The year was 1989, and Cuban President Fidel Castro was sensing trouble ahead as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev spread his ideals of openness and reforms around the communist world.

Quietly, Castro sent an envoy to Mexico to buy the first batch of riot gear for Cuba's police, said author Norberto Fuentes, then a leading pro-Castro intellectual and now a refugee in Miami.

Ten years after the Berlin Wall collapsed on Nov. 9, 1989, and sparked the fall of regimes across Eastern Europe, the tear-gas grenades and helmets remain unused. Castro is still in power, defying the laws of communist gravity.

''If anyone saw the fall of communism coming, it was Fidel,'' Fuentes said. ''There were many who believed Cuba would follow Poland and the others, but Fidel is a man of many resources. He remains solid as a rock.''

Much has changed in those 10 years, as Castro and 11 million people were forced to pay a painfully high price and make concessions to survive the cutoff of massive Soviet subsidies and tightened U.S. economic sanctions.

In today's Cuba, the U.S. dollar rules and fuels a growing gap between those who eat regularly and those who can't. Foreign investors and tourists, once spurned as carriers of corrosive ideas, are now welcome. Corruption, crime and dissent are on the rise. The Roman Catholic Church is finding its voice.

Ironically, communism's virtual disappearance appears to have affected the U.S. views of Cuba more than Havana itself.

No longer a dangerous outpost of the Soviet empire, Cuba is now seen by Washington primarily as a potential immigration bomb, by U.S. business people as a promising market and by U.S. admirers as a redoubt of humanism.

EMBARGO AT ISSUE

The 37-year-old U.S. trade embargo is under attack as never before, with the U.S. farm lobby, pharmaceutical firms and even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce pressing for its abolishment.

The 1992 Cuban Democracy Act tightened some embargo provisions but widened the opportunities for cultural and academic exchanges and opened the doors to direct U.S.-Cuba telephone and mail links.

The 1996 Helms-Burton Act turned the embargo into law but could not stop the Baltimore Orioles from becoming the first Major League Baseball team to play in Cuba since 1959 or Illinois' George Ryan from being the first U.S. governor to visit Cuba since Castro seized power 40 years ago.

Thousands of Americans are now traveling to Cuba under President Clinton's policy of promoting people-to-people contacts. Others are going there illegally to look over the last communist regime in the West.

And after Pope John Paul II's visit to Cuba last year, a growing number of Cuban exiles have put aside their bitterness and called for reconciliation and support for a peaceful transition to democracy.

''There's been less change in either side than one might have expected, compared to the sea changes we saw in Eastern Europe . . . but there's been more change on the U.S. side than on the Cuban side,'' said Richard Nuccio, former Clinton advisor on Cuba.

SURVIVAL AMID DOWNFALL
Castro retained power through a harsh system of repression

When the Berlin Wall collapsed, setting off the chain reaction of communist collapses that ultimately led to the breakup of the Soviet Union itself, many people bet that Castro would be next.

Miami exiles talked of ''next year in Havana.'' In Cuba, Castro supporters suddenly befriended foreigners who might help them in a post-Castro era. Several media organizations, including The Herald, made plans for covering any emergencies.

But there's little mystery to how Castro managed to avoid becoming the tropical link in communism's daisy-chain death.

His repression machinery -- euphemistically known as ''social controls'' -- remains so all-encompassing that recent Eastern European visitors judged it as far harsher than anything they had experienced in their homelands.

''Forty years after the revolution, Castro maintains control through intimidation, repressive laws and by imprisoning dissidents,'' Jose Miguel Vivanco, the head of Human Rights Watch-Americas, said last week.

Castro, 73, still wears the mantle of a revolution that was highly popular at its birth, a bit like a tribal elder not always obeyed but never publicly challenged by the young warriors.

U.S. PLAYED ROLE

Antagonism from Washington and Miami exiles gave him ready excuses to throttle personal freedoms, and U.S. migration policies made it easy to export dissatisfaction with his regime.

''A Cuban prefers to risk his life on the Straits of Florida than risk his life throwing a Molotov cocktail at some government office,'' said Lisette Bustamante, a former Cuba Television correspondent exiled in Madrid.

Cuba's geographic isolation has also allowed Castro to control the flow of people and information from abroad far more effectively than his Eastern European counterparts.

''For Cubans, The Wall is an ocean,'' said Miami human rights activist Ruth Montaner. ''How can they tear down a wall that is made of water?''

While most East Germans could watch West German television, with its images of full store shelves and open political debates, Cuba still jams Radio Marti and restricts foreign TV broadcasts to tourist hotels.

Havana's government-run media make a point of carrying horror stories on the chaos in post-Soviet Russia and failing health and educational services in Eastern Europe, giving pause to Cubans who wish for change.

''Anyone invested in this system, any [communist] party or government official, has been made afraid of change,'' said a Western journalist in Havana. ''The fear of the unknown, of losing benefits, of vengeance from exiles, are powerful factors in the inertia that pervades this country.''

ECONOMIC FIXES

Aside from his political controls, Castro maneuvered effectively to patch the gaping holes punched in his economy by the end of Moscow's aid, which caused a 35 percent plunge in Cuba's gross national product from 1990 to 1993.

Legalizing the possession of U.S. dollars in effect opened the floodgates to remittances from Cubans abroad, now estimated at more than $600 million a year, Cuba's largest net source of hard currency.

Tourism grew by an average of 20 percent a year since 1992, bringing in $1.8 billion last year alone, and economic czar Carlos Lage reported last month that all productive sectors are on the rebound.

Subsidies to public enterprises that once lost millions of dollars have been slashed, unemployment is dropping, and Cuba is beginning to gain access to medium-term loans instead of depending on more expensive short-term credits, Lage told municipal presidents.

''The remaining problems are very large, but I believe that the difficulties, the complexities, the most difficult and dangerous challenges for the revolution have been overcome,'' he concluded.

WHAT DOES FUTURE HOLD?
Castro's hold is unbending, but the system could be fragile

Cuba has indeed survived. There has been no famine, no chaos, no public outbreaks of dissent among the ruling class. Those who support Castro say the revolution is solid, and dismiss doubts as dreaming by exiles.

But other analysts believe Castro's system is more fragile and carries the seeds of its breakdown, perhaps not in the near future but certainly a few years after Castro dies.

The communist ideology that once persuaded Cubans to sacrifice in order to build a better society disappeared long ago, especially among youth who have known only hardships of the post-Soviet crisis.

''The youth realize this national project is dead in the water,'' said Mauricio Font, head of a Cuban studies program at Queens College. ''They have spent their whole lives having illusions about it, but now there's a sense of lethargy and inertia, a sense of perplexity. Do you deny your entire life?''

''All the myths that I had based my life on went to hell,'' said Bustamante, the exiled TV correspondent, recalling her feelings as she watched the Berlin Wall collapse on television.

A NEW CLASS

The flood of remittances and legalization of small private enterprises such as family-owned restaurants have created a broad new class of Cubans who no longer depend on the government for their salaries and services.

Corruption has seeped into the highest levels of government with the arrival of foreign business people, and Cubans long accustomed to the petty thievery of state goods now speak of the existence of organized ''mafias.''

The Catholic Church is beginning to speak out about the future of society; a broad segment, from journalists to teachers and physicians, is establishing ''independent'' associations; and public dissidence continues to grow.

While still minuscule, the number of human rights activists in Cuba is larger than in Czechoslovakia in 1985, and far higher than the 12 dissidents who founded the East German opposition movement in the mid-1970s.

'CIVIL SOCIETY'?

''As little as five years ago, there wasn't a civil society in Cuba,'' said Nuccio, the former Clinton advisor. ''Today, there is a basis for arguing whether or not one exists.''

The Clinton administration is hoping to water those seeds of civil society so that they will help cushion any transition and avert a migration crisis.

But Castro has made it clear he intends to retain control and avoid significant economic reforms, and insisted that in the long run it will be capitalism, not Cuba, that collapses.

''The ingredients exist for a peaceful transition to a multiparty democracy and a market economy,'' said Montaner, the Miami human rights activist. ''But Fidel is not about to cook with those ingredients. He has his own recipe.''