Changing Lifestyles : ‘We Have Nothing, Only Fidel, Fidel’ : After two years of deprivation, Cubans now hold a much harsher view of Castro.

Imagine a life in which a woman who must stay youthful looking for her job as an Afro-Cuban dancer at a tourist hotel uses a home-brewed concoction including battery acid to color her graying hair. She has no hair dye.

Imagine a life in which this same woman lines her eyes and brows before performances with charred cooking residue that she collects in her tiny kitchen and crushes into a fine, midnight-black ash. She has no eye makeup.

She has no milk in her refrigerator. She has hardly enough rice. She gets only 18 sanitary pads a year, four eggs a month. She’s never tasted canned pears, so she has a constant yearning for the fruit beyond her reach--a treat sold only at the tourist and diplomatic stores that ordinary Cubans cannot enter.

Hard to comprehend, perhaps. Certainly frustrating. But that’s life in today’s Cuba, Milagros Medina Herrera, 31, tells visitors to the shabby, but impeccably clean, one-room apartment she shares here with her half-brother.

“We have nothing. Only Fidel, Fidel, Fidel,” Medina says, referring to Fidel Castro, this country’s unreconstructed Communist president. “This is the big problem today in Cuba.”

Medina’s half-brother, Tony Lopez, has savored the syrupy sweetness of canned pears. A former center fielder with the Havana baseball team, Lopez traveled for months in the United States with the club, learning to love rock music and becoming so fascinated with the culture that he smuggled home a little slice of it: a snapshot of a shopping mall Santa Claus.

“It’s very good for me having been in America. In Cuba, there is no Santa Claus,” said Lopez, 30, retrieving the photo from its hiding place in a dresser drawer.

To hear this pair talk of everyday life in austerity-stricken Cuba is to get a glimpse of how two years of deprivation have given at least some Cubans a much more sour, more dour, view of Castro.

Once propped up by sweetheart trade deals with its communist allies in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the Cuban economy has crumbled in lockstep with the collapse of Soviet-style socialism across the Atlantic. A government official said the country now has no reserves for international trade.

And as Castro’s “special period” of cutbacks drags on, the hope of a long-ago revolution fades into a scramble just to get by. Resourcefulness, the black market, the kindness of foreigners and hope that the winds of change will soon rattle the doors of this crumbling fortress of socialism sustain Medina and Lopez.

The charismatic “Maximum Leader” has lost his grip on once-loyal households such as this one--hunger, inconvenience and rolling blackouts have so irked the siblings that not even the omnipresent threat of police action will silence their grievances.

“Twenty years ago, I used to support the revolution. Not now,” said Lopez, who makes the equivalent of $150 a month as a car mechanic, a skill he honed on his 1950 Chevrolet. “I was thinking then that we could have a good future. But now I know that we work and work and work and we have nothing. We have no future.”

Just around the corner from their apartment sits the famed Floridita, an exclusive, off-limits restaurant and old Hemingway haunt that might as well be a slap in the face to neighborhood residents. Like the relatively well-stocked special stores for tourists here, Floridita accepts only U.S. dollars--no Cuban pesos. But ordinary Cubans are not permitted to possess dollars.

“There is everything here for tourists and nothing for the Cubans. The Cubans are very angry about this,” Lopez said.

Cuba is known the world over for the quality of its cigars, but the government-issue, loosely rolled cigars sold to its own citizens are “a grand insult,” nothing like those reserved for sale to foreigners, Lopez said.

Lopez and his half-sister seem to harbor no resentment for individual tourists; on the contrary, they were anxious to spend time with three recent American visitors. And they showed off presents they had received from earlier guests: food, toiletries and clothing from Spanish, French, German and Guatemalan acquaintances. Cuban workers are not supposed to accept tips or other gifts; it’s a corruption of the Communist work ethic.

However, tourists at the Hotel Playa del Este sometimes press folded dollars into Medina’s palm after she dances there.

As the abandoned mother of three children, ages 5, 10 and 11, Medina appreciates Castro’s accomplishments in national health care and education. (The children’s father fled to Miami, and they live with their grandparents.)

Cuba is said to have a 94% literacy rate--in a league with the world’s wealthiest nations. And Medina takes for granted that her children will be well-schooled. But the very quality of those key social services baffles Medina even more as she sees the poverty around her. “All over the world, the most difficult things to provide for people are education and health care,” she said. “If they can give us these things, why can’t we have something simple like food?”

Both brother and sister spend a good part of a typical day standing in long lines to buy food. Mechanic Lopez works about seven hours a day, although he says the country’s gasoline crisis means fewer vehicles needing repairs. Cars that aren’t driven don’t wear out.

On days when she is not performing, Medina sees her children, cooks, sews and visits with friends who fill the apartment with lively conversation and laughter.

A black market, fed in part by theft from restaurants, hotels, factories and farms, acts as an economic safety valve. On a recent June day, Medina, whose salary is equal to $135 a month, paid the equivalent of $5 for three onions. A black market egg also costs $5. But were it not for these illicit street sales, Medina said, her family would not have milk, which is rationed by the government and only available for young children.

When even the black market cannot provide the things she needs, Medina uses her imagination. To keep the gray from her hair, she cooked up this unorthodox recipe for coloring: Smash a Russian flashlight battery and, to the murky fluid inside, add carbon, alcohol and peroxide.

“We Cubans have to make a lot of inventions out of necessity,” Medina said. “When Fidel Castro says the problem in Cuba is the (U.S. economic) blockade, it’s a lie,” Lopez added. “The problem is with our government.”

As for the future, Lopez pointed to the Los Angeles riot scenes he saw on Cuban TV. “The bad news that came to America will come to Cuba real quick. It will come to Cuba just like this,” he said, snapping his fingers. “Only in Cuba, it won’t stop after three days. It’s going to go on day after day after day. It’s never going to stop.”

Assistant Metro Editor Cynthia H. Craft was in Havana earlier this month with a USC journalism group.

At the Limit

Rationing restricts Cubans to only a few consumer goods. Here is a partial list of what a person receives each month: * 4 eggs * 30 bread rolls * 1 ounce of coffee * 1 pack of matches * 1 roll of toilet paper * 1 small Cuban cigar * 2 1/2 pounds of rice * 2 1/2 pounds of sugar * 1/2 pound of beans * 1 container of cooking oil