But if you want to see Havana alive and vibrant, not simply as an architectural showpiece, stroll along the Paseo de Martí on a Sunday afternoon. This marvelous boulevard, running for a mile from the Parque Central to the Malecón seawall, is a raised walkway of inlaid marble lined with laurel trees. It buzzes on a Sunday with locals strutting their stuff, dancing to boom boxes, playing dominoes, engaging in heated debate. In its people, in the sounds and smells of Havana, you sense the intrigue, the mystery, the untrammeled exoticism of a city that has moved to its own beat for centuries. Occasionally the stench of raw sewage wafts by, reminding you that this really is a dilapidated Third World city, not a film set. The decrepitude of the buildings also provides vivid reminders, as does the corpse of a dog long dead at the junction with the Malecón.

My most profound contact with the emotional landscape of Cuba came on a clandestine visit to the National School of Arts. This is a place that sums up the contradictions—the high aspirations, low achievements, and broken dreams—of Fidel's Communist utopia. It was here, on the site of the former Havana Country Club, that Fidel and Che chose to locate the epicenter of artistic and cultural excellence. In this cradle of Batista's decadence—163 acres of groomed lawns and lakes—the revolutionaries created a new arts academy, home to five disciplines: drama, music, plastic arts, modern dance, and ballet. Because of restrictions on imported cement and steel, it was constructed mainly of locally produced bricks and terra-cotta.

By the mid-'60s, the money started running out. The half-finished school fell into disrepair, becoming a weedy refuge for goats and chickens.

Now, decades later, with Cuba gradually embracing architectural rehabilitation, the project is being revived. Getting to see this splendid place proves difficult, but we manage to smuggle ourselves in with a photography student who has a persuasive way with the guards.

Once inside, the soaring ambition and the ultimate neglect of the site hits me all at once, and I find myself close to tears. This is not something I experience frequently, much less confess to. It had been raining, so the terra-cotta tiles glisten in the late-afternoon sunlight. Two students are practicing trumpet in one corner, and across the rolling lawns, a pair of dazzling dancers rehearse under the hawklike gaze of an instructor. More than a thousand students are currently enrolled, many of them foreign.

Van Gruisen arranges to meet with Lázaro Zamora Vargas, director of the school. Zamora says that the Cuban government is not looking for donations and that it has earmarked $24 million for the project, but we later learn that there is already considerable funding from outside. Like so many things in Cuba, the truth about the rehabilitation of the School of Arts is elusive.

To get a measure of what is happening elsewhere on the island, Van Gruisen and I hire a driver/guide named Oscar Otero. A former English teacher, Otero abandoned that profession out of financial desperation. I found people like him throughout Cuba—a hydraulics engineer working as a waiter, another teacher waiting tables in Havana, a doctor working as a gillie—and was constantly reminded of the folly of having a good education system when the economy cannot employ the graduates.