HAVANA

BREAKFAST felt a touch peculiar that first morning in La Ciudad de la Habana. Accustomed to American abundance, we found a paucity of offerings. A few boiled eggs clattering like cue balls on a warming tray; string beans (string beans en la manana!) mashed to pulp. Breakfast rolls the circumference of quarters, soggy yet sparkling with sugar.

We ate, and then stepped to a table a few feet away to fill our coffee cups with famed café Cubana.

In those tiny moments, the waitress absconded with our forks and knives.

"Where's the silverware?" I asked my new friend Ben.

"Gone. See? She's wiping it off for the next customers."

The silverware caper seemed silly, yet a bit disturbing, as was a man who introduced himself to me as "Ernesto," an engineer from Havana staying at our hotel.

How could he be an engineer from Havana? Tourist hotels were for tourists, and by government edict, off-limits to Cuban citizens. Who was Ernesto? Secret police?

It seemed so ridiculous. And then, eventually, it seemed so obvious.

I am not a scholar of Fidel Castro's Revolution. I have, however, traveled extensively, both for pleasure and for stories on human-rights issues that have ranged from trafficking in women in Thailand, to a democratic uprising in Burma, and Cambodia's on-going struggles.

Simpler curiosities propelled me to Cuba. Mostly, they included the desire to see Havana's famed architectural potpourri — ba-roque, Art Deco, neo-classical — before its buildings crumble into dusty heaps. I wanted to hear some Cuban music, learn something about Afro-Cuban religion. Visit museums. Roam.

Most of all, I wanted to glimpse - however briefly — life under Fidel Castro before the chance evaporates.

With a legal license to travel to Cuba, (ours was an art-oriented tour), we boarded a direct flight from Miami.

As we stepped from the plane to the tarmac, Havana air wrapped around us like warm wet gauze. Coconut palms seemed to droop in the heat. On the the Aerovision monitors anchored above passport control, salsa dancers and Cuban comedians welcomed us to Havana.

Havana is a worn, majestic city, as stuck in the '50s as an insect in amber.

On a side street in the Vedado District, a famous muralist has splashed images of Afro-Cuban gods and goddesses that stretch for blocks. Near our hotel, people lined up by the hundreds at an ice cream park, and stood patiently through the afternoon as storms soaked the city.

The dingy but must-see Museo de Revolucion informed visitors that the United States deliberately introduced plague to Cuba in the 1960s. (I laughed, and then I wondered).

One day as I wandered through Havana with my cameras, five young guys began to close in on me. Just when relinquishing my cameras seemed the logical next step, plainclothes police rushed in, scattering my new "friends." That was when I realized that there was a cop on nearly every corner. And that's when it seemed more obvious that the smiling "Ernesto" who patrolled our hotel worked for the government.

In the narrow Jewish quarter, a 70-year-old synagogue member led us on a tour of the past. "This is where the tailor shop was" before the government appropriated it, he told us. And here is the oldest synagogue in Ha-vana, a narrow blue building now being renovated with French money.

Pointing out the kosher butcher shop, he confided that Orthodox Jews are resented for the extra meat rations they are allowed.

Everywhere, people were revving up for Carnevale, two weeks hence.

Along the Malecon, the famous seawall that stretches for miles in Havana, the rules had been relaxed. At night, beer flowed, one band blared louder than the next, and thousands of people danced together in one pulsing mass. Vendors sold slender paper cones filled with roasted peanuts. A few inebriated souls slept on the sidewalks.

So many sights seemed so strange! On the road to the city of Trinidad, men raced along the highway, offering platters of cheese to people riding in rumbling '50s relics. People stood in sweaty hordes by the roadside, hitchhiking by the dozens.

At a highway checkpoint, the amarillo (yellow) police (as opposed to the blue street police, and the omnipresent secret police) stopped government trucks to make sure they were obeying an edict to pick up the hitchhikers!

Given the dearth of private cars, sticking out one's thumb seems the major mode of transport for the average Cuban in the countryside.

Too few cars. Too little silverware. Too little food.

"They are no longer making any air conditioners," a Cuban friend told me during our sojourn. "Not enough parts."

This same friend has been waiting eight years for a telephone. He laughed, and told me, "I'll probably wait eight more."

In Trinidad, a UNESCO historic city with buildings in sherbet shades, we bumped into a rhumba band. The band beat on upside-down frying pans and huge conga drums. The dancers sashayed from one side of the street to another, like swaying schools of fish.

In the afternoons, we lolled in the emerald sea behind our hotel.

On the road again, we traveled past fields of rice and groves of banana trees, and here and there, tobacco. Stunning billboards exhorted the populace to heed the ideals of the revolution.

During a visit to the U.S. Interests Section (tantamount to an embassy), we learned that 500,000 Cubans ap-plied to leave the country in 2000, at risk to their jobs, their families, and possibly their lives.

It is astonishing that in a country of only 11 million, such a large number of people have asked to leave.

Doctors and lawyers are becoming taxi drivers to take advantage of the new "dollar economy" — a benefit of tourism — that is creating an economic apartheid system within Cuba.

These professionals also engage in some of the few capitalistic "free enterprise" experiments, including sidewalk sales of butane cigarette-lighter replacements, and small family res-taurants (paladars) in their homes.

Despite a mostly sealed-off society, ideas are seeping in. Here and there, satellite dishes jut from rooftops. Although Internet access is largely prohibited (except for government officials), someone handed me a business card with his e-mail address. A few people confessed they gain Internet access at hotel computers reserved for tourists.

Despite U.S. travel restrictions to Cuba, things are becoming more porous. Thousands of Americans enter Havana illegally every year via Canada and Mexico, at risk of steep penalties or jail sentences.

More and more people, however, are traveling legally to Cuba, as we did, licensed through the Treasury Department for cultural exchange trips. Those include visits to Cuban medical or educational facilities, architectural tours, music and museum tours, photojournalism workshops, and bird-watching trips to the habitat of the world's smallest hummingbird. Journalists may obtain licenses. Volunteers bring in medical supplies.

The Fund for Reconciliation and Development, a nongovernment organization devoted to normalizing diplomatic, economic and cultural relations with Cu-ba, advocates an end to the U.S. travel ban. The FRD calls it "an anachronism of the Cold War," and "coun-terproductive to U.S. policy goals." But the leaders of these two countries remain obstinate.

The embargo has failed to effect the desired changes, including access for human-rights organizations to prisons, and the hundreds of political prisoners within.

But visitors can build bridges.

More Americans ought to press to end the travel ban. They should also travel to Cuba through the legal routes available.

Besides enjoying a splendidly beau-tiful country, Americans should visit for the sake of Cuba's people, whose exposure to the outside world remains restricted.

In turn, Americans must learn from the Cubans.

Every day, we built bridges. With the Havana shop clerk who broke her reserve and clasped my hand, after we practiced English and Spanish together, using images on Cuban stamps. With the painter who delighted at the new art supplies we gave her; mostly, she said, she used second-hand paper. With the hotel doctor who treated my eye infection.

But I remain haunted by a friend who said he yearned to get out of Cuba — even for a brief visit somewhere. Anywhere at all.

"I want to see something else before I die," the friend said, "but I don't think so."