Cuba's economy lies in tatters. Finding food is a daily battle. Moral rot is setting in. Buildings are caving in. The U.S. dollar rules, and mocks President Fidel Castro's calls for an egalitarian society.

At least one million Cubans have fled his rule, many by jumping into the sea. Just this year, 450,000 applied for U.S. visas, essentially saying that, for whatever reason, they prefer to live with his archfoes.

Friday, New Year's Day, will be the 40th anniversary of Castro's rule. He has governed longer than any other Latin American ruler this century, and as long as Moses led the Jews in their search for Israel.

Castro today is still trekking through the wilderness, in search of the promised land of communism. But his pledges of deliverance for the Cuban people ring more hollow every day.

Under Castro, Cuba has nevertheless notched undeniable advances in health, education and social welfare. The island is now a tourism and sports powerhouse, an exporter of doctors and biotechnology.

Havana has a growing number of international friends who back it with votes in world organizations, send it development aid and offer it trade and commercial credits.

Castro has survived decades of U.S. efforts to topple or assassinate him, and he boasts that Cuba is now free of foreign controls, be they Spanish, U.S. or Soviet, for the first time in 100 years.

``Yes, it has survived. And yes, it has created a sense of national honor. No two ways about it. But at what price?'' asked Irving Louis Horowitz, an expert on Cuba and Rutgers University professor.

One price: democracy.

There are no opposition parties. No real elections. No free media. There is jail or exile for dissidents. Neighborhood snitch squads, Rapid Reaction Brigades and Acts of Repudiation.

``In my 40 years, I have known only one president. I have heard only one speech. I have had only one alternative,'' dissident journalist Manuel Vazquez wrote in a column marking Castro's four decades in power.

Another price: the economy.

The end of $4 billion to $5 billion a year in Soviet aid in 1991 -- and, Havana insists, the U.S. embargo -- left the island in tatters.

Cuba, which in 1957 had Latin America's third- or fourth-largest economy, ranked 16th or 17th in 1997. The United Nations' Human Development Index lists Cuba toward the bottom among 35 Western Hemisphere countries in 1997, ahead of only Peru, the Dominican Republic, Paraguay, Guatemala, El Salvador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Honduras and Haiti.

Today, the revolution is more like a grand society matron who has slipped into shabbiness, wearing threadbare clothes and living in a once grand, now crumbling mansion.

``I call it the Macondo Syndrome,'' said University of Pittsburgh economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago, after the mythical town in a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. ``That town came out of nothing, had a boom with coffee or bananas . . . and after that went into a very rapid decline, went back to dust.''
GOALS
Achievements fall short

Foes who want the autumn of the patriarch to turn into winter may have long to wait.

The 72-year-old Castro's hands shake occasionally, his beard is gray and wispy, his walk is unsteady at times. He is clearly not the young rebel who forced President Fulgencio Batista to flee abroad on Jan. 1, 1959.

But rumors of fatal ailments have always proved wrong, and he has time and again cunningly maneuvered to ensure his regime's survival by accepting measures that he had rejected in years past.

After the Soviet collapse, Havana opened the doors to foreign tourists and investors, legalized the dollar and farmers' markets, and allowed ``selfemployment'' for people like plumbers and hairdressers to help Cubans make ends meet.

Other, less visible, reforms may promise significant changes in the long run. Bent on boosting the productivity of state enterprises, Castro has recently allowed a degree of decentralization that was unthinkable before 1991.

Enterprise managers who once answered directly to central planners in Havana now have more power to hire, fire and set production quotas, and are developing strong voices at the municipal and regional levels.

Cuba now seems to be headed toward what Horowitz called ``communism with a capitalist face'' -- using as few open-market tools as necessary to ensure the survival of its socialist bulk.

But those goals are a long way from the promises that Castro made in 1959, and far from the levels of progress Cuba achieved with Soviet subsidies up to 1990.
ECONOMY
Living standards lag

British historian Sir Hugh Thomas wrote recently that the island now has ``a 19th Century economy'' with living standards ``at less than half'' what they might have been without the revolution.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and its communist satellite regimes in eastern Europe, the Cuban economy shrank by 35 to 40 percent between 1991 and 1994. The government estimates it will take until 2004 just to return to 1985 levels. Meanwhile, life grinds on.

The average monthly salary of 207 pesos -- worth $9.85 -- buys just nine pounds of pork. Most consumer goods are rationed. Housing is in desperately short supply, and buildings collapse from lack of repairs. Cars and gasoline are so expensive that bicycles rule the streets.

Foreign investments are small compared to those in the rest of the hemisphere, and Horowitz said he would bet ``that there are fewer fax machines in all of the island than in one square block of the Miami business district.''

Havana now survives largely on the estimated $400 million to $600 million that Cubans abroad, most of them in the United States, send to relatives on the island each year, as well as on booming tourism and a destitute sugar industry.

``The two big economic complaints of Fidel during the Batista years -- too much reliance on tourism and . . . sugar -- have now been repeated. Tourism was this foreign evil . . . and now look at the country,'' said economist Mesa-Lago, who was born in Cuba.

``The Cuban Revolution, as we've known it over the past 40 years, is essentially dead,'' said Wayne Smith, the top U.S. diplomat in Havana in 1979-82 and now a critic of U.S. policies on Cuba. ``The revolution's gains were real enough to the people, but they weren't based on reality.''
HEALTH
Progress and setbacks

Cuba's public health system remains the pride of the revolution, a free system that has attained first-world levels on many fronts.

Its infant mortality rate last year hit 7.2 per 1,000 births, the lowest in all Latin America and among the world's 25 best. Its life expectancy of 75.3 years is only one year behind that of the United States.

Cuba now has one doctor per 160 people, enough to assign one to every neighborhood, hire out 450 to South Africa and send 150 to Central America in the wake of Hurricane Mitch.

Eleven childhood diseases like polio have been eliminated. Biotechnology centers are working on everything from AIDS and hepatitis vaccines to new treatments for Parkinson's disease.

Government figures are generally regarded as credible, despite unconfirmed reports of occasional manipulations -- for example, raising the threshold for diagnosing anemia to lower the number of cases reported.

But the health system has slumped since Soviet subsidies ended and -- critics of U.S. policies say -- since the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act restricted the sale of medicines to Cuba by foreign subsidiaries of U.S.-owned firms.

A 1997 report by the Cuban Health Ministry and the U.N.'s World Health Organization said that annual surgical procedures dropped by 40 percent from 1990 to 1995 because of shortages of medicines and equipment.

Nearly 70 percent of medical facilities had deteriorated, the Health Ministry report added, and the percentage of people with access to safe drinking water dropped from 90 percent in 1989 to 40 percent in 1994, sparking outbreaks of several diseases.

Many doctors, who earn about $20 a month, often skip their government jobs so they can do other work, like driving taxis, that brings them U.S. dollars.

And the quality of recent medical school graduates is suspect. In 1996, Jamaica ended a 20-year-old policy of allowing Cuba-trained doctors to work there, saying a review found ``shortcomings with aspects of their training.''

A study last year by the American Association for World Health, the U.S. branch of the World Health Organization, concluded that the U.S. embargo and the Cuban Democracy Act have had a ``devastating'' impact on Cuba's health system.

Embargo supporters scoffed at the study, noting that Cuba is free to buy medicine from other countries and arguing that its medical shortages are tied more directly to its economic ruin.

Cuba, perhaps embarrassed by the grim picture painted by the study, denied its central theme. ``One cannot say the embargo has had a disastrous impact on the health of the Cuban people,'' Health Minister Carlos Dotres said.
EDUCATION
Advances, limitations

Cuba's public education system remains an impressive achievement, free from primary school through all of the country's 47 university centers.

Cuba had one teacher per 13.7 students in 1996, and a 95.7 percent literacy rate in 1997 that was Latin America's highest. It also has a nationwide average eighth-grade education and one of the highest overall enrollment rates in the hemisphere -- 96 percent of all youngsters through the sixth grade.

A study issued this month by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization said Cuba's third- and fourth-grade students scored higher in language and math tests than those in other Latin American nations tested.

But the system suffers from politics and shortages.

Most curricula still require Marxist studies, and the Ministry of Education's Resolution 713 has long mandated that teachers put their lessons into government-approved political and social contexts.

``The advances cannot be argued, but it is a manipulated education that twists every topic to government views,'' said Miriam Garcia, a former teacher who now heads the dissident Cuban Teachers Association.

Many textbooks are decades old, classrooms are decrepit, computers in schools are rare, and surfing the Internet is not allowed. Only specially designated compañeros can carry out Internet searches for others.

Teachers have recently been quitting in droves in search of better salaries -- a starting primary-school teacher earns $8 a month and a college professor about $13.

Most bothersome to parents is that many pre-university students are sent to rural boarding schools known for their sexual promiscuity, long hours of required manual labor and steady doses of Marxist indoctrination.

Pope John Paul II drew some of the most enthusiastic applause when he blasted that system during his January visit.
ARTS, SPORTS
AND CHURCH
Openings and failures

The Cuban Revolution has unquestionably produced an important number of sports champions and artists, from writers to painters, movie directors, ballet dancers, musicians and poets.

But many have fled abroad, some in search of U.S. dollars, some to escape the ideological blinders that have been relaxed in recent years but still exist.

``Poets belong next to the people,'' said Carlos Marti, head of the Union of Cuban Writers and Artists, in a hard-line speech this autumn that chilled the spines of many Cuban intellectuals.

And after decades of official atheism, the Roman Catholic Church scored many gains before and after John Paul's visit, most significantly the return of Christmas as a day off from work. The government let in about 50 new foreign missionaries and permitted several outdoor processions.

But Cuba, alone in Latin America, bans the church from running parochial schools. It has forced at least two foreign missionaries to leave the country in the past two years, and sometimes rejects requests for permits for outdoor processions.

Most significantly, Cubans now complain of a widespread breakdown in morals and ethical values. They blame it on poverty, tourism and the growing gap between the well-off who have access to dollars and the poor who don't.

Violent street crime is rising. Prostitutes, both female and male, openly proposition foreign tourists along Havana's main streets. Theft from government stocks is rampant.

``Stealing from the government is not theft. It's life,'' said Victor Gomez, an 18-year-old Havana student visiting Miami.

And the gap between rich and poor is growing, causing tensions between those who receive dollars from relatives in Miami and those who don't or won't -- army and internal security officers, Communist Party officials.

So troubling is the gap that some primary schools asked parents this year not to send their children to class with new sneakers, backpacks or even ``extravagant lunches,'' Havana teacher Luz Maria de Ojeda said.

This rending of society's fabric worries Cuba watchers.

``This breakdown . . . is identical to what happened before the collapse of the Soviet Union,'' said the current chief of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana, Michael Kozak, in a recent speech in Dallas.

``As matters now stand, I believe there is a grave risk that even if the Castro regime manages to avoid an economic collapse before President Castro dies, it will produce a chaotic situation . . . within a short period after his demise,'' Kozak added.

None of these failures appear to have disheartened Castro, the last communist ruler in the Western Hemisphere and one of four left in the world, along with those in China, North Korea and Vietnam.

He not only remains committed to centralized socialism -- and still closes speeches with the slogan ``Socialism or Death'' -- but has positioned himself as the leader of a campaign to rescue communism for the world.

Soviet-style communism did not fall because it was flawed, he argues, but because it was badly run. And Moscow's current chaos proves that its attempt to shift to a market economy was ``the biggest mistake in history.''

Castro has attacked the privatization of state enterprises as ``savage neoliberalism,'' has called the International Monetary Fund ``the kiss of death,'' and has argued that capitalism will collapse in the next 100 years, if not sooner.

Globalization is good, Castro says, as long as it means the globalization of socialist values, not capitalism.

As a young prisoner in one of Batista's jails in 1953, Castro wrote an impassioned manifesto defending his revolutionary ideals, History Will Absolve Me.

History may yet do that. But 40 years after he seized power, the first draft of history appears headed toward a different verdict.

Monday: Forty years after Castro seized power, U.S. sanctions designed to impel his communist regime toward change are under one of the strongest assaults marshaled by public opinion leaders. Some analysts are predicting a nibbling around the edges of U.S. policy.