The sun was diving toward the rooftops as I turned back around the corner onto Obispo Street. For today's man in Havana there is one more important thing about El Floridita. Next door on the second floor, through a separate entrance on Obispo Street, is the Casa del Ron, the House of Rum. Glasses and paper coasters are set up at a small, polished wooden bar set into the wall, waiting for visitors to try free samples of the bottles opened behind the bar. The Casa is stocked with almost every brand of rum produced in Cuba, and although the prices are not as low as in other places, the selection is the best. I sampled the rum, but did not buy, and returned to the street. Prices for Havana Club were better at Marina Hemingway, and I would not have to carry it far.
     "Señor." An old man beckoned to me. I thought he wanted me to buy a slightly ragged edition of Granma, the national newspaper mouthpiece of the revolution.
     "I'm sorry," I said in rough Spanish, "but I'm not able to read Spanish."
     "No," he said pulling a three by five card out of his pocket. He pointed to the words carefully printed on the card, separated by a horizontal line: Pen/Pluma. To make his point he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pencil stub less than an inch long. He was begging for a pen or pencil, hoping to trade the only thing he had to bargain with, the newspaper of the revolution. I quickly made the trade, defying the U.S. embargo once again, handing this "enemy" the ballpoint pen in my pocket. He thanked me and vanished into the crowd. Not ten minutes later, while I was sitting on a park bench changing film, the elderly woman next to me made the same request. Socialism has, in Cuba, created a very high level of literacy, estimated at 98.5 percent. I sighed and wondered: Is it better to know how to read and beg for a pen and understand your circumstances, or is it better to be illiterate and in the dark and assume your condition is nothing unusual?

     I glanced at my map of Havana and decided to take a different route back to the waterfront, down O'Reilly Street, then over on Cuba Street to see Cathedral Square at sunset, and back to the fort.

     Cuba Street quickly became one of my favorites. It is a residential neighborhood of people living jammed together in beautiful but collapsing sixteenth-century colonial homes and apartments. Where one family lived in a house before the revolution, there is now a family in each room of the house. Those hoping that Cubans will rise up against Castro should bear in mind that if the people who fled the revolution should return to claim their property, thousands of people, perhaps hundreds of thousands, would be out on the street. Not much of an incentive for revolution.

     I stuck my head into a doorway where a tangle of electrical wires and meters would have shocked an American housing inspector into unconsciousness, and a woman invited me in to take a look around. The beautiful tile floors had been torn up and rivers of dirt ran down them. In a central courtyard, laundry hung drying on ornate ironwork 300 years old. A boy, the woman's son, told me twenty-seven families lived here. He was polite, clean and cheerful.

     Along crumbling, faded Cuba Street the evening meal was being prepared behind open doorways; music drifted out, I could see figures dancing, and there was laughter. Cubans have a happiness gene that transcends socialism.

     Before the light failed completely I paused to take a picture of a young girl of about nine in a red jacket. She dodged behind the door every time I raised my camera, so finally I put it away. Then she stepped out into the street and made an "O" of the thumb and index finger of her left hand, and through the "O" she pumped the index finger of her right hand, beckoned to me, and pointed up a dilapidated staircase. It was the gesture of the world's oldest profession. I walked on, drained, wondering who exactly was for sale up those stairs — the child, the mother, a sister?

     It was dark when I reached Plaza de Armas and plunked down on a park bench to wait for the VW bus. The booksellers had folded up their displays and gone for the day. The street lights illuminated shadowy trees and fountains and a statue of a Cuban hero. In the dim light four boys were noisily playing baseball, and I moved over to watch them. They had the moves down pat, probably seen on television somewhere. The batter stood with arched back, cocky, defiant, the bat a few inches off his shoulder, ready. His bat was a piece of lath scavenged from a collapsing historic building. The pitcher sized him up, wound up and pitched, but the ball wobbled oddly. It was a hit, and it rolled toward my feet. I saw that it was not a ball at all. It was a small plastic bathtub duck. They had no ball. But the batter ran the bases and there was shouting and protests and laughing; it didn't matter about the ball. It was the game that mattered.

     I liked this place, Old Havana, and the resilience of the people. I felt at home in the park on a warm evening with the shadowy statue of some unknown hero watching over it. I had learned that a stranger must be very careful in Cuba. If you are not careful, Cuba will break your heart.

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