Havana Street Scene: Anger, Poverty, Dedicated Child Care : Lifestyles: School gives learning-impaired children special attention and lunch. But elderly people must line up around the block for food.

From the giggling pupils at the Socialist Republic of Vietnam School to angry, frustrated housewives lining up for a few potatoes, San Ignacio Street is a study in what works in Cuba and what does not.

In her tiny apartment in a tumbledown building, Concepcion Napoles y Gonzalez, 79, slammed her fist on a rickety wooden table. Six small potatoes jiggled from the impact and the flies scattered.

“That’s it. That’s what we get for two people,” she grumbled. “Until when? Until they get some more potatoes, I guess.”

Her building in Old Havana was built in 1860 and Napoles y Gonzalez has lived in it for 50 years.

Slender, white-haired and sizzling mad, she recalled better days in a building that looks from the outside, as do many on San Ignacio Street, like an architectural treasure.

Inside, residents share a water faucet in the courtyard and there are no sanitary facilities. A three-story chute serves as a catchall for waste, human and otherwise.

Gaping holes have opened in the floors of interior balconies. The building’s timbers sag, despite attempts to shore them up.

“They blame the Americans for our problems, but they aren’t the problem, it’s him ,” the woman said, clearly referring to President Fidel Castro. “I’m 100% Cuban, and I’m more Cuban than he is. He hasn’t done a thing for us. Just look at this pigsty!”

A neighbor stuck her head in the door and shouted: “Twenty pesos for a liter of milk on the black market, and don’t even look anywhere else!”

The neighbor earns 260 pesos a month, her husband half that. She walked away, stepping around holes in the balcony floor three stories above the small, filthy courtyard.

“When it rains, all of this gets wet, all of it,” said Lucia Rebollar, the daughter of Napoles y Gonzalez. “We’ve been on the list for housing for 12 years, but (it) always goes to foreigners or someone else.

“And when you go to the doctor, he tells you to get this medicine if you can find it or this one if you can find it. Well, you can’t find it.”

A neighbor asked why the mother and daughter were not afraid to give their names.

“What can they do to us, really?” Rebollar asked, staring at the cracked and falling beams. “And if they do something, so what?”

She has broken a leg twice and ribs once falling through holes in the balcony floor at night. She worries about the children.

When Rebollar escorted three visiting journalists to the street, a block warden barked: “Who gave you permission to bring foreigners?”

Two Interior Ministry policemen approached the journalists a block or so away.

“You were seen going into a private residence,” one said, pointing a forefinger at his eye, a Latin American symbol for caution. “That isn’t looked upon well here.”

A dark staircase leads up two stories to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam School, where the principal, Margarita Monto, oversees the education of 71 children judged to be slow learners.

“They aren’t really retarded,” she said. “They are learning at below the advanced or normal level.”

There is much individual attention in the small classes. Therapists work with children who need special help. At midday, they all walk to a workers’ central, where everyone gets lunch, something not always available on an island short of food.

On that day, the exercise in handwriting class was: “A socialist country. Use lots of descriptions.”

Most of the children wore the red scarves of the Pioneers, a youth movement to which most grade-school children seem to belong.

There is an infirmary with a nurse, and a library.

Children stand when the principal enters the room and are seated when she gives permission, courtesies lost decades ago in most U.S. schools.

Most Cuban schools are much larger than this, with larger classes, Monto said, adding: “These children are special to us.”

Here, as elsewhere in Cuba, time tends to date from Castro’s victory in 1959. Since then, the building has been a school of some sort. Centuries ago, Monto said, it was the home of a Spanish count.

Outside the Meson San Ignacio, lines of Cubans form early and shuffle in to lunch. The menu is not complicated: rice with tiny bits of sausage and glasses of water. Even so, the line is long.

Most of Havana’s few restaurants are expensive and well-stocked but accept only dollars, which few Cubans are allowed to own.

There is talk of clandestine black market restaurants where better food can be had for pesos. A lot of people seem to know about them, but few will admit to having patronized one.

People line up for potatoes at a small, dark storefront. Anger is evident but not universal.

“It is the old people who stand in line,” said a woman of about 60 who gave her name as Flor Davalos. “The young ones study or work or stay with the children. Our place is in the line.”

She said she was retired after working 37 years in a store.

“I have five children and six grandchildren,” Davalos said. “They all live near here. I have a small house with an avocado tree, and we grow a few black beans. We get by, I guess.

“I hope there will be something better than this for my children, certainly my grandchildren.

“You have to believe. You have to have faith. If you don’t believe, what can you do? If I don’t keep faith and I die tonight, well, then what?”

Farther back in line, a 2-year-old gummed his mother’s plastic-coated ration card.

“Juan Carlos is a healthy baby, the doctors tell me that,” the mother said. “I wish I had more milk for him. I can get money, but sometimes it is easier to get money than milk. And meat. My boy needs meat.

“I believe we will get by, and I believe his father should help. He is in the army, or he used to be. Those people always seem to have enough.

“But it’s hard. The Americans are against us, everybody says so. I have relatives in Miami. Half of Cuba has relatives in Miami. I wrote them once asking if they could help me go there, but they never wrote back.”

In a squalid doorway, three black marketeers sat nervously with their plastic bags, waiting for business.

One had bunches of garlic, the second a bag of mamay, a sweet, yellowish, pulpy fruit--everything home-grown and illegal to sell. Buyers appeared from nowhere. Pesos were passed and the scarce goods vanished into worn shopping bags.

The third vendor offered a sausage. He would not say where he got it.

No sausage? Then do you want to change money (also illegal)? He flashed a thick wad of pesos.

By most accounts, at least one-third of the food, gasoline, clothes and other goods in Cuba pass through the black market. Castro experimented with a farmers’ market that allowed growers to sell some food directly, but soon abandoned it.