The Last Bastion of Communism? : DRIVING THROUGH CUBA Rare Encounters in the Land of Sugar Cane and Revolution<i> by Carlo Gebler (Simon & Schuster: $19.95; 293 pp.) </i>

There is an old joke--which, for a time, had the rare distinction of appealing both to official Washington and to official Moscow--that claimed there were only two superpowers left in the world: Israel and Cuba. If Israel’s reputation has been dented a bit since the onset of the Intifada, Cuba’s has all but crumbled away entirely. Perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union’s external empire has seen to that.

Today, instead of prizing Cuba as the East bloc’s Sparta, the Soviets are murmuring about cutting back their aid, while in Havana Moscow News is now banned. In a recent speech, Fidel Castro noted the repudiation of Marxism in Eastern Europe and grimly affirmed that it might be Cuba’s destiny to be the last standard bearer of authentic communism in the world. This is a far cry from the days when the island not only presented itself but was widely perceived abroad as the standard bearer of revolution throughout the Third World.

Carlo Gebler’s engaging book, “Driving Through Cuba,” was written before either the full extent of the changes in the Communist world or their impact in Cuba were apparent to anyone. From his account, however, the handwriting was already on the wall.

The Cuba that Gebler describes is not the country of unflinching revolutionaries so rhapsodically described by foreign visitors in the ‘60s and ‘70s, so much as a sullen, miserable place full of police spies and resignation. “I am not a Communist, but I say nothing,” a man tells him in the Sierra Maestra, the first stronghold of Castro’s July 26 movement. It is a sentiment that Gebler heard often during his stay.

Even those defenders of the regime whom he met seem oddly defensive, and the most eloquent partisans of the regime turn out to be a group of foreign sympathizers who live in Havana. More royalist than the king (that is, more revolutionary than the Cuban people), they are not, at least as Gebler portrays them, very much to be trusted.

At the beginning of his book, Gebler is at pains to point out that, as he puts it perhaps too self-deprecatingly, “My perspective on what I saw was very limited. I was only one observer and I took my own cultural baggage with me. I saw the country from behind a car windscreen. Traveling with my family, I was a tourist of the revolution.”

This last reference is, presumably, to the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s great essay exposing the gullibility of radical visitors to revolutionary societies and the skewed tales they bring home with them. From the Western Europeans and North Americans who visited Bolshevik Russia after 1917 to the so-called “Sandalistas” in Nicaragua before Violeta Chamorro’s electoral victory, people have flocked to the places where they thought they would see the future in action.

Gebler’s reference is, of course, an ironic one. Although he too became fascinated with Cuba when he was a university student in Britain in the early ‘70s, his enthusiasm seems to have waned long before he stepped off the plane from Prague onto the runway at Havana’s Jose Marti International airport. And the looks he casts as he drives across Cuba during his three-month stay are less the admiring glances of a supporter than the cold eye of someone who expected to have a thin time before he came and is only being confirmed in that view now that he has finally arrived. Indeed, a defender of the Castro regime might credibly argue that by not including a single portrait of an eloquent revolutionary, Gebler stacked the deck unfairly.

In fact, of course, books such as “Driving Through Cuba” are always partial and always unfair because, fundamentally, they are more literary than journalistic in their ambitions. Gebler is a well-known novelist in the United Kingdom, and his book belongs to the genre of political travel writing, a form that has attracted the best British writers at least since the 1920s and ‘30s, when Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Norman Douglas and Robert Byron first pioneered it, combining personal reflections, history, and reportage in a novel mix that was at once very light and very free. Viewed in this context, Gebler’s prejudices are an integral part of his enterprise and do nothing to discredit his account.

Gebler is particularly good at evoking the atmosphere of scarcity and low-grade paranoia that seems to pervade life in Cuba today. Rarely have black marketeers been written about with such panache. On a deeper level, his book excels in elaborating the ways in which Cuban society remains bound, culturally and imaginatively, to the United States, even after what has, after all, been decades of bitter confrontation--one of the longest running episodes of the Cold War. Gebler does stumble a bit in the historical sections of the book (he appears to have misunderstood, for example, just what the Platt Amendment actually was), but these are small faults in a book that is both vivid and richly instructive.