Crime Soaring in Cuba as Fidel Castro’s Socialist Economy Is Caught in Free Fall : Latin America: Visiting detective novelists get the picture first hand as muggers prey on them in Havana.

Seventeen detective novelists from the United States, Mexico and Italy visited Havana recently to swap secrets with their Cuban counterparts in the art of crime fiction. But real-life Cuban criminals stole the drama.

By the end of the weeklong exchange, two U.S. mystery writers had been mugged in most unmysterious fashion--in daylight by unmasked teen-agers, before shocked but unresponsive bystanders--and a few others had been silently relieved of valuables.

Among the victims was K. K. Beck of Seattle, author of “The Body in the Volvo” and other whodunits. She was dragged several feet down a street in historic Old Havana, bloodying her knees and elbows before she won a tug of war over her purse. Oakland writer Janet Rudolph lost her sunglasses in Havana’s Colon Cemetery when a passing cyclist plucked them off her face.

“Everywhere we went, the hands of desperate people reached out at us,” said New York crime writer Charles Raisch, who lost a watch and pair of shoes while he was swimming.

The crude rip-offs of these crafty storytellers was an embarrassment to the Cuban hosts of the Three Frontiers Encounter, but not much of a surprise. As the demise of communism in the former Soviet Bloc sends President Fidel Castro’s revolution into an economic free fall, crime in Cuba is soaring.

Cuba’s attorney general reported in July that crimes “foreign to our socialist style of life” are on the upswing, ranging from petty theft and prostitution to black-marketeering and wholesale robbery at ports, warehouses, factories and collective farms.

The official reported 10 murders and 125 violent robberies for each 100,000 Cubans last year, an overall increase of 42% in such crimes from 1989. Other kinds of theft rose by 63% in 1990 and 146 cases of “economic crime” against the state went to trial, he said.

Havana residents assert that crime rates have kept rising in 1991 as both pillars of the city’s safe-streets reputation--revolutionary police vigilance and a high standard of social welfare--have crumbled.

Cuba has yet to succumb to the random killing and corrupting drug trade that overwhelm Jamaica, or Colombia. But the island’s social fabric has unraveled at an alarming rate since 1989, when Eastern Europe abandoned communism and cut off large shipments of food and machinery to Cuba. And shortages are getting worse as the Soviet Union, still Cuba’s main trading partner, breaks up into capitalist-oriented republics.

Cuban Communist officials, who once prided themselves on providing work for all, now admit to 30,000 unemployed on an island of 10.7 million people. The crime rate is especially high among youths in their teens and 20s with little prospect for jobs befitting their high levels of education.

“Crime is a very serious problem and we’ve got to look more deeply into the causes,” Castro told a Communist Party congress last month during a wide-ranging debate on the subject.

“One hears all sorts of explanations (for rising crime)--that it results from lack of control, that the police are inefficient, that they don’t know anything, that they don’t act, or that it’s because of shortages,” Castro said. “Some have said that the hand of the enemy (the United States) might possibly be behind this.”

Unfortunately for Cuba, two favored solutions to the economic crisis--importing hundreds of thousands of Chinese bicycles to save fuel, and wooing sun-loving foreign tourists to bring in dollars--have become favored targets of criminals.

Thieves string wire across darkened streets to throw bikers to the ground, then steal their cycles. Bikes disappear from repair shops.

In August, when Castro played host to the 39-nation Pan American Games, Cubans generally heeded their Maximum Leader’s appeal to show “gold-medal hospitality” to the 17,000 visitors. A U.S. reporter who covered the games and returned to the island late last month found an uglier mood toward foreigners, who are more often the targets of obscenities, hassling or mugging.

Two young Cubans strolling past the four-star Hotel Presidente stopped one evening to peek through the high wooden fence at foreign guests sipping mojitos , a rum mint julep, while watching a water ballet in the pool.

“The tourists have everything; Cubans have nothing!” one youth exclaimed, directing his barely constrained rage at two American reporters passing nearby. “And what country are you from?”

The tourist influx has also brought a resurgence of prostitution, a scourge Castro claimed to have wiped out after taking power in 1959. Cuban officials insisted in August that they’re cracking down. But the so-called “flowers of Fifth Avenue” still walk that street in Havana, hustling dollar-spending clients willing to buy them luxuries most Cubans can’t afford.

With every basic consumer item under strict rationing, Communist leaders sound far more concerned about “economic crime” that diverts goods from the official distribution network into the black market, sapping the state’s capacity to provide.

Among the hottest items is soap, so scarce that each pilfered bar sells on the illegal market for 60 times its price in the ration book. More than 50 truckloads of soap have vanished from factories this year, and one soap truck was seized by armed hijackers recently near the port city of Matanzas.

Thieves invade collective farms by truck and bicycle to rustle cattle and haul off crops. A single farm near the city of Las Tunas reported losing 36,000 chickens last year.

Police responded last year with a crackdown dubbed Operation Jingle Bell, with swift trials and jail terms of up to 20 years for grand larceny. Among those nabbed were 14 executives of Havana’s state-owned restaurant chain, convicted last month of stealing $100,000 worth of food and selling it on the black market. The last three managers of a supermarket in the capital’s Kholy district have gone to jail on the same charge.

Judging from the debate at last month’s Communist Party congress, the police measures are not working. Some delegates noted that fines for petty thievery are too low to deter it. Rather than moving toward a free-market economy, the congress endorsed rigid state socialism and a broader crackdown on black marketeering by using armed vigilante patrols.

“How many rifles do you have?” Castro asked a Communist delegate who had risen from his seat to complain of avocado thieves on his collective.

Two rifles for the whole collective, replied the farmer.

“How the hell can you have only two rifles when we are constantly talking about the war of all the people, yet we are not arming the proletariat?” the president shot back, drawing applause.

Cuban writers, who have churned out volumes glorifying the counterespionage exploits of Castro’s intelligence police, are just starting to examine crime bred by the economic crisis.

One recent book by Arnaldo Correa, an Agriculture Ministry official who moonlights in mysteries, tells the true story of an Afro-Cuban cult gang that burglarized houses and buried the loot while waiting to sell it. The gang, whose cult believes in the power of spirits, dug up a Chinese body from a Cuban cemetery and reburied it alongside their stash, to “guard” it.

Justo Vasco, the Cuban novelist who played host at the recent gathering of crime writers, called the encounter a step toward breaking Cuba’s cultural isolation and invigorating Cuban writers with “fresh ideas.” The visitors, including such masters of suspense as Ross Thomas and Lawrence Block, joined in hailing the event as a success. But some were relieved when it was over.

“On the first day here, a Cuban reporter stuck a microphone in my face and asked what I thought of his country, and I told him I felt safe on the streets,” said Tony Fennelly, who writes about homosexual murders in New Orleans, her crime-plagued city. “Now I feel like a fool for saying that. You’d think that in a police state they wouldn’t have so much crime, but after what happened here, I’ll be happy to get back home.”