AS we started speaking about my visit, Father Jose Maria removed the telephone cord from the receiver in one deft, well-practiced move. I knew that move well from my youth in Communist Poland, when it was wise to assume not only that every telephone line was bugged but that each telephone could serve as a listening device. We were on the outskirts of one of Cuba's provincial cities, in a tiny reception room with decrepit furniture and peeling paint. Even though Fr. Jose had a rotund face that radiated good humor, there was an otherworldliness in his manner, like that of the Solidarity priests I knew in the old days in Poland. The Cuban secret service's favorite extermination method is simply running someone over with a police car, and Fr. Jose has had a couple of brushes with death recently.

But having faced martyrdom, he had clearly passed the threshold of fear. "What's this?" I pointed to an unframed painting with animals in jolly colors and a bold red hammer and sickle in the center. The Communist symbol was upside down, with a broken white line in the middle of the sickle leading up to a hut perched on top of the handle of the hammer. "It's an allegory of George Orwell's Animal Farm by our local artist," he explained. "The road markings on the sickle are meant to say that the road of the revolution leads to the pigsty."

Fr. Jose then explained how he would distribute the 500 doses of antibiotics donated by the Solidarity trade union that I had brought to prisoners, among them opposition activists who had received long sentences following the crackdown on dissent two years ago. (Medicines are crucial because one of the milder persecutions the regime metes out is spraying the cell walls with foul water, which gives inmates skin diseases in a matter of days.) Assistance like this, in addition to alleviating suffering, also gives the parish more clout, making it an enclave of civil society outside the regime's control. The regime knows this, of course, which is why all of Fr. Jose's requests for a permit to build a community center have been refused. Instead, the Communist government gives support to the local version of voodoo, which has fewer subversive foreign links.

IN THE COMMUNIST BASTION

I had arrived in Cuba as a tourist, bearing my Polish passport. My luggage was searched minutely. My heart raced when they discovered the box of antibiotics but, curiously, they didn't even ask me for whom such a large quantity of medicine was intended. Instead, the young customs officer focused on the copy of Playboy I had put next to the drugs. The centerfold perked him up and he called for his superior. Should we confiscate? I understood him asking. The older man let it pass; I was grateful to be thought of as just another degenerate Westerner.

My destination was one of the resorts on Cuba's southern coast, within driving distance of Guantanamo. Like other havens for foreigners, the resort was surrounded by a fence with guards on all sides, natives admitted as staff only. The clientele were mainly elderly Canadians and Europeans of the sort who enjoy organized gymnastics on the beach. There was something East German about the ambience: regimented entertainment and the identity checks at the gate. To my surprise there was Internet access for the foreigners. It was viable but slow, reputedly on account of scrupulous key logging by the Cuban secret service. I eavesdropped as one of the tourist groups staying at the hotel received a pep talk from an official minder, who berated them about the 636 attempts on the life of Fidel Castro that the CIA has supposedly organized. (Surely, they cannot be that incompetent?)

For a former inmate of the camp of progress such as myself, visiting Cuba was peculiar. I felt 20 years younger at the sight of a grubby collective farm named after Lenin. Groups of Communist Youth in red ties such as I had myself resisted wearing at school lined the streets. Communist slogans by the roadside were familiar too--ambitious in rhetoric, pathetic as advertising. Above all, acres and acres of land with no master and therefore littered and overgrown. "Commies love concrete," P. J. O'Rourke observed after a visit to Warsaw, and nothing has changed. And it's not the concrete you see in Italy, the kind that contains so much marble dust it looks like reconstituted stone. Commies like their concrete poured slothfully, creating a patina so dull it positively soaks up light. I had been brought up in Poland on a Communist housing estate, which was bad enough, but here, in the tropics, houses with flat roofs, their concrete walls overgrown with mold, look even more preposterous. Inside there are unplastered walls, weak bulbs hanging on their own wires, doors as rough as a barn's. TVsets and ghetto-blasters stand in rooms that are otherwise medieval in their primitiveness. One gasps to think how hot it must be under those flat roofs at the height of summer without air conditioning.