Market Scene : Cubans Tasting Capitalism--But It’s Just an Appetizer : Selling food is now legal, with limits. A lively black market provides everything from cars to cigars.

If an old man of the sea catches a big fish, who gets to keep it? Ernest Hemingway had his old man give it up to the predators of the deep, but in today’s Cuba it belongs to Fidel Castro, at least by the rules.

According to the Castro regime’s regulations, any fish caught in Cuban waters by Cubans belongs to the government. It cannot be processed or sold privately, even though recent reforms permit private enterprise in a few fields.

The regulations are a matter of great distress to Chincho Calacon, by Cuban standards an old man at 63 but also a man of opportunity.

Calacon is one of a handful of defiant Cubans challenging Castro’s rigid economic system, under which nearly everybody works for the state in one way or the other.

His way is, with some friends, to fish illegally for marlin and other large fish from old tractor-tire inner tubes, using only a plastic line and their hands. No poles, no gaffs, no nets.

Unable to get a proper license either to operate a boat or to fish, Calacon and three or four associates have joined the black market, which for dollars--lots of them--will provide almost anything that the Castro regime either can’t or won’t, at least not at a fair price.

The black market purveys satellite TV, automobiles, tomatoes, pills to increase sexual potency, teen-age girls (or boys), cigars, single-malt Scotch whisky and anything else that comes to mind, including a good meal.

His urge or need to acquire dollars sends Calacon out of Havana Harbor in the black sky before dawn several days a week, towing the oversized inner tubes behind a tiny rowboat powered by a small, sputtering motor.

After an hour of so of stomach-churning roller-coasting through the whitecaps of the harbor and into the open sea, Calacon has his associates clamber into the inner tubes and toss out their lines, holding the spools in their leathery hands.

On one recent trip, a young man--Hector, he called himself--got a hit on his line after bobbing about for just under two hours. Very carefully he pulled in the fish, hand over hand on the plastic line.

It was a small marlin, and it was not clubbed or gaffed for fear of attracting sharks that were sensed but not seen in the water. Instead, when the exhausted prey was tugged close, the other men paddled over and helped haul the fish onto Hector’s inner tube. He held it against his chest while it suffocated.

After another hour, the little armada gathered itself and returned to Havana.

Calacon cut up the fish and began selling the pieces on the Malecon, Havana’s bay front. In short order, he sold about 15 pounds of marlin at $3 a pound. U.S. currency only, no exceptions.

The old man, whose last legitimate job was in a bicycle assembly plant now closed for lack of parts, argues that he is not a maceta , as the black marketeers are called here. The word literally means flowerpot and is used contemptuously to describe people as members of the idle rich.

“I am doing what the government said we could do,” the wire-thin, tensile-strong Calacon said on the way in from the fishing trip. “I am an et cetera, not a maceta .”

In an odd experiment in free enterprise, Castro last year approved as part of a limited reform program a list of self-employment activities that could charge in dollars and make a profit.

There were 140 such categories approved, including the sale of “light foods (drinks, sandwiches, candies, et cetera).”

Calacon’s objections to the contrary, in government eyes the private catching and selling of fish is not “et cetera,” and therefore illegal.

For the moment, Calacon has been permitted to operate with only minor “move it along” types of harassment, presumably because he is small time and no threat to Communist market theories.

Also lurking either within the “et cetera” clause or close in its shadow are other small activities, including private restaurants, places with one or two tables in private homes.

In fact, these dining rooms, known as paladares , are the most prominent of the little businesses that have sprung up since last year’s reforms. They are popular because they provide food found not even in the expensive restaurants limited to tourists. In addition, the paladares are cheap, at least for foreigners with dollars.

A certain romanticism to the point of myth has built up about these restaurants as places where rare and wonderfully prepared food can be enjoyed with champagne and other European wines in an atmosphere of linen, soft lighting and strolling musicians.

Perhaps such oases of culinary delight existed in Havana in the two or three months before Castro recently cracked down on the paladares . But recent visits to four private restaurants touted as the city’s best found something more musty than mythic.

The best of the lot, arranged through the help of a government functionary, was in an old mansion in Miramar, the neighborhood that once housed the pre-Castro elite and now serves diplomats, foreign business people and Castro’s favored few.

A visitor was brought in through a side garden after an exchange of coded knocks on a gate. The dining table was on a veranda next to a kitchen. The stars above looked three-dimensional, the breeze wafted and the Chopin etudes on the CD player sounded enchanting.

The visitor was in the second of three sittings that night, each given 90 minutes to eat. Before the meal was served, the owner-chef asked for drink orders, apologizing for having only one single-malt Scotch.

“We are not accustomed to a big selection,” he said, “but I’ve put in an order for three more brands. Is there one you would particularly like?”

The menu was limited to one selection arranged in advance by the go-between. This night it was cold asparagus with a hollandaise sauce as an appetizer, a salad of tomatoes and sliced onions, broiled snapper with steamed carrots and baby potatoes. Dessert was a choice of fresh fruit or cake.

A Spanish sparkling wine was offered along with three Spanish still wines. The meal was capped with a choice of five Cuban cigars.

The bill for four people came to $76, U.S. currency, of course.

A grand evening, except. The asparagus was canned and tinny tasting, the onions soggy, the snapper dry and overcooked, the fruit limited to orange slices and the $8 cigar stale.

The three other restaurants were worse, ranging in entrees from stringy chicken (no breasts, only thighs and wings), chewy--thin steaks, faux Chinese noodles, boiled fish bits and soy sauce.

In the early days after the September announcement that some free enterprise would be permitted, the paladares spread quickly; some estimates reached 2,000 in Havana alone despite the indifferent food, inexperienced cooks and waiters and, for Cubans, high prices.

But there was such enthusiasm in the first few weeks that even American diplomats were eating in paladares , as were ranking Communist Party and government officials. One private restaurant was large enough to feed 100 people.

That caught Castro’s attention and brought a crackdown.

When restaurants are small, he told the National Assembly of Personal Power in December, “I really do not think that one or two tables (in someone’s home) will affect socialism. However, a man with 25 tables and 100 chairs is something else.”

Evidently. That restaurant was shut down and its owner put in jail. Others were treated less harshly, but the effect was serious. The guesses now are that only a few hundred paladares are operating.

“When it came down to it, they couldn’t really let free enterprise develop, even in someone’s dining room,” said one diplomat.