COLUMN ONE : Cuba Faces a New Life on Its Own : Unable to count on its onetime Communist allies, the nation uses resolve to cope with economic turmoil. After 32 years, Fidel Castro’s grip on power still appears strong.

The salty sea air disintegrates the muffler on your 1950 Buick 8 and there are no spare parts in the stores, but never mind. Hammer out a new muffler from a soda can.

Todo se resuelve. Anything can be resolved.

You’ve run out of shampoo and can’t find a bottle anywhere, so make your own. The recipe: water, laundry soap, perfume, lime and a touch of egg to soften the brew.

Todo se resuelve.

You’re a construction worker on a government high-rise and the elevator you just installed doesn’t work. To finish the job, you cannibalize parts from another building site.

Se resuelve.

In Cuba, “resolve” combines the will to push on and the ingenuity to fix seemingly impossible problems. It is one of the words most often heard today, as economic turmoil in the Soviet Union and the switch to capitalism in the old socialist bloc have thrown Cuba into its hardest times since the start of the U.S. economic blockade 30 years ago.

Perhaps more than any other Latin American nation, Cuba is taped, tied and sewn together. Now, more than ever, Cubans find they must live by their wits. The government has responded to the economic emergency with a severe austerity program. In the countryside, oxen and plows are taking the place of fuel-starved tractors. Half of Havana’s taxi fleet has been pulled from the streets, to be replaced by half a million Chinese bicycles.

“The revolution is like a bicycle,” President Fidel Castro told guests at a recent reception. “It has brakes but there is no reverse.”

Castro, who ousted dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, has ruled Cuba half his life. He is 64 now, and his famous beard is slate gray. Although his face has loosened with age, he still stands erect in olive-green fatigues, and his charisma is undimmed. So is his conviction that socialism is the most equitable and humane system for his island nation.

The man one Western official calls “the most recognizable human being on the face of the Earth” has no plans to step down or submit his leadership to a test of elections. “Socialism or Death” and “I Will Be Fidel (loyal),” the official billboards read.

The taut faces of men and women waiting in lines for crowded buses and rationed food bear a different message--discontent.

But so far, Cubans seem disinclined to imitate Eastern Europe’s overthrow of socialism. No angry demonstrations fill the plazas, no anti-Castro graffiti appear on the walls, no evident spark is about to ignite an uprising.

Supporters of Castro’s one-party socialist system insist that most Cubans want to improve the government, not overthrow it. They want to hold on to the revolutionary social benefits, so advanced that Switzerland, for example, no longer considers Cuba eligible for its Third World foreign aid.

“If we had capitalism, it would be the capitalism of Haiti, El Salvador and Honduras, not the capitalism of the United States and France,” said Dr. Jaime Bernaza, a kidney specialist and 25-year member of the Cuban Communist Party. “We do not have what a consumer society has, but we have the necessities.”

Critics of the government--intimidated by a system that swiftly identifies its opponents, denies them opportunities and often jails them--complain in private about shortages and official corruption. They want political choices and freedom to travel. Some want a free-market economy.

“There are three kinds of people in Cuba,” said a Havana University student. “Children who are happy with the little they have, youths who dream of leaving and adults who dream of capitalism.”

Earthquake of ‘89’

Cubans call it “the earthquake of 1989,” the year the Berlin Wall crumbled, the Soviet economy tottered away from central planning and the dictatorships of Eastern Europe fell one by one.

Castro kicked up a storm of protest, accusing his former comrades of betraying their Marxist-Leninist principles to become “apprentices of capitalism.” Cuba would stand as one of the last defenders of orthodoxy, he declared.

Although the political temblor failed to shake Cuba in 1989, the economic aftershocks were unavoidable.

Last year, the unification of Germany deprived Cuba of its second-largest trading partner; East Germany had been a reliable buyer of Cuban citrus and sugar and a source of cheap canned food and automotive parts. Moscow pulled out one-third of its 3,000 civilian technicians, a corps of skilled labor that Cuba depended on to build nuclear power plants and sugar refineries.

Moscow also reduced deliveries of cheap petroleum from 13 million tons in 1989 to 10 million tons in 1990, causing an energy crisis and depriving Havana of the small surplus it used to re-export to the West for hard currency.

This year, the Soviets abolished the system of barter and preferential prices for their socialist allies. Moscow, which accounts for 70% of Cuba’s foreign commerce, is shifting all trade calculations to “convertible currency”--from rubles to dollars.

A Cuban-Soviet agreement signed in December leaves the exact terms of trade to be negotiated under a transition to market prices. But the bottom line is that Cuba will pay more for Soviet oil and get less for its sugar. It will lose another 1,000 Soviet technicians this year and assume 10% of the shipping costs for all Soviet trade, an expense formerly borne entirely by Moscow.

Cubans say the adjustment is more difficult in some ways than the early days of the U.S. trade embargo.

“When the U.S. blockade was imposed, we had the option of transferring our commerce, spare parts and financial flows to the Soviet Union,” explained a party official. “Now we have to do that all over again--reorient our economy--but it is more difficult because the blockade is still in effect.”

Although the long-term cost of adjustment remains unclear, Castro is not waiting to find out. Last August, he launched an emergency program of energy cutbacks and food production dubbed the “special period in time of peace.”

First drawn up in the 1980s to cope with a feared U.S. invasion, the wartime plan required all households and businesses to cut electricity consumption by 10%, closed some factories and reduced gasoline allotments for public and private transportation by up to two-thirds.

The belt tightened in October. Communist leaders announced that half the party’s bureaucracy was being laid off, making unemployment an official reality for the first time since the revolution.

The rationing list grew. In addition to beans, rice and a handful of foods already rationed for years, the government added canned meat and fish, pork, chicken, beer, rum, soap, matches, fabrics and toiletries. Last week, restrictions were announced on purchasing medicine.

Officials stopped the sale of household electrical appliances such as television sets. Hundreds of black marketeers, dollar changers, prostitutes and colistas (people who sell places in food lines) were arrested in an anti-corruption drive.

To compensate for lost food imports from Eastern Europe, Castro is personally supervising a plan to expand agricultural output with volunteer labor, improved irrigation and hog-breeding techniques and limited material incentives such as bonuses for the most productive farmers.

Cuba has had some success in finding new trading partners in the West and developing medical technology and tourism, the sugar-based economy’s most promising new sources of foreign exchange. Brazil has become the first client for Cuba’s meningitis vaccine, and China is buying more Cuban sugar and investing in a bicycle factory. By allowing majority foreign ownership in tourist hotels, the government has attracted more than $800 million in investment, mainly from Spain.

But such payoffs are slow, and Castro expects the special period to last a long time. In a speech to the Federation of Cuban Women last year, Castro signaled the depth of the problem by warning that women might have to “wear the same clothes for five years” because of a fabric shortage.

Lines and Frustration

Rationing under the special period is a source of rising despair and isolated disorders in Cuba. Lines are longer and tempers shorter.

One Saturday, the Communist Party newspaper Granma provoked an uproar at a market in western Havana by announcing that eggs were going on the ration list the following Monday. Each customer would be limited to four per week “to achieve a more just and equitable distribution.” The reason: Cuba had cut back on imported Canadian chicken feed to save dollars; Cuban chickens were eating less and laying fewer eggs.

The scarcity of eggs, a substitute for Cuba’s dwindling meat supplies, caught officials by surprise. The day before, Eugenio Balari, director of the Internal Demand Institute, had boasted that Cuba was fourth in the world in 1990 in per-capita egg consumption.

The run on eggs at the western market started at 6 a.m. When the doors opened at 8, more than 500 people were in line. By 11 a.m. the eggs were gone and half the people were still waiting. Some tried to storm the manager’s office. Scuffles broke out. A pregnant woman fainted.

“The people in the lines speak badly of the revolution,” said the shaken market manager. “We haven’t had vinegar for five months; no noodles for three months. The sugar is the worst--damp and dirty. The beans are hard and bitter. People ask, ‘How long can this go on?’ It won’t be long before they do something.”

But by the time he spoke, the line outside the store was calm. Anger dissipated into acid jokes.

“What is a sardine?” asks one Cuban.

“A small, white fish that travels in schools,” comes the reply.

“No. It’s a whale after 30 years of revolution and a special period.”

Over those 30 years, Cubans have learned to live with shortages. Castro’s revolution has guaranteed them cheap housing and child care, free education and health services. The trade-off is his insistence that Cuba never become a consumer society like its nemesis to the north.

As a result, Cubans have perfected their “resolve,” learning to make do within the system or, in some cases, outside it.

The special period has intensified this spirit of improvisation.

Bernaza, the kidney specialist, is committed to socialism and working within the system. He makes daily forays to the supermarket, vegetable market and bakery, spending more time in line than he used to in search of milk, yogurt, plantains, potatoes, vegetables and meat.

Bernaza, 56, is a model Communist. As a young doctor, he went to the mountains to treat poor peasants and joined the party. He studied medicine in East Germany and worked for more than a decade at a provincial hospital before moving to Havana. In 1988, he did “revolutionary duty”--a year of practice in Zimbabwe at the Cuban government’s expense.

He works longer hours than his contemporaries in capitalist countries and lives more modestly. He and his wife, three children in their 20s and a daughter-in-law live in a three-bedroom home. But the payoffs, in Cuban terms, are great.

His insider status gave him priority to buy a late-model Soviet car from the state. In 1995, after 20 years of low payments, he will own his house. Cubans are not allowed to have dollars, except for officially sanctioned travel. On trips to medical conferences, Bernaza acquired a television set, stereo system and videocassette recorder.

“I have been to Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Peru. I always want to come home to Cuba. I wouldn’t change this country for anything. Why do I need a swimming pool so others below me can do without? Why do I need to go out and compete so my house is bigger?” he asked.

What bothers other Cubans are shortages of basic goods, from books to clothes. Blanca Perez, a 49-year-old mother of two university-age sons, shops mostly in the black market. A professional with friends in the Communist Party, she asked that her real name not be used.

“Through your friends, you hear about things,” Perez said. “They say, ‘Hey, they’re selling meat today.’ I never use the ration card. I do things on my own. You have to hunt for bread, but the sister of my son’s girlfriend knows a baker who sells bread, so we don’t have to stand in line.”

As Perez talks in the kitchen of her middle-class home and fries slices of ham that a friend procured from a military store, another friend arrives with asthma medicine she found for Perez in a provincial city. A third friend drops by on her way to buy bootleg cheese from a neighbor, who makes it from milk he buys illegally from a farmer in the countryside.

When the guests leave, Perez leads a visitor to a back bedroom, closes the door and curtains and pulls out a box of lacy women’s underwear.

“I make them,” she whispered. “I sell them.”

On the black market, Perez buys material stolen from industrial warehouses; she copies designs from American magazines and sews on a borrowed machine. A son sells the underwear at the university and friends sell them at work.

“They are cracking down on contraband,” she said. “But here people don’t work in their jobs. They live doing biznes .”

The Opposition

How much serious opposition to Castro’s hold on power simmers in the black-market economy and the food lines is hard to judge. Jokes about Castro abound, but few Cubans who seriously criticize the president will utter his name aloud. They stroke an imaginary beard with their thumb and forefinger and talk about “him.”

The difficulty for anyone with a contrary thought is knowing where the authorities will draw the line between grumbling and outright dissent.

“It’s an imaginary line you dare not cross, but it’s always shifting,” said Moises Rodriguez, 30, a mechanic imprisoned in 1980 for trying to flee to Florida on a raft. Now he is a member of Cuba’s human rights movement, determined to make the system more just. For most Cubans, he said, “the line has been moving slowly forward.”

“Ten years ago, it was almost impossible to speak up in a bread queue and complain about the lack of bread or its poor quality,” he explained. “Today it’s normal, although you cannot (openly) blame the bread shortage on the socialist system or on Fidel.”

But the government’s broader tolerance of criticism is coupled with a crackdown that has forced its most outspoken opponents into jail or silence. Among those imprisoned are human rights advocate Elizardo Sanchez and 30 people who testified before a U.N. human rights committee that visited Cuba.

Meanwhile, the government plans to lower from 45 to 18 the minimum age for obtaining a passport and leaving Cuba, apparently hoping to widen the escape valve that has always channeled anti-Castro dissent to Miami. And it is giving more latitude to young artists and singers to stray from the party line.

At dusk, Havana is seductively tranquil. Its sultry skyline of colonial buildings fades with the sunlight as lovers gather at the seawall along Havana Bay. You can hear the splash of waves against the rocky shoreline and the dull hum of slow traffic--1950s Fords, Soviet Ladas and motorcycles with sidecars. In Coppelia Park, teen-agers wait in hourlong lines for two flavors of ice cream.

Against this timeless landscape, seemingly defiant of world change, it is hard to imagine what event could set off a major protest against Cuban socialism or its founding father.

But, in muffled voices, Cubans debate the future of Castro’s revolution. To many, Fidel is still a popular figure who transcends the system he created--a living legend. Some of his critics concede that he would be hard to beat in an open election but feel his generation should step aside.

“Fidel has fulfilled his function,” said Renato, a Havana University biology major. “He is old and wedded to an idea that doesn’t work. He is a great personality, intelligent, capable, but he doesn’t have the right to run the country forever. The problem is, who can replace him?”

Castro supporters insist that socialism is the answer and must outlive him. They note that Cubans don’t have to worry about the traditional Third World ills of hunger, beggars and barefoot children. Through collective construction brigades, they have found a cheap way to turn slums into rows of six-story apartment blocks. The streets are safe at night and virtually free of drugs.

But 32 years into the revolution, even Cuban officials acknowledge they have some basic problems to fix. One party official said in frustration: “We have resolved the problems of education, health and child care, all that the rest of Latin America has not been able to do. So why does daily life still have to be such an inferno?”

So far, the country is coping with the shortages imposed by changes abroad. Whether it continues to do so will depend, in part, on the Soviet Union’s ability to keep supplying Cuba. The future of the revolution, some Cubans say, depends just as much on Castro’s government.

“If we have developed the country in five years and satisfied the material needs of the population, then socialism is guaranteed,” said Mercedes Arce, head of Havana University’s Center for the Study of Political Alternatives. “If we fail, I am not so sure.”