EL-HE (continued)

In the weeks before the elections, the opposition -- which had squabbled and squabbled and had finally grouped together under a sixty-year- old woman, Violeta Chamorro, who seemed no threat -- failed and fumbled at every turn. They had no money, and the Sandinistas controlled the television, the campaign buses, and the streets. Sandinista president Daniel Ortega transformed himself overnight from a military man, with uniforms and militarized mien, to a pop-star presidential candidate in tight blue jeans; rock music dominated his campaign. A few close observers noted that the Nicaraguans went to the Sandinista rallies but didn't really talk much about the whole thing.

But by evening of that Sunday, February 25, it was clear that the Nicaraguan people had simply nursed their rage at the mismanagement and oppression of the Sandinistas and, when the moment came, they declared themselves. Violeta Chamorro won overwhelmingly, and the Sandinistas stood about like dazed creatures who could not understand what possibly could have happened to their dream. As for Castro, his "revolutionary son" was now gone, too, and one American cartoon showed an enraged Castro looking at a bloodied Daniel Ortega after the loss, saying, "You what?"

As Castro's empire closed around him, it became clear that his extravagant claims -- that he had done great things in Cuba in the areas of race, of literacy, and of health -- were also far from accurate. It was true that he had to a large degree abolished racial segregation and increased areas of equality for the 35 percent of the Cuban population that was mulatto or black. He had overseen substantial improvements in spreading health care to the rural poor, so that infant mortality had fallen and life expectancy and literacy had risen. But the terrible and the unpalatable fact after all the years of sacrifice was that, while the Cuba of 1959 had been not only immeasurably ahead of every other nation in the Caribbean and the Third World but actually at the point of economic "takeoff," the Cuba of 1990 had fallen well behind even relatively primitive Latin American countries. In 1952, Cuba had come in third in the hemisphere after oil-rich Venezuela and land-rich Argentina in relative positions of social indicators. By 1981, in World Bank figures, Cuba rated a mere fifteenth.

As he watched his dreams shatter, where now were the other dreamers? The sweet and vulnerable Mirta still lived where she had for many years, in an unobtrusive, British-style brick apartment building in Madrid, with her conservative and long-suffering husband. She saw Fidelito occasionally, clandestinely, in European capitals, and she knew that if she ever "talked" about Fidel or her life with him, she would never see her son again. When visitors came to see her in Madrid and her husband Emilio went out of the room, she would sneak out pictures of her grandchildren in Cuba -- Fidelito's children by his Russian wife. Both of her daughters with her second husband were Leftists, and one had married a member of the Spanish Communist party. The wags in Madrid liked to say, cruelly, that her second husband lived with three women, "all of them in love with Fidel."

As for Fidelito, he lived almost unknown in Cuba, with his blond Russian wife and their three children, until something happened in 1983 and 1984 to cause Castro suddenly to allow his only legitimate son to come to the surface of Cuban society. Suddenly Fidelito's name and picture appeared in the newspapers, sometimes even with his Díaz-Balart matronymic. Suddenly, as the head of the Cuban nuclear organization, he was at a scientific meeting here, a scientific meeting there. One definite school of thought felt Fidel was grooming him, not Raúl, to take over, and this group was terrified of him. They said he had an explosive character, his own private intelligence apparatus, and extraordinary power and ambition.

Alma Fernández, Naty's daughter, also wanted to leave the island and also was unsuccessful in doing so. So she amused herself by belonging to a group of elite, useless, gilded youth -- children of important people in Cuba like ambassadors and generals. But far from being the "children of the Revolution," Alma's friends were ineffably more the children of American videos, of rock music, of a constant yearning for the world outside. Above all, they searched endlessly -- and theatrically -- for "emociones fuertes," or "strong emotions." Every hour of the day, searching for strong emotions -- how difficult it was to be one of the privileged children of Cuba!

Mirta's brother, Rafael Díaz-Balart, lived luxuriously and happily in Madrid, having made a small fortune in many ways; while Fidel's older brother, Ramón, tried several times to defect to the United States -- but finally gave up and quietly ran a ranch in Cuba.

Beautiful and at times eccentric Gloria Gaitán still lived quietly in Bogota with her daughters, nursing her tragic father's museum and more than occasionally thinking about the "old days" in Havana. One day in 1988, she suddenly had her father dug up and reburied, this time standing up, in the style of the Colombian Chibcha Indians, in her backyard, because she said she thought it would bring him luck. By then, she understood, sadly so, why Castro had lost interest in her: "He has lived a thousand years, and I have lived only thirty."

The beautiful Isabel Custodio had grown into a lively middle-aged divorcée who wrote on feminist issues for the Mexican paper Excelsior. She too returned, as another moth to an eternal flame, to Cuba in the 1980s and met Fidel again for the first time since 1956. "When I saw him," she reminisced afterward, "we revived very important moments we had lived through in Mexico."

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