PAN AMERICAN GAMES : Bay of Pigs Was Merely a Warm-Up : Labor: This time, Cuban brigades struggle to ensure that the invasion will succeed.

When President Fidel Castro agreed in 1986 to play host to the 1991 Pan American Games, his backing from the Soviet bloc seemed as solid as the rocky Caribbean shoreline east of Old Havana, where an Olympic-size stadium and athletes’ village were to rise.

Three years later, as Communism teetered in the Soviet Union and toppled across Eastern Europe, the central site of the 39-nation sports competition was still a rock pile. Cuba was quickly running out of funds, food, fuel and friends.

“We started with picks and shovels, and many times I slipped and hurt myself on those rocks,” recalled William Acevedo, 27, a bricklayer. “What you see now was little more than a dream.”

Thanks to a low-tech, Herculean effort by Acevedo and thousands of other workers, who volunteered or were pressed into service at 65 construction sites and often had to mix cement by hand, the multimillion-dollar sports complex was finished barely in time. The Games, which opened Friday, have drawn 18,000 athletes and other visitors to the biggest international event of Castro’s 32-year-old revolution.

The gamble to push ahead with the costly undertaking amid an economic crisis and the way he pulled it off are measures of Castro’s resolve to court dollar-spending tourists to break the growing isolation of his one-party socialist island.

It is a risky, controversial venture. While Cubans take pride in hospitality and generally welcome contact with foreigners, many are embittered by the glaring contrast between their poverty and the government’s lavish treatment of its moneyed guests.

During the past two years, as gleaming new gymnasiums went up for the games, school and hospital construction came to a halt. Irrigation reservoirs for emergency food production were plugged up for kayak racing. Dwindling dollar reserves went to import chicken--one of a growing list of rationed rarities in Cuban markets--for the athletes’ daily training tables.

Hotels, restaurants, nightclubs and discotheques have sprung up all over Havana--for dollar-paying clients only.

“The whole island is being handed over to foreigners,” complained a pregnant Havana woman with three other children to feed. “The athletes are getting all the beef, and slowly but surely we are starving. These Games mean less food, less clothing, less medicine, less public transportation. When it’s all over, there will be nothing left for us.”

Worried that such sentiment might boil into an open political challenge, the ruling Communist Party has recruited “rapid-action detachments” of civilian volunteers to silence complainers. The pregnant woman, who spoke inside her tiny apartment and declined to give her name, said a party official told her neighborhood block association a few weeks ago that Cuban-style SWAT teams would “strike back” at any embarrassing demonstration during the Games.

In one long line outside a state-run supermarket offering nothing more than chicken, eggs, canned milk and crackers, shoppers muttering about meager rations burst into a loud chorus of mock praise for their bearded ruler as the manager came out to listen. “Everyone eats here,” an old woman shouted. “We’re with Fidel to the death!”

Among dozens of people interviewed this week around Havana, however, enthusiasm for the Games seemed genuine. As the 16-day competition approached, street-corner conversations centered less on its cost than on Cuba’s hopes to reign in track and field, baseball, volleyball and boxing.

Cubans can get into the stadiums free and pay pesos for all the pizza and hot dogs they can eat there. Many who plan to stay home formed long lines at television repair shops this week to get aging Soviet-made sets fixed for the 14 hours of daily coverage.

“If you took a poll, I doubt that a majority of Cubans would honestly say the effort (to stage the Games) has been worth it,” a Cuban journalist said. “But maybe the hoopla will distract us from our problems.”

For nearly a year, Cubans have lived under “a special period in time of peace,” a euphemism for wartime rationing mandated by the cutback of petroleum, canned food, machine parts and even toiletries from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

But Castro declared the games “a sacred commitment” and made them a showcase of Cuba’s effort, begun in the late 1980s, to redirect its economy toward the West--through tourist ventures with Spaniards, Canadians, Germans and Jamaicans. Cuba, he kept repeating, will win “a gold medal for hospitality.”

The Hotel Ambos Mundos, Ernest Hemingway’s first haunt in Cuba in the 1930s, and the Floridita, an Old Havana bar where the novelist held forth over daiquiris, were refurbished and opened to dollar customers in time for the Games. Havana Auto, which rents cars in hard currency, imported 400 new Nissans last month.

Cuban officials licensed 50 joint ventures with foreigners to sell more than 700 kinds of souvenirs--cigarette lighters, towels, sun visors, cosmetics--bearing the logo of Tocopan, a red-white-and-blue cartoon parrot that is the Pan Am Games mascot.

In the race to finish 21 new sports facilities and renovate 46 others, Castro turned to Jose Ramon Fernandez, a towering, white-haired revolutionary hero who led 4,000 soldiers to victory against U.S.-backed Cuban exiles in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Under his command, core brigades totaling 3,000 building tradesmen labored two years, motivated by a promise that 1,013 of the 1,473 apartments in the seaside athletes’ village will go to deserving workers after the Games.

They were joined by unskilled workers driven by revolutionary duty or peer pressure, or simply assigned to the task by Cuba’s biggest employer, the government. Fernandez said 300,000 of the country’s 10.5 million people, including some star athletes, toiled at construction sites in Havana and Santiago de Cuba. Work on the village slowed in May amid complaints about food and confusion over which apartments would become permanent tourist hostels.

“It wasn’t exactly a strike, but an organized lack of enthusiasm,” said an army garage attendant assigned to the project after he was caught selling gasoline on the black market. Foremen overcame the protest, he said, by extending work shifts to 17 hours.

Games organizers overcame another obstacle, the 30-year U.S. economic embargo, by shopping elsewhere for such U.S. specialties as drug-testing facilities and bowling equipment. Although 700 U.S. athletes are competing and 2,300 other Americans are also here, American networks were barred by U.S. law from paying Cuba for television rights.

But the Cubans were so eager to showcase their island that they practically gave away rights worth an estimated $9 million to ABC in exchange for some technical assistance for their own TV coverage.

Cuban officials said the games cost $24 million in hard-currency imports--about a quarter of the Central Bank’s reserves--plus 100 million Cuban pesos ($132 million at the official rate) for local expenses. They have been vague about how and when the investment is supposed to pay off.

Miguel Castellanos, 48, an electrician who helped repaint Cuba’s main baseball stadium last month, was sitting in his three-room apartment the other day trying to figure that out.

“Let’s see, how many of you are coming?” he asked an American who dropped by. “How much are you spending each day at your hotel? How much on meals? How long are you staying?”

Then he stopped and broke out a bottle of rum, at noon.

“The important thing,” he said, “is that you’re the first foreigner who ever stepped foot in my home. We Cubans have been isolated too long. Here, have a drink.”