning to replace the old buildings with casinos, high-rise hotels, and nightclubs. Now, international organizations such as UNESCO and the World Monuments Fund are working with the Cuban government to save this magnificent neighborhood from the ravages of poverty and the Caribbean climate. Some 150 of Old Havana's buildings date to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, about 200 to the eighteenth, and more than 450 to the nineteenth, making Havana the best-preserved colonial city in the hemisphere. But an estimated nine buildings a week are collapsing citywide. A walk around Old Havana provides evidence enough of its fragile beauty: Starting in the oldest square, the Plaza de Armas, within half an hour you will have taken in the Governor's Palace, Havana's finest Baroque building; the open-air Doric temple El Templete, where the city was founded in 1519; and the magnificent Cathedral of San Cristóbal, described by the novelist Alejo Carpentier as "music turned to stone."