by Linda Robinson; Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld

        Along Cuba's coastal Via Blanca last week, thousands of police and Interior Ministry troops fanned out to search vehicles and warn would-be rafters not to leave. They efficiently shut down the monthlong exodus that had filled the Florida Strait with 25,000 Cubans and had threatened to become an unending flotilla of homemade craft bound for U.S. shores. 

        Meanwhile, in Miramar, a middle-class Havana neighborhood, a literature professor erupts in frustration even before her visitor sits down in her living room: "I can't work, there is no electricity. We're cooking with kerosene or charcoal, if we can find it." A neighbor rises at 2 a.m. on weekends to go to the countryside to buy food illegally from farmers. 

        The clampdown on the beaches, executed in compliance with a migration accord signed with the United States on September 9, demonstrated that the state apparatus built by Fidel Castro is very much intact and functioning. The growing daily frustrations of rank-and-file consumers demonstrate that, in the 36th year of the Cuban Revolution, not much else works. 

        Survival strategy. Fidel Castro, who defied predictions that he would fall along with the Berlin Wall, now faces a fast deepening economic and social malaise that threatens his communist vision. In a rare interview, Castro admitted to U.S. News  that the problems are real and outlined a survival strategy for Cuba that resembles reforms adopted by China and Vietnam. Gradual economic reform would be tolerated, but not broad political liberalization [interview, Page 56]. "We are prepared to take measures" to improve the economy, said Castro, but he added: "We do not believe we should do anything that leads to chaos or anarchy, because no country can be governed if it is in chaos." 

        "This country can only be ruled by the revolution," insisted Castro. That is unwelcome news for the Clinton administration, which anchors its Cuba policy in democratization of the island nation. Looming large in Castro's mind is the Soviet Union, which disintegrated after attempting simultaneous political and economic reform. So he refuses to throw over socialism for democracy and, instead, has opted for creating his own brand of market socialism. 

        But the mass exodus of refugees bound for the United States and an unprecedented antigovernment riot on August 5 laid bare the fraying popularity of his home-grown revolution. "This government does not have the support of the majority of the population," says a European diplomat whose government is one of Cuba's staunchest allies. Castro is trapped between the Soviet specter and the rising desperation of his people. 

        The demise of the Soviet Union delivered a crushing blow to Cuba's economy, which relied on a $6 billion annual subsidy from Moscow to keep afloat. The Cuban economy has shrunk by over 40 percent since 1989, agriculture is struggling, and the country's much vaunted social services are decaying. For now, Castro's authority remains unchallenged. But his failure to quickly address Cubans' economic complaints is spilling over into a loss of political support. 

        Rosa Gomez's husband had just bicycled off to work on August 5 when a rampaging mob ran down her street in the crumbling Central Havana district, shouting "Down with Fidel." Soon after, a phone call from a hospital informed her that her husband had been shot in the groin by a policeman's stray bullet (during his interview with U.S. News, Castro said the riot was put down "without using weapons"). Nonetheless, Rosa sympathizes with the rioters: "People here have reached their limit. We're all in a state of desperation." 

        For the past three years, Rosa's family has lived on the brink of subsistence, aided by her brother's dollars sent from Miami -- which now are blocked by stricter sanctions imposed by the Clinton administration on August 20. 

        Dalia Estevez, who says her daily three-hour wait for a bus from Alamar to the hospital where she works has brought her to a state of nervous exhaustion, has no idea who should replace Castro, but "everyone thinks este senor should leave." 

        Perhaps hardest hit by Cuba's decline are the country's youth. Well over half of Cuba's population is younger than the revolution. They grew up in a state that guaranteed each of them free education and health care, food and a job. Carlos Lage, one of Castro's top advisers, acknowledges that "the generations born after the revolution pose one of the greatest challenges we have. The revolution has to offer them solutions so they will believe in it." 

        "I've lost my youth in Cuba," says 38-year-old Juan, who awaited nightfall before departing from the seaside village of Cojimar in one of the last boats allowed to leave. "My life is nothing if I stay here, so who cares if I die at sea?" 

        That sentiment is shared by many of the refugees who made it as far as the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay during the recent exodus -- even though under the September 9 agreement they must return before applying to emigrate to the United States. "I'd rather they kill me here than return to Cuba," says Juan Carlos Abar, 35, who was beaten when he tried to leave Cuba during the 1980 Mariel boatlift. 

        Older Cubans are still grateful for the improvements that Castro's revolution has brought, including 94 percent literacy, 76-year life expectancy and infant mortality of only 11 per 1,000 births. Even 40-year-old Angel, a party official in Havana Province, recalls his father pointing out to him the narrow pre- revolutionary Central Highway and telling him how the president who built it cut 1 meter from each lane and pocketed the funds. A couple of miles away stretches the eight-lane highway built by Castro in 1975. 

        Castro's tentative reforms are most evident outside Havana. In the lush countryside outside San Jose de las Lajas, Andres Machoqui is working hard to prove that new regulations giving more autonomy for farmers will pay off. Machoqui heads the Angel Varela cooperative, which was formed last October. The 39-year- old agricultural engineer and his co-workers now control operations and pay in-kind bonuses to their most productive members. Over 6 million acres of farmland were converted from rigid state control to cooperative farming in the past year, Cuba's boldest reform to date. Machoqui describes the results on his 948 acres: savings from cutting the work force from 500 to 140 laborers and a one-third increase in their vegetable harvest. "Before, we felt no loss or gain if we spent 1,000 pesos or 100 pesos," Machoqui says. 

        Residents of San Jose de las Lajas, a town of 35,000, are just as enthusiastic about the reforms. Since mid-August, farmers have been allowed to bring their produce to town on weekends and sell directly to the consumers, in a pilot farmers' market that Castro adviser Lage told U.S. News will soon be introduced throughout the country. Pointing to a passing woman carrying a huge squash in both arms, Julio Mendez, 70, said: "The government is coming up with solutions. Now, with these markets, we don't have to go out scrounging for food on the black market." 

        For years, Castro has blown hot and cold on free farmers' markets. He allowed them to open in the early 1980s but shut them when he felt farmers and middlemen were reaping unseemly profits. So an important symbolic barrier will be breached if the markets are reopened and Fidel doesn't change his mind again if they succeed. "The main impediment to these reforms seems to be Fidel," says one U.S. official in Washington, "because they undercut his vision of the revolution." 

        Government officials are increasingly relying on foreign investment to kick-start the economy. Gross revenues from tourism are expected to grow from $700 million last year to $900 million this year, topping sugar sales. But Cuba netted just $200 million in the sun-and-sand business in 1993. Spain has been the leading investor, primarily in tourism, but Mexico has surged ahead with major investments in the decrepit telephone system, the Cienfuegos oil refinery, and cement, glass and textile factories. Cuba, with French and Canadian help, struck oil in Cardenas Bay this summer. 

        Slashed subsidies. There are now 150 joint ventures with foreigners, and price hikes and subsidy cuts are whittling down a government deficit of over 25 percent of gross domestic product in 1992. The government is introducing a system of taxation -- there were no taxes in Cuba until now -- and increasing prices for electricity, water and other basic necessities. Finance Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez estimates that subsidies to state companies have been slashed by one third, and the system of unlimited-length unemployment pay is being scaled down. Workers in steel, port and fishing industries now receive productivity bonuses, and Cubans are permitted to hold U.S. dollars, which give them access to hard-to-get consumer items. 

        Yet despite pockets of optimism in the countryside, there has been a reported 30 percent decline in food production and another disastrous harvest of sugar, still Cuba's main export crop. Finance Minister Rodriguez holds out hope that increased earnings from tourism and other new investments will produce "zero growth, or maybe even a little increase" this year. But Pedro Monreal, an economist with the party-affiliated Center for Studies of the Americas, predicts that the economy will shrink a further 5 percent this year. 

        What are needed, says Monreal, are far-reaching reforms to decentralize and privatize the economy. "These economic changes will necessarily bring political change, and the government must be prepared for this," he adds. But such bold reforms risk the upheaval that Castro seeks above all to avoid. 

        Cuba lacks even the most fundamental building blocks of a civil society independent of Castro, the government or the Communist Party. It has no Vaclev Havel or Lech Walesa, no independent trade union or strong Catholic Church, crucial ingredients for Eastern Europe's transition to democracy. Aside from a handful of tiny dissident groups that have been severely repressed and a church that only recently called for a national dialogue, all organizations are party or state creations. In Matanzas, Juan Gonzalez uses sign language to impart a message of dissent, although he is alone with a friend. Pulling his eyes and clamping his wrist to indicate police vigilance and arrest, he says: "Here no one can go against the government." 

        To combat rampant fatalism and crank up the tired revolutionary machinery, provincial party leaders have been sacked this summer and replaced with younger up-and-comers. Party organizations are mounting a campaign to rally citizens around the revolution: Cane cutters are urged to be more disciplined, block committees are called to clean up their neighborhoods, and workers are exhorted to greater efficiency. One more superhuman effort is being asked of Cubans, but doubt creeps even into the latest political slogan: Si se puede (Yes it's possible). 

        Even foreign diplomats from countries friendly to Cuba doubt that Castro is willing to move far or fast enough to stave off crisis. A European diplomat says: "The Cubans think they've done a lot. But from the outside, it looks like very little." 

        Ambassador Carlos Tello of Mexico, which has been a longtime supporter of Fidel Castro, asks "Who can better judge the proper pace of reform than the Cubans themselves?" But he adds his nudge for a political opening as well: "I think it is healthy to have political parties that ventilate and discuss ideas." 

        Rickety pillar. The options now are stark, say many Cuban analysts: Either Castro succeeds in his gradualist economic reform or unrest boiling up from below will strip the revolution of its strongest pillar, the semblance of mass popular support. Cuba's military, the Revolutionary Armed Forces, will not preside over an outright police state, says a military defector who requests anonymity. 

        For now, exhausted Cubans, deprived at least temporarily of the escape route to the United States, are simmering in anger and frustration. If Castro appears to be Cuba's only option, his only option is to produce results -- quickly. Otherwise, the specter of a repeat of August 5 looms. As one loyal Cuban official says, "If blood runs in the streets, it's all over."