Albania: A Miserable, Poor Last Bastion of Communism : East Bloc: The country is opening up. However, what travelers see in addition to clear rivers and snowcapped peaks is not exactly the sort of thing tourists dream of.

Two dogs run toward the setting sun, which is turning the Albanian mountains red.

Greek border guards whistle them back, but they carry on, fearless of the electrified barbed wire and heavily armed Albanian guards at the Kakawia crossing point in Albania’s south.

The dogs run unhindered into a country that for 45 years has lived in almost total isolation under its strict communist rule.

For the last few years, around 20,000 tourists annually have been allowed into Albania as it slowly opens up. U.S. citizens are still excluded.

However, what travelers see in addition to broad valleys, crystal-clear rivers and snowcapped mountains is not exactly the sort of thing tourists dream of.

Misery, bitter poverty, barefoot children in rags, dilapidated houses, farms sinking in mud, bleak housing developments for workers, men, women and children working in the fields, everywhere people sad-eyed and bowed by labor--these are the images that stay with anyone traveling through the last bastion of communism in the Balkans and Europe.

In the south, where many of the Greek minority live, and in the Adriatic port of Durres, you can still glimpse what it was like in prewar and pre-communist times.

Well-tended parks, palms, promenades, old patrician houses and hotels--though now crumbling--give a veneer of Mediterranean charm to the misery of the barracks-like workers’ homes.

Making contact with the people is extremely difficult. Anyone who does talk invariably expresses gratitude to the Communist Party, as did an elderly Greek woman who spoke on the beach at Durres:

“Thanks to (former strongman) Enver Hoxha and (his current successor) Ramiz Alia, I have a better life than ever before. What was I and what am I now?

“Forty years ago I was living with my family in a shack, with no clothes and nothing to eat. Now the party has given me an apartment with two rooms, a kitchen and a hallway.

“When I got married, they even gave me a stove. Once a week we can eat meat--a whole kilo (2.2 pounds)--and each day my family gets a liter (about 1 quart) of milk.

“We used to get poor maize flat bread, and now we get good-quality bread. In winter we even get wood and coal. Then there are the clothes: a coat, shoes, skirt, jacket--all with a change.”

With a look of pride, she shows her cheap, prewar-style clothing and her 1960s-style plastic handbag and shopping string-bag containing leeks and hard-looking bread.

“My children have learned to read and write,” she said. “My two sons are engineers, and my daughter is a nurse, like me. I already have 11 grandchildren.

“Soon we’re even getting a television set. I’ve never known a time as good as this. Ramiz is a good man.”

In Berat, the center of Albania’s textile industry, the people appear withdrawn. Their one pleasure, apparently, is the Sunday afternoon soccer match.

On the way back from the stadium, hundreds of men gather in the main town square in front of a sort of a wall newspaper with pictures of workers who have exceeded their quotas.

Occasionally one of the leather-like faces wears a proud smile, but the only really happy people appear to be the children, still unaware of their poverty and beyond feeling the cold.

Three little boys clamber onto a steamroller built in China in 1972 and pose for a photograph. They look hungrily at chocolate offered them--but then are shouted at angrily by passers-by.

Finally, they do not dare accept the chocolate from across the border in Greece. But a few steps farther on, in the narrow alleys of Berat’s center, children ask for chewing gum and ball-point pens.

Anyone coming to Albania is well advised to bring plenty of both, plus cigarette lighters, soap and plastic flowers--small gifts that seem to be the only passport to conversation.

No one is allowed to accept tips, which are considered charity that no one needs in the communist workers’ state. However, there are people who laugh at such rules and slogans.

They are aware of their poverty, oppose the blows of the sigurimi (the security police) and also the laws that send enemies of the state to labor camps or mines, to long jail terms or death in the electric chair.

One can become an enemy of this atheist state simply by making the sign of the cross. Churches are used as warehouses, and the crosses on graves have been systematically knocked away.

No Albanian would dare talk of this. One man already lining up at 3 in the morning in Tirana for milk and bread said behind his hand that the security police were everywhere.

He could not possibly answer all the questions, he said. On another occasion, a sad-eyed 17-year-old said, “Just tell me one thing you can be happy about in this country.”

But any foreigner who sees this country and thinks the conditions mean that there will soon be another Romania is mistaken. For a start, it is sparsely populated.

There are no telephones, and only 100 cars--all exclusively for the use of the party. To take a trip in a truck or on an oxcart, you need party permission. Informers are everywhere. Fear abounds.

The only hopes lies with Ramiz Alia, who heads the government, and those in the country who realize that without reforms, Albania will only sink into further helplessness.

But he also realizes that the safety valve can be opened only slowly, that there must be more consumer goods and above all more food in order to restore morale and sagging productivity.

The person opposing him is the powerful widow of Enver Hoxha, Nejmiye, who heads a wing of the party made up of former partisans who were in at the beginning of communism in Albania.

Take away her sting, say those who know Albania, and there is hope that the people someday will be able to move freely, have glass in their windows instead of plastic, and get their human dignity restored.