Some Cracks Appear in Castro’s Fortress Cuba : Communism: Amid lean times and a frayed ideology, he struggles to hold the socialist experiment together.

Beneath Havana’s broad, leaf-shaded boulevards, workers are blasting a network of tunnels. The idea was conceived as a subway, to be built by Czechoslovakia, but when Eastern Europe abandoned communism two years ago, the Czechoslovaks left Cuba and the project took on a different purpose.

Today, Cubans are being told that these “people’s tunnels” are shelters to huddle in if the Bush Administration, emboldened by the collapse of its Communist adversaries and by its military victories in Panama and Iraq, tries to bomb President Fidel Castro into submission.

The miles of tunnels are an emergency addition to the image and the reality of Castro’s Fortress Cuba. Struggling to defend his troubled socialist experiment to a threadbare people, the 65-year-old supreme commander plays to their patriotism by portraying Cuba as an island besieged by the world’s unchallenged superpower.

“If to crush the revolution they had to kill all the people, the people would be willing to die in support of their leaders,” Castro declared last month at a congress of his ruling Communist Party.

Castro’s apocalyptic Cold War rhetoric and tireless appeals to socialist orthodoxy may be wearing thin in Cuba, especially after the failed Soviet coup in August destroyed the last of his Communist benefactors. But he skillfully used both themes at the five-day congress to limit what many Cubans hoped would be a saving embrace of radical reform.

As a result, Cuba’s survival strategy seems little changed from the ad hoc but centrally planned crisis management of the last two years. Suddenly isolated in the world, the party faithful appear too disoriented, divided and disillusioned to agree on a coherent new formula for keeping Cuba alive, much less Communist.

“The level of tension and mistrust inside the regime has increased dramatically since the Soviet coup,” said a Western diplomat here. “Until the coup, people in the (Cuban) Communist Party thought Fidel could survive somehow with smoke and mirrors. The coup made them think that this might no longer be possible.”

On the streets of Havana, above all those tunnels, the survival drama plays out daily. The long list of scarce consumer goods under strict government rationing has grown in recent weeks to include cooking oil, rum, cigarettes and cigars.

The Cuban model of an egalitarian society that could offer 10 million people a decent diet, free medical care and civic order is fraying rapidly. People complain openly of hunger, crime and special privileges for officials. Of 800 medical products Cuba once guaranteed in hospitals and pharmacies, fewer than 600 are now available.

Scarcity has closed in since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and Eastern Europe left the Soviet Bloc with which Havana bartered for 85% of its imports. The Soviet Union, still Cuba’s main trading partner, had already cut oil supplies to Havana by one-fourth before the coup speeded the Soviet breakup into capitalist-oriented republics.

Cubans are only beginning to realize how events in the Soviet Union will deepen their suffering. This month they learned that Havana’s already shrinking bus service will soon be cut again--from 169 routes to 88 in a city of 2 million people--because of uncertainty over how much oil Cuba can barter from the Soviet republics next year.

Castro’s imitation of the Soviet system was a divisive issue in his party during the 1980s. Heeding the advocates of reform, Castro embarked in 1986 on a “rectification” to develop a more “creole” style of communism without dumping the party’s pro-Soviet hard-liners. It was a compromise that left the one-party state intact and economically dependent on Moscow.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s dismantling of the Soviet Communist Party after the coup shattered the hopes of both Cuban factions. The hard-liners lost their mentors. The reformers lost their example of a Communist system’s transformation from within. Both sides damned Gorbachev as a traitor to the socialist cause.

“The orthodox faction here hasn’t given up, but it has no alternative model to believe in,” said a party official. “Both sides now realize that copying the (Soviet) system was a mistake, but they cannot agree on what to replace it with.”

The outcome of the Oct. 10-14 party congress, the fourth held since Castro seized power in 1959, reflected this uncertainty. On the one hand, it ratified his 15-month-old effort to stretch dwindling Soviet oil and food imports by Draconian, orthodox means--replacing tractors with oxen and buses with bicycles, mobilizing tens of thousands of city dwellers to work on collective farms, cracking down on the black market.

To finance imports from the West, however, the party endorsed key elements of “rectification,” such as liberalizing investment rules to draw foreign capitalist partners into joint ventures with the state. It allowed individual tradesmen to work for private gain and gave state companies involved in foreign trade a degree of independence from central planning.

Politically, the Communists vowed to “perfect” their one-party system, make it more responsive. They streamlined the bureaucracy, elected a younger, 25-member Politburo and approved direct popular election of the lawmaking National Assembly of People’s Power.

But to the many Cubans with higher expectations, the party failed two litmus tests of reform. It ignored a motion urging Cuba’s centrally controlled press to undertake “systematic and profound criticism of everything that blocks the way to perfecting the society.” And it defeated a bid to increase food production by letting farmers sell crops directly to consumers without price controls, a proposal Castro argued strenuously against.

A senior Cuban journalist and longtime party member, a man who has as much trouble getting critical reporting published as feeding his family, said he was equally frustrated by the lost opportunities.

“When they come and ask me to work on a farm, I will refuse unless Fidel and (his brother) Raul go in my brigade,” the journalist said. “Until they recognize their responsibility for the failure of Cuban agriculture, why punish me?”

Nowhere does such disenchantment among believers run deeper than in Cuba’s intellectual community, long a bastion of support for Castro. Generous state funding and tolerance for free expression “within the revolution” have withered along with Cuba’s economy, driving creative talents into dormancy, exile or open opposition.

Daniel Chavarria, a Uruguayan Communist who hijacked a plane to Havana in 1969 and stayed to lionize Castro’s Cold War spies in best-selling novels, made a telling admission this month at an international writers’ gathering here: He has retreated into history for new heroes, the spies and warriors of ancient Greece and Persia.

“The collapse of the East Bloc has left me emotionally ravaged,” said the 57-year-old writer. “I am still a Communist at heart, but I write my novels with my head. I prefer to take a vacation . . . to the 5th Century BC.”

The government, swiftly adept at silencing declared opponents, stunned its loyal critics recently by cracking down on two small challenges that might have passed unnoticed in more tolerant times.

First, it had several intellectuals expelled from the Communist-run National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists for writing an open letter to Castro suggesting mild reforms of the system. Then it abruptly closed, after a four-day showing, the Cuban-made film “Alice in Wondertown,” which satirized the regime as bureaucratic, conformist and heavily policed.

To bolster its standing among intellectuals and young people, another disaffected group, the party elevated Abel Prieto, 41-year-old head of the Union of Cuban Writers and Artists, and Roberto Robaina, 35-year-old Union of Communist Youth leader, to the new Politburo last month.

Meeting later with foreign writers and journalists, Prieto defended the expulsions from his union, saying the pro-reform letter had been sent to U.S. news media “to create a scandal outside Cuba.” He was more sympathetic toward the film, which was produced by Communists, but defended its shutdown anyway.

“The film was screened in an extremely tense moment,” Prieto said. “A critical work of art, in this country, under these conditions, cannot expect an absolutely clinical and balanced reception. Little things take on extraordinary dimensions. Ants become elephants.”

It is an argument echoed in Castro’s numbing tirades: Cuba, under siege, cannot admit criticism or make reforms that might create divisions and play into the enemy’s hands. “If imperialism could again install capitalism in our country, it would turn us into a Miami, with all the repugnant rottenness of that society,” Castro stated at the party congress. “What would be left of all we have done?”

Some loyal Communists view the supreme commander’s bluster as a smoke screen for his party’s disarray. They portray Castro as an arbiter, trying to forge a consensus for reform that will take time. Meanwhile, according to Havana political scientist Santiago Perez, Castro learned a lesson from Soviet perestroika: Moving too abruptly, Gorbachev “tore down the old system and created nothing but exaggerated expectations.”

O thers view Castro as obstinate. The real lesson he drew from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, they say, is that giving up any control of the economy will open a flood of unpredictable challenges to his own rule. Some Communists wonder whether the open door to foreign capitalists, which has already produced 50 joint ventures in tourism, pharmaceuticals and transportation, will have that effect.

Castro’s biggest challenge is not the threat of a U.S. military invasion, a Cuban philosophy professor said. “The biggest challenge is the day George Bush stands up and says, ‘We’re not going to invade Cuba. We’re going to end our trade embargo because the island is for sale, and we’re going to buy it up.’ ”

The professor, a party member, worries that the growth of foreign economic enclaves--like the dollar-only tourist resorts that already dot Cuba’s northern beaches--will create models of success unattainable in the rest of Cuba and bring strong internal pressure on Castro to imitate them. That would be dangerous, he said, because “a socialist society with capitalistic values cannot compete economically with capitalism.”

But that is exactly what some reformers in the party hope for--a demonstration by foreign companies and increasingly autonomous Cuban export firms earning dollars from the West.

“Power in Cuba is shifting toward the producer,” said an Agriculture Ministry official. “One day a party bureaucrat is going to walk into a factory and try to dictate orders, and the manager is going to tell him, ‘No, because we’ll lose half a million dollars in exports.’ And the bureaucrat will not want to take responsibility for that.

“I don’t know about the effect of this on politics,” he added, “but if the economy doesn’t work, what good is the system?”

Whether dollar trade and investment can rescue Castro’s regime in time, or force it to evolve into something more viable, is another question. The dollar flows are still small compared to the enormous cost of shoring up Cuba’s once-envied social welfare system.

But on an island running out of nearly everything, Castro needs all the help he can get. Lately he has embraced a new constituency, Cuba’s religious community. He lobbied successfully at the congress to end job discrimination against religious believers and allow them to join the party.

According to a joke told in Havana, the supreme commander confessed to his fellow Communists an ulterior motive for the reform: He wants to put Havana’s churches in charge of distributing meat, which has been available in the capital just four days this year.

“But why the churches?” he was asked.

“Because,” Castro replied, “only God knows when the meat is coming to market.”