Age may be Fidel Castro's greatest triumph. Against all odds, the revolution he led celebrates the 40th anniversary of its victory on Jan. 1.
Little over those decades has turned out the way anyone expected. But almost every Cuban life has been radically transformed: some for better, some for worse, and some for Miami.
The revolution has outlived decades of U.S. attempts to overthrow it. The Soviet ally has long outlived the Soviet motherland. Spanish hotels are now more important than Russian missiles.
And yet, as in the bygone times of John F. Kennedy, Nikita Krushchev and Francisco Franco, Castro remains firm, vowing ``socialism or death.''
The era began shortly after midnight on Jan. 1, 1959, when dictator Fulgencio Batista, his army crumbling, fled by airplane from Havana's Camp Columbia to exile in the Dominican Republic.
Soon afterward, Castro appeared in the eastern city of Santiago to make his first speech as the country's apparent new leader.
``I am not interested in power nor do I envisage assuming it at any time,'' he told celebrating supporters.
Cuban independence hero Jose Marti -- not Karl Marx -- had been the guiding spirit of insurrection. The rebels promised multiparty elections. Their support extended far into Cuba's middle and upper classes, weary of Batista's thuggish regime.
In magazine advertisements, Coca-Cola welcomed ``the resurgence of democratic liberties.'' The magazine Bohemia ran grisly photographs of people tortured or killed by Batista's police and editorials insisting the revolution was not socialist.
Even the U.S. government tentatively welcomed Castro, though shadows appeared within days as circus-like people's courts -- apparently with popular support -- began taking revenge on alleged war criminals of the Batista regime.
About 200 people were executed within three weeks, causing international protests. Historian Hugh Thomas estimated 5,000 people might have been executed by 1970, though in more recent years capital punishment has been rare.
``Fidel always had support, always had and has it,'' said Faustino Cruz Acosta, then a 44-year-old contractor from Jovellanos, 75 miles east of Havana on the route of Castro's January 1959 procession to the capital.
If one of the revolutionary leaders returned to visit, ``the whole town would come out to see him again,'' Cruz said. ``Whether they eat or do not eat is another matter.''
The new, proudly nationalist government clashed frequently with the United States as it steadily moved to the left -- enacting land reforms, nationalizing U.S. oil companies, trading with socialist countries.
U.S. officials who at first welcomed Castro began backing efforts to topple him. That led to the CIA-organized Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 -- at the same time Castro declared for the first time that Cuba's revolution was socialist.
With U.S. trade cut off, the government leaped toward a Soviet-style economy even as Castro took control of the Cuban communist party. Opposition parties were banned and opponents were muzzled, accused of backing Yankee efforts to topple the government.
Within a few years, most private farms and all private businesses had been expropriated.
Cruz's family lost about 120 acres. In exchange, he receives a pension of 130 pesos a month -- now worth about $6.50 on the free market.
Many people fled and others remained neutral or silent. But Castro kept the allegiance of many Cubans thrilled by his defiance of the United States or happy at the sweeping social programs that dramatically improved Cuba's health and education.
In 1961, 300,000 volunteers spread across the island to educate Cuba's 985,000 illiterates using textbooks with phrases such as ``We win liberty, guided by Fidel.''
Half of Cuba's 6,000 doctors fled Cuba shortly after the revolution. But today the country boasts a surplus of doctors -- 62,000 for a population of 11 million.
Almost every neighborhood has a free family doctor who has morning office hours and goes house-to-house in the afternoons.
Dr. Ernesto del Pino, a 26-year-old internist at a Havana neighborhood clinic, makes less than $15 a month. But he receives rice rations good for about one serving a day, plus some beans, some oil, a bit of ground meat.
``Without the revolution, it would not have been possible for me to study medicine,'' he said.
The farmers market a block from the clinic sells beans for 80 cents a pound, cassava for 5 cents a pound, tomatoes or cabbage for 8 cents a pound and some meats for about $1 a pound.
Cuban salaries average about $10 a month. Some pensions are as little as $3.
With free housing, Cuban rations were once generous enough that most people could save money on such salaries. But the collapse of communism in eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991 ended huge economic subsidies from the Soviet bloc and forced dramatic cutbacks.
Castro's government adopted measures it had once seen as socialist heresy: foreign capitalist investment, legal use of dollars, small-scale private businesses and some private sale of farm produce.
Today, dollars from tourism and more than $500 million a year sent to relatives from Cubans abroad help keep the economy afloat.
The government blames dollars and tourism for an upsurge of street crime and prostitution -- vices that had almost been wiped out after the revolution.
Yet even those who practice a bit of private capitalism often admire Cuba's socialist heroes.
``Che means a lot to us,'' said Luis Madero, who farms a small private vegetable patch beside a monument to revolutionary hero Ernesto ``Che'' Guevara in the central city of Santa Clara.
He admires Guevara's practice in the early 1960s of leaving his office as planning minister in Havana to ``pass the day working as a laborer.''
The refugee exodus began with Batista and his cronies, then spread across the wealthy and middle classes in 1960 and 1961 as Cuba veered toward socialism. By the early 1990s, Cubans were fleeing largely to escape a stultifying economy.
The refugees and their offspring total roughly 1 million today.
The Havana they left behind is still largely intact physically, if crumbling.
Ten families live in the former house of Rafael Diaz Balart, an undersecretary in Batista's government and the father of the vociferously anti-Castro U.S. Rep. Lincoln Diaz Balart.
A peeling memory of paint clings to the once-elegant house that rises above a rutted street overhung with untrimmed trees.
On one side of the house Rosa Rodriguez and Orlando Echeverria share a small apartment with their 16-year-old daughter.
Rodriguez's father, Emilio, was given the apartment as a wounded veteran of the struggle against Batista. But Emilio abandoned Cuba in 1980. Money he sends from New York has helped the family buy a stereo and puts food on the table.
``If my family calls for me, I will go,'' Rodriguez said when asked about leaving Cuba. ``But not for me.
``This one,'' she said, nodding at her daughter, ''is crazy to leave.''
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press