The Party Line Is Party : Lifestyle: Cuban communism is using music and discos to woo post-revolution youth from cities to work in the rural areas.

Twenty-five miles south of Havana, the flat monotony of pig farms is shattered by the voice of Phil Collins blaring “Another Day in Paradise” from a rock video.

The sound draws a visitor down a dirt road to a riotously colorful discotheque, the Stinging Mosquito Cabaret, where couples dance under flashing lights. It might as well be the theme song of this rural hangout, known as Paradise Camp.

Buxom women in bikinis wink from wall paintings. A bathroom mural shows two pairs of legs behind a curtain and a motto for Cuba’s lean times: “Save water. Shower with your partner.” Out back is a “love hut” with six pillows on the dirt floor.

A bit racy for rigidly socialist Cuba?

Perhaps.

But the young men and women here have mud on their boots. The Club Med ambience is a come-on to lure them from Havana, to toil dawn to dusk in monthly shifts growing potatoes, yucca and bananas in the nearby fields for Fidel Castro’s revolution.

The old Communist methods of scaring up “volunteer” field labor--coercion, peer pressure, ideological harangues--are out. Paradise Camp, opened late last year, is an inspired attempt by an aging party leadership to woo the post-revolutionary generation--the 60% of Cuba’s people born since Castro came to power in 1959--by showing that revolutionary orthodoxy doesn’t have to be so dull.

The Communism-can-be-hip campaign is vital to Castro’s bid to overcome a severe economic crisis by making his Caribbean island self-sufficient in food. The 64-year-old Cuban leader evidently believes it’s working. Among the love notes scrawled on the camp’s walls is Fidel’s own signature, along with his photograph and the date of his approving visit.

“We are profoundly revolutionary, but we are profoundly fun-loving, too, and that’s no contradiction,” says Jose Angel Rodriguez, a 26-year-old party official in a Che Guevara T-shirt who manages the camp with one eye on production quotas and the other on its social calendar. “We are here because we want to work, but if the people go back to Havana and say they had a good time, it cannot hurt.”

Cubans aged 30 and younger are a tough audience for traditional ideological appeals to revolutionary sacrifice. Thanks to Castro’s early achievement of universal education and free health care, they grew up better off than most Latin Americans but compared themselves to richer North Americans and Europeans.

Despite a U.S. embargo in force since 1961, Cubans can watch made-in-America movies like “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” on Cuban television. They listen to AM radio stations from Florida, 90 miles away, with Top 40 music and ads for designer clothes.

“Cubans have the attitudes of the First World,” says one European diplomat. “They aspire to the life of young Californians, without appreciating that they don’t get it for free.”

One party official, Diosdado Quintana, put it this way: “Those who were born after the revolution never knew Cuba as it was before. They take the conquests for granted. That is our most serious challenge.”

Cubans in their teens and 20s still join the Union of Communist Youth, which claims 600,000 members, including 60% of the University of Havana student body. But a recent survey in Matanzas Province showed that few younger people wanted to join the organization, the first step toward Communist Party membership and success in just about any career.

Signs of disillusionment abound among Havana’s young--and random conversations make it clear that the heroic image of Castro as the guerrilla leader who became the gray-bearded president-for-life is fading as most of the socialist world embraces free-market capitalism.

A 30-year-old supermarket manager, weary after a day of rationing food for irate customers, sat in his tiny apartment one Saturday night watching a beaming, elegantly dressed couple on TV.

“You can’t find a smile like that here,” he observed bitterly. “You can’t find a chandelier like that. You can’t find a jacket like that.”

One balladeer, 27-year-old Carlos Varela, who generally supports the revolution, has become a folk hero among the young with his songs of lament about the generation gap. A riot erupted among teen-age fans two years ago when a Havana theater manager tried to halt one of his concerts on the grounds that the music exceeded government limits on criticism.

After a period of official ostracism, most of Varela’s songs are now played on Radio Havana. But one of his most famous, “William Tell,” is still banned. It is a haunting allegory:

William Tell didn’t understand his son

Who one day got tired of having the apple on his head. . . .

It was a shock when the young one said:

Now for Father, the apple on his head.

William Tell, your son has grown up

He wants to shoot the arrow . . . and with your own crossbow.

Only in the last five years have party elders begun to try to understand the young through systematic surveys. They have confirmed a high level of frustration with consumer shortages, a rigid bureaucracy, a dogmatic school system and restrictions on personal freedom that make the generation raised by the revolution the source of its strongest criticism.

“The great slogans--anti-imperialism, ‘socialism or death,’ what have you--do not educate a society,” said Juan Luis Martin, a sociologist who has supervised some of the Cuban Academy of Science’s 17 surveys of young people. “This generation requires a different focus, different methods.”

Party leaders have responded to such criticism with a revolutionary idea: If it can’t deliver material goods young people crave, socialism can at least let them have fun.

Last December Beatles fans were allowed to hold a huge outdoor rock festival marking the 10th anniversary of the death of John Lennon, whose music was banned here in the 1960s. Varela chimed in with a passionate rendition of “Power to the People” in English.

In a switch from its usual coercive methods, the party later that month staged an outdoor concert by top performers to draw the young to the 32nd anniversary of Castro’s takeover. More than 100,000 joined a parade along the Havana sea wall on foot, roller skates and bicycles.

Young Cubans say the state has been more tolerant lately of their clothing, their hair styles and, to some extent, their criticism. In a move both to satisfy the yearnings of young revolutionaries and to get rid of young misfits, the government is preparing to lower from 45 to 18 the minimum age for obtaining a passport. It has already begun letting young people travel to the United States on a case-by-case basis.

Not long after the party’s big youth concert, Havana University students lined up outside a campus grill for empanadas. The lunch-hour crowd was the pride of the revolution: young men and women of different family backgrounds pursuing an opportunity that many of their parents never had--an advanced degree and a professional career.

What kind of society would they work for?

Judith Perez, an earnest 18-year-old economics major, said she had no quarrel with socialism, no qualms about a future “administering the goods of the state.” She reflected on the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe over the previous year and the upcoming Fourth Party Congress, at which Cuban Communists will debate how to keep their party’s monopoly on power by making it more democratic from within.

“European communism was a poor copy of the Soviet model,” she said. “The people were not given the opportunity to express themselves. We borrowed from the Soviet model, too, but we didn’t import it wholesale; we made our own revolution. It has its problems, but the people can participate and suggest reforms.”

Castro, she added, “is a sage, one of the most important figures of the 20th Century.”

Seated on benches across the quad, three male students with long hair weren’t buying any of that. When one mentioned the Castro propaganda slogan “socialism or death,” another quipped: “That’s a redundancy. Socialism is death.”

The three--who introduced themselves as Heriberto, Renato and Andres--said they had avoided the party concert because attendance would have been taken as a gesture of support for the government. Renato said he had stayed home that night and watched television.

“That’s even worse,” Heriberto chided. “TV is so controlled, it messes up your mind.”

Heriberto, a computer major, said he was expelled from high school six years ago for wearing a logo of the heavy-metal group AC/DC on his jacket. Now he wears his red hair in a ponytail and seems relaxed enough to speak his mind openly within earshot of dozens of other students--but not enough to give his full name.

Andres was studying physics in East Germany when the Berlin Wall came down in late 1989. First he cheered the end of communism, but then he became alarmed when East Germans embraced capitalism so suddenly, moving “from one extreme to the other.”

There must be some middle ground, he said, between Castro’s brand of orthodox socialism and a market economy. “Pure capitalism would not work here,” he said. “There would be too much unemployment. We’d become a poor satellite of the developed countries.”

When Renato’s turn to speak came, the biology student answered with carefully chosen words: “Fidel has fulfilled his function. 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 party’s most eloquent answer to such criticism is Roberto Robaina, the dynamic 34-year-old Communist Youth president, the youngest member of the Politburo. He often precedes Castro on the speakers’ platform at rallies, acting as a forward-looking counterpoint to Castro’s defense of the past three decades.

“Who says ideology has to be boring?” Robaina asks crowds. In a recent speech, he urged young Cubans to “remove the fences that limit our thinking.”

Besides sponsoring rock concerts, Robaina is defying an acute energy shortage by lobbying for 15 new discotheques in Havana.

Says Manuel Aguilera, another Communist Youth official: “If they like rock, we’ll give them rock. In return, we’re asking them to help us in the countryside. We’re putting rock music on at night in the camps.”

At Paradise Camp, the strategy seems to be working. Camp leaders say farm output exceeds the quotas: According to the production chart, the 60 men and 40 women volunteers had planted 163,996 banana trees in their first week of work, surpassing their goal of 126,481 despite boasts by some workers that they stay up partying as late as 3 a.m.

According to the gossip mill, at least 10 couples had paired off that same week and one had been “married” in a symbolic ceremony.

Lazaro Herrera, a 19-year-old Cuban army soldier doing a month’s duty in the camp, said he is “inspired” by the surroundings to work hard and play hard.

“I love it here,” he said. “The women are great dancers.”