The post offers a rare glimpse into the well-being of the aging political icon who — judging by the lack of in-person coverage — seems to not allow such intimate meetings to be used as fodder for feature stories. 

The Atlantic story that inspired Fidel to arrange the visit was "The Point of No Return," Goldberg's piece on nuclear tension between Iran and Israel that provided the cover for this month's issue. "Fidel to Ahmadinejad" — which is the first of a five-part first-person account of the three-day visit — contains extended discourse from Castro on Iran's anti-Israel policy and, as Goldberg puts it, "the consequences of theological anti-Semitism." Fidel makes no bones about his profound dislike of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his Holocaust denial and couples the views of Iran's president with a story of his own introduction to anti-Semitism as a child.

But the most gripping thing about the post may be the sheer amount of access Goldberg gets. Such an opportunity cannot be afforded to most writers, of course, and Goldberg takes full advantage. Judging by some of the quotes, it turns out Fidel's wit has ripened with age.

His body may be frail, but his mind is acute, his energy level is high, and not only that: the late-stage Fidel Castro turns out to possess something of a self-deprecating sense of humor. When I asked him, over lunch, to answer what I've come to think of as the Christopher Hitchens question — has your illness caused you to change your mind about the existence of God? — he answered, "Sorry, I'm still a dialectical materialist."

Perhaps the biggest revelation comes during a discussion that veered toward the missile crisis, when Fidel admitted to having doubts about telling the Soviets to bomb the U.S. in the event of an American attack on Cuba. Goldberg's asked whether he regretting the advice he gave the Soviets and Castro said, "After I've seen what I've seen, and knowing what I know now, it wasn't worth it all." 

James Fallows has a post at The Atlantic that went up later today about this last nugget from the sit-down. And there are sure to be more accounts of "Fidel being Fidel" to come from Goldberg in the next few days, especially judging by the teaser the closes out today's post. Goldberg plans to use a question Fidel asked him as a jumping-off point: "Would you like to go to the aquarium with me to see the dolphin show?"

This is, in fact, Jack Kerouac’s favorite New York dive bar. At least, it used to be.

Though, initially, you’d be hard-pressed to figure that out. The exterior signage beams “Havana Central” in radiant neon, while the venue’s historic title, “The West End,” appears in black, at about half the size.

The site of Mr. Merrin’s new hybrid brand, Havana Central at the West End, remains a nearly century-old Morningside Heights landmark, mostly for its connection to Beat writers like Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs—a past (and now decades-old marketing tool) that the new proprietor plans to use.

Starting foremost with a grand reopening this Friday, which marks the end of a drastic six-month, $2.5 million face-lifting and identity-altering makeover of what locals stubbornly still call “The West End.”

While Mr. Merrin’s two other Havana Central locations in Manhattan occupy far less venerable spaces, the emergence of his growing Cuban-themed restaurant chain isn’t entirely unwelcome on a block already occupied by formula retailers Aerosole and Häagen Dazs. In fact, Mr. Merrin characterized the hallowed venue’s striking overhaul as carrying on with tradition.

“The West End has changed hands a number of times and each owner has contributed to its ongoing evolution, but, essentially, they have all acted as caretakers of the legacy of what has become a New York institution,” Mr. Merrin said in a written statement. “As the latest in that succession I take my responsibility very seriously, which is why Havana Central at The West End will embrace a ‘burgers and beer sensibility’ along with a commitment to an authentic Cuban dining experience.”

The burgers, careful readers will note, are on the back of the menu.

It’s the first time in six decades that any owner has so significantly and pre-emptively altered the eatery’s hallowed name, which former owner Sid Roberts’ father bestowed upon the place in 1946, around the time it was first establishing its bebop-era cred.

Mr. Merrin, a former jeweler whose family once ran Merrin Jewelers, is a lifelong resident of the Upper West Side and a Columbia alum—in business, not English nor history. So he deserves at least some credit for trying to temper this corporate chain-store takeover with a sprinkling of historic preservation.

As part of Friday’s festivities, frequenters of the former West End are invited to come share their memories of the way the place used to be, as part of an ongoing oral-history project. You know, for the sake of posterity.

As a reward for their video-recorded statements, participants will receive a platter of complimentary empanadas.

Mr. Roberts, the former owner who sold the place in 1977, is slated to be among the first speakers. In keeping with the event’s historic-preservation shtick, management plans to unveil a commemorative plaque, dedicating Mr. Roberts’ favorite booth, in a private ceremony early in the evening.

It’s a far better fate than that afforded the Beats’ old corner booth, once located in the back of the restaurant. That, according to one employee, was dismantled during recent renovations to make way for new tables.

Framed black-and-white photos of such famous former West End frequenters as Kerouac and jazz great Dizzy Gillespie, however, are slated for hanging in coming weeks upon the freshly touched-up walls.

At least one employee queried by Counter Espionage approved of Mr. Merrin’s sweeping changes to the place. Julie, a bartender, who claimed to have also worked under previous ownership, described the venue’s new incarnation as “a lot cleaner” and “better overall” than its prior state of affairs.

Mr. Merrin has further pledged to reinstate an old West End tradition that some owners seemed to have forgotten: live music, including a jazz band during Sunday brunch.

Those Beats, you know—big brunchers.

Indeed, mocking a then-popular Times promotional slogan, William F. Buckley Jr. headlined a 1961 magazine story on Matthews with “I Got My Job Through the New York Times: How one man’s opinion, disseminated through an influential newspaper, helped put Castro in power.” It was an assessment The Times’ own publisher and abashed editors came to agree with. Following his now-legendary 1957 front-page sit-down with Mr. Castro in the guerrilla leader’s mountaintop hideout, Matthews was thought too emotionally close to the story to render it objectively, and was initially barred from returning to Havana as a foreign correspondent.

What followed was a decade-long war within The New York Times’ newsroom, one that ran in tandem with the actual battles being waged in Cuba. Mr. DePalma’s book expertly intertwines these two historical strands, unearthing internal memos from The Times’ own archives (many of which are every bit as colorfully acrimonious as their latter-day e-mail counterparts), as well as Matthews’ personal correspondence and now-declassified F.B.I. records (including surveillance by a fellow Times reporter). There’s plenty of juicy grist for Kremlinologists of both stripes—Times-ian and Cuban.

The first myth to be demolished by Mr. DePalma is that Matthews’ fawning profile of Fidel was the product of an impressionable cub reporter. The 56-year-old Matthews was anything but green, though his Times résumé was checkered: His Spanish Civil War reportage alongside Ernest Hemingway had already drawn flak from editors worried about his pro-Loyalist bias. Any reservations were overruled by then-publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, with whom Matthews had developed a close personal relationship. In fact, Sulzberger eventually granted Matthews a unique position on The Times’ editorial board—the first and last time in the paper’s history in which a reporter was allowed to pen both news stories and unsigned editorials.

It was from this privileged roost that Matthews swept into Havana in 1957, itching to land a career-capping story and, in the derisive opinion of one colleague, live out his “Lawrence of Arabia” fantasies one last time.

Slipping past police roadblocks in an all-night drive to meet the rebel leader—then presumed dead—he certainly found plenty of stirring source material. In a series of articles, he presented to the world a dashing Fidel Castro, a Robin Hood whose only goal was to end the Batista dictatorship and usher in free elections. Just as crucially, whereas in reality Castro had perhaps two dozen poorly equipped men under his personal command, Matthews estimated his strength at upwards of 1,000—and growing daily. (It wasn’t the last instance of Matthews’ failed intelligence-gathering skills that Mr. DePalma wryly compares to those of Ms. Miller.) The results “did not create Fidel from nothing,” Mr. DePalma observes of the ensuing publicity, “but they did change his image from hotheaded loser to noble rogue with broad ideals, a characterization that appealed to a large spectrum of Cubans as well as Americans.”

Ironically, the sharpest rejoinder to Matthews came from The Times’ own Havana bureau chief, Ruby Hart Phillips, and over the next few years the paper was full of dueling accounts: Was Fidel Castro a Soviet stalking horse or a misunderstood democrat? Were the newly victorious rebel army’s firing squads producing a “blood bath” on the flimsiest of evidence, or were they merely administering rough justice in the name of the greater social good? It all depended under whose byline the story ran, Phillips or Matthews.

Meanwhile, Matthews’ involvement was ranging beyond his typewriter as he provided counsel to policymakers. Mr. DePalma notes that his input was influential in the hiring and firing of ambassadors to Cuba, in ending the arms sales to Batista (which sealed his fate) and in producing the ambivalent U.S. response to Castro’s initial months in office. As with Iraq, the State Department (where Matthews had the ear of the Cuba desk) hoped for an accommodation of some sort, while the Defense Department angled for a military strike. Accordingly, it was the desire to distance themselves from Matthews which helped persuade Times editors to defang their Bay of Pigs exposé, lest they be accused of tipping off Castro to the C.I.A.’s invasion plans.

However, by January 1962, a new publisher was in place at The Times, and Orvil E. Dryfoos shared little of his predecessor’s affection for Matthews. The result was a memo from on high which rivals in its bluntness 2002’s notorious inter-office e-mail demanding “we have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times”: “I trust that Herbert Matthews will remain: 1.) out of the news 2.) and not write for the news department.”

It’s not surprising that Matthews persisted in his cherished illusions. After all, he was hardly the only one to fall for Castro’s charms—Miami is full of figures, from business moguls to erstwhile comrades-in-arms, who can speak eloquently to their own rude awakenings. And among creative types, from Oliver Stone to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, there still exists a storied tradition of acting as Castro’s apologist. (Castro has publicly boasted of using Mr. Garcia Marquez in the late 90’s as a back-channel envoy to President Bill Clinton.)

What’s shocking is that The Times allowed Matthews to dispense his folly for so long. He wrote editorials arguing that Cuba had no designs on its regional neighbors even as Che Guevara embarked on his doomed Bolivian insurrection; and as late as December 1966, eight months before his retirement, after 45 years at the paper, he was still injecting tsuris into the heart of yet a third Times publisher, Arthur Ochs (Punch) Sulzberger.

Like any old-school Times vet, Mr. DePalma largely reserves judgment through all this, remaining coolly dispassionate as Matthews eerily echoes Castro’s own belief that “history will absolve me” and returns to Cuba for one last trip in 1972, gathering material for what he hoped would be a score-settling tome. At the very moment when homosexuals, hippies and anyone else deemed “counterrevolutionary” were being rounded up and sent to forced-labor camps—a chilling period recalled in Reinaldo Arenas’ 1992 memoir, Before Night Falls—Matthews felt that the island’s rulers had at last “struggled through to something good for Cuba, and something that is at last beginning to succeed.”

It’s in his book’s last pages that Mr. DePalma finally sets his dogged evenhandedness aside and deftly carves up Matthews. “It is certainly arguable that the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban peoples are better off under Communism than under their previous regimes,” Matthews opines in his final unpublished manuscript, completed just before his death in 1977—a viewpoint Mr. DePalma isn’t about to let stand. He closes The Man Who Invented Fidel by traveling to the same jungle-shrouded spot in Cuba where Matthews first met Castro, and then speaks with the now-elderly local farmers in whose name the revolution was first waged. His discovery? “Only the calendar year seems to have changed.” Area families remain dirt poor, without even electricity, paralyzed into submission by their fear of a police state and waiting—praying—for Castro to finally die so a better future might emerge. “The sheer desperation of the scene stunned me. All the rancor and bloodshed of half a century, for this? How could so little have changed, when so much has changed?”

But don’t blame The Times for any of this. “Castro could have triumphed without Matthews,” Mr. DePalma insists, and he’s quick to share out responsibility to the horde of reporters who initially parroted Matthews’ take on the revolution, as well as uninformed U.S. diplomats in Batista-era Havana and their equally clueless counterparts in Washington, D.C.

Anthony DePalma coyly leaves it to the reader to substitute the word Iraq for Cuba, dancing right up to the obvious parallels. But while he may be unwilling to compare and contrast l’affaire Judy with the Matthews debacle, The Times’ current stewards would seem to have the similarities firmly in mind. As Mr. DePalma quips in the acknowledgements, executive editor Bill Keller “winced when he heard that I was writing about Matthews after so many unflattering books about the newspaper were being published.” No doubt.

Brett Sokol has written about Cuban culture and politics for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Vibe magazine.

Certainly there is no escape from the inevitable disaster that befell the 40 courageous passengers and crewmembers aboard United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco, the fourth hijacked plane on that fateful day when terrorism erupted on the American landscape. We know what happened. We know how it ends. And still, this sad and gripping movie—revealing the mounting tension of events in “real time” of approximately one hour, 45 minutes—leaves you limp and devastated.

It is not the kind of movie that used to inspire preview audiences on their way out of a “sneak” to jot down reactions like “Give us more like this one!” But United 93 is a much better realized and more professionally executed movie than I expected, and it affects us all. Yes, it happened here!

Writer-director Paul Greengrass leaves nothing to the imagination. From the pre-dawn prayers of the terrorists in a motel room in Newark to the final surge of heroism and honor when the passengers fought to regain control of the plane from their hijackers a little more than 90 minutes after takeoff, you get the anatomy of aggression and rebellion that signifies the dangerous DNA of a terrifying new world of global terrorism. Unaware that three other flights were simultaneously heading for their targets at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the people on Flight 93 were going about their early-morning rituals—men reading newspapers, tourists studying maps of Yosemite, housewives anxious to get home, seniors gloating over photos of their grandkids, pretty flight attendants serving gossip with the breakfast snacks—when the pilots first heard about the chaos at the air-traffic control centers on the ground and the smoke that was encircling Manhattan.

Panic did not implode until the four terrorists on board rose from their seats with a homemade bomb, invaded the cockpit and killed both United pilots, then rerouted the plane toward the nation’s capital. Contacting their families on cell phones and credit-card-activated Airfones, the passengers were stunned, then anguished, then hysterical, finally seizing the need to switch into control mode. The most nerve-frying thing about the whole ordeal, in retrospect, is the confusion, the mixed signals from the F.A.A., the erroneous information and the short-circuitry of the shock waves, on the plane and among both the air controllers and the military. Mr. Greengrass is careful not to affix blame, but a gasp went through the audience when it is finally revealed that the military couldn’t get permission or clearance to dispatch fighter planes to the rescue because nobody could find President George W. Bush. Flight 93 crashed at 10:03 a.m. in a field near Shanksville, Penn. At 10:18 a.m., Dubya finally came to life, ordering military action. All I could think of was the cynical lyrics to the politically satirical Johnny Mercer song, “The Country’s in the Very Best of Hands.” Not so funny in this context, but true enough to turn your blood cold.

The production values are excellent. The camerawork captures the claustrophobic action and chaos on board, even the sweat and near-nervous collapse of the four terrorists. Mr. Greengrass avoids sentimentality, even in the intimate last-minute cell-phone goodbyes. A large cast of unknowns contributes strongly to the authenticity of this film. It wouldn’t have the same impact with Brad Pitt as the gay rugby player, Mark Bingham; Tom Cruise as the pilot, Capt. Jason Dahl; or Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan as the brave flight attendants who gathered all of the knives, forks and fire extinguishers for the passengers to use as weapons.

The heroism of the 40 people who made a group decision not to die without a fight really leaves you slack-jawed. I also admire the way every effort has been made to give the film maximum realism with a moment-to-moment naturalism that often seems improvised. The actors are all salient to the facts amassed in exhaustive research; even the hijackers are perfect. (They were not from Iraq!) All told, United 93 is an exemplary attempt to relive history, inspired and powerful. Personally, I have survived all I want to about 9/11. Isn’t it time to resurface, regroup, reorganize and move on? This is just one aspect of a national tragedy that is still too recent to revisit without anxiety. I don’t want to live—or die—through another one anytime soon.

Andy’s Cuba

For Andy Garcia, The Lost City is a long-time dream come true: a passionate valentine to his native Cuba that recaptures the glamour, sensuality and decadence of Havana in 1958, when it was nearing the end of the Mardi Gras reign of General Batista and shivering under the storm cloud of pre-Castro revolution. You gotta call this one a genuine labor of love. Wallowing in nostalgia in his directorial debut, the fearless and versatile actor (he was last seen on the screen playing Modigliani), who also co-produced it, co-wrote the script and even composed the musical score himself, spent almost 20 years getting The Lost City on the screen. Here at last, the finished product arrives—with mixed blessings. Sincerely conceived and beautifully photographed in lush tropical colors that intoxicate, it’s too long, politically confusing and painfully self-indulgent, loaded with too many tertiary characters and darting from one subplot to the next like a butterfly with hiccups.

The labyrinthine plot revolves around the affluent Fellove family, headed by an upper-class professor of philosophy who abhors the corruption of Batista’s capitalist dictatorship, preaches democratic reform and raises his three sons to support the right causes. Mr. Garcia plays eldest son, Fico, the owner of the glittery El Tropico nightclub, a tourist attraction where the rum flows and the floor shows are lavish. An apolitical observer who never makes waves, enjoys the perks of a fluid economy and records the changing times with his video camera, Fico uses his popular club as a buffer from the winds of revolution. Meanwhile, his handsome younger brothers, Ricardo (Enrique Murciano) and Luis (Nestor Carbonell), are ardent anarchists and violent dissidents who try to overthrow the government, stupidly believing that a Communist revolution will result in freedom and democracy.

After Luis leads a daring assassination attempt—a raid on the presidential palace that lands him in prison and ruins his life—Ricardo heads into the jungles to fight shoulder to shoulder with Che and Castro, and Luis’ gorgeous wife Aurora (played by supermodel Inés Sastre) ends up in Fico’s bed. The wandering plot (culled from a 300-page draft by the great writer G. Cabrera Infante, who died in 2005) features betrayal, disgrace, adultery, suicide and escape, often shifting moods so fast we lose track of the characters. The movie devotes a lot of time to the splashy musical numbers at the El Tropico, but it fails to focus on the poverty-stricken workers whose plight lit the fires of revolution. The pacing is so lazy that after the big war scenes set the screen ablaze with gunfire, there’s still 45 minutes to go.

Wafting through the mélange are ill-fated cameos by Dustin Hoffman as Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky and a scenery-munching Bill Murray as a sarcastic American parasite with no name and obviously no ethnicity, wearing short pants and acting as a court jester and funny sidekick who never says anything funny or relevant at all. The film’s biggest surprise is Millie Perkins, a far cry from the way she looked as Anne Frank back in 1959, but astoundingly good as the Cuban matriarch struggling to preserve her family values and sustain a naïve vision of her sons as the future pillars of a once-proud country.

Cuba, played by the Dominican Republic, leaves us with the scarred impression of a ravaged country, decimated by greed and ignorance. Between Batista and his terror squads, Castro and his Communist insurgents, and Lansky and the mob, Havana changed from a once-placid and civilized Old World paradise to a devastated and lost metropolis. Mr. Garcia makes no secret of his unilateral hatred for Batista, Che and Castro, blaming them equally for turning Havana from a “capital city into a capital sin.” In that respect, his film will be embraced by Cuban exiles in Miami, denounced by others who refused to leave when they could still get out, and considered a big yawn by everyone else. But there is nothing controversial about the sincerity of his ode to the bedrock of his ancestry—a country in ruins, existing now only in shattered memories. His Cuba is like a rose: It has petals and it has thorns, but no matter how you grab it, in the end it grabs you.

A Tiny Bride

Water is the highly praised Indian director Deepa Mehta’s third film in the trilogy that began with Fire and Earth. Set in 1938 in Colonial India during the rise to power of Mahatma Gandhi, it tells the inspiring story of a girl struggling against religious customs that turn her into a prisoner without a future. Chuyia is an 8-year-old child bride whose husband suddenly passes away. According to ritual, her head is shaved and she is taken to an ashram for Hindu widows, where she is expected to atone for the sins of her past that resulted in the death of her husband. In virtual exile, with no hope of escape, she bonds with other widows, old and young, all with their own stories, hopes and fears. Some accept their cruel fate; others are bitter. The indestructible Chuyia is forced to navigate this odd world alone and learn its lessons with obedience and resignation. It is harrowing stuff, to say the least.

Although Water is easily Ms. Mehta’s richest and most complex film, it is still the work of a humanitarian, made with incredible tenderness and real concern for the plight of her female characters. Her finely characterized portraits are textured, moving and wise, from the elderly woman who runs the ashram to the deeply conflicted woman who seeks solace across the dangerous Ganges under cover of darkness. But the film is centered by the sweet, heartbreaking life of young Chuyia, a girl whose innocence cannot be crushed. Her refusal to surrender to her plight elevates Water from a harsh tale of horror into one of hope. The film was forcibly shut down in 2000, following violent protests and riots by fundamentalist Hindus and personal death threats to the director. It took five years to revamp the production in Sri Lanka under strict secrecy and an assumed name. Ms. Mehta’s refusal to throw in the batik is worth celebrating, for she has made a trenchant film for the ages about a degraded psyche that slowly, finally, is raised up by the soaring power of the human spirit.

Mr. Sánchez’s landscape paintings have been likened to the work of Caspar David Friedrich as well as the American painters of the Hudson River School. This is itself very high praise, but not any higher than the work deserves. Like Friedrich and the Hudson River painters, Mr. Sánchez brings an epic vision to the depiction of landscape—a vision that combines the most meticulous depiction of nature with a metaphysical comprehension of its spiritual implications.

From the clouds in the sky to the majestic waterfalls that flow into the leafy, rocky terrain of a virgin wilderness, Mr. Sánchez is a master of everything he surveys, and he never hesitates to pack his paintings with a surfeit of detail that affords every rock, tree and sunlit vista its share of pictorial brilliance.

Who, then, is this remarkable painter? Born in the village of Aguada de Pasajeros in central Cuba, Mr. Sánchez studied for two years at the San Alejandro School of Plastic Arts in Havana in the mid-1960’s and later at the National School of Art. He won the Joan Miró Prize (awarded by the Miró Foundation in Barcelona) in 1980; in 1984, he won the Amelia Peláez Award for painting at Havana’s first biennial. His first retrospective exhibition was at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana in 1985. Four years later, he left Cuba for Mexico, and afterwards moved to southern Florida. He now divides his time between Miami and his home in Costa Rica.

Surely we would have heard of Mr. Sánchez long ago had it not been for the troubled political relations that have obtained for so many years between Cuba and the United States. But now that we’ve been given the opportunity to see his extraordinary paintings, it’s safe to assume that he’ll enjoy a good deal of attention in this country.

Tomás Sánchez: Buscador de Pai-sajes, New Paintings and Drawings remains on view at the Marlborough Gallery, 40 West 57th Street, through Dec. 30.

After watching all 80 minutes of the tepid remake Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights , I can tell you that I did not have the time of my life-this I swear-and I owe it all to … well, I guess everyone involved is to blame.

Directed by Guy Ferland and set on the eve of the Castro revolution, Havana Nights does little to improve or build upon the 1987 original. Diego Luna plays Javier, a lowly waiter at a posh Cuban hotel, where he meets Katey (Romola Garai), the daughter of a rich Ford executive recently transferred to the tumultuous island. They bond over their mutual love of dancing. She is seduced by the freedoms of Cuban rhythm; he must learn the structure of ballroom boogie so they can win a contest with a prize of $5,000 and a free trip to the States.

There is no doubt that Mr. Luna is a sexy little Mexican, but he lacks the oomph of the original star, Patrick Swayze (who appears in a cameo as a sage dance instructor). The blond bombshell Ms. Garai simply towers over the little lad. Wasn't Jennifer Grey's pre-nose-job, frizzed-hair averageness a large part of the first Dirty Dancing 's charm?

Ms. Grey and Mr. Swayze had sexual tension in front of the camera, which might have arisen from their real tension on the set. They were the most unlikely of dance partners, and their fiery energy permeated every undulation of their bodies. Unfortunately, in the remake, this dynamic is replaced by a facile lasciviousness.

If there's any silver lining to this dark cloud of a project, it's that it makes the success of the original Dirty Dancing actually appear like a result of talent and good acting. Did I just write that?

[ Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (2004), PG-13, 105 min., $26.98]

Teen Toon

A qua Teen Hunger Force : This show sounds like a hodgepodge of non sequiturs, and indeed it is. Yet it's currently the most compelling bit of programming on the Cartoon Network's nightly Adult Swim .

The main characters are Frylock, a floating carton of French fries with a goatee and special powers that allow him to shoot a laser beam from his eyes; Master Shake, a hapless milkshake with a voice that puts Jerry Lewis to shame; and Meatwad, a meatball with the mind of a 4-year-old who likes to dance to rap music. According to the opening montage, they were supposed to be a motley crew of crime fighters. But the show is actually about their unique living situation: It seems that comprising the contents of a Happy Meal does not necessarily make for a happy home.

In the first season, the Force encounters fumbling space invaders with bad German accents saying things like, "Do you see how my mind works? It's like a laser." They discover a mummy in their basement who threatens to put a curse on Frylock if the latter doesn't hug him.

The second season (both are available on DVD) advances these themes with an alien that arrives at the Force's doorstep in search of a job in retail. He speaks Japanese and urinates like a sprinkler. Other highlights include Carl, the surly next-door neighbor, and a grotesque creation called the Universal Remonster.

At its best, Aqua Teen Hunger Force dispenses with plot altogether. Truly the sum of its characters and their individual antics, it's a strong contender to replace The Simpsons among the adolescent cognoscenti. Trust us … er, I mean them!

[ Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Season Two , NR, $29.98]

Pitt of Despair

ThetroublewithBernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers is not the perfunctory display of incest, nor the unrelenting fixation on adolescent genitalia, nor the terrifically overdetermined performances, nor the pseudo-informed arguments about " le cinema ." No, the trouble with The Dreamers is that one is supposed to accept Michael Pitt, who plays an American exchange student in Paris, as the film's rational core.

Happily degenerate, Mr. Pitt stumbles through the film unknowingly mumbling a line here or there, eyeing the camera anxiously from the sidelines. His spine sags, just like his limp lower lip droops, but the responsibility of upholding the story's moral vertebrae has been foolishly placed in his sweaty palms.

The protagonists of The Dreamers are too callow to attempt anything like the inside-scraping performance of Marlon Brando in Mr. Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris . Mr. Pitt, who was inaccurately pronounced the next Leonardo DiCaprio, proves himself capable of little more than shedding his clothes at the drop of a hat.

The esteemed director has a tendency to become too enamored of his subjects, allowing them to run away with his films. In Mr. Brando's case, it proved miraculous; in the case of these wayward kids, it doesn't. The film conveys little beyond the wanton abandon of young people who are not yet able to move beyond their own simple desires and erroneously constructed belief systems.

[ The Dreamers (2003), NC-17, 115 min., $29.90]

-Jessica Joffe

The year is 1380, and a defrocked priest (Paul Bettany), driven butt-naked out of his village for adultery and fornication with one of his parishioners (apparently some sins never go out of style), is rescued in the forest primeval by a scruffy troupe of traveling players. Since their forte is performing stories from the Bible, a subject on which he is an expert, the holy man (who is also something of a ham) adapts comfortably to the greasepaint and becomes an important member of this company of strolling minstrels, causing rancor and discord in the ranks between the master player (Willem Dafoe), the wardrobe mistress (Gina McKee) and the jealous old character actor (Brian Cox) who feels his wisdom and seniority threatened by the newcomer. To pad out the running time, there's a lot of medieval hugga-mugga onstage and off, and some antic athletics by Mr. Dafoe, who would be right at home in the Cirque du Soleil.

But the trouble (and the plot) really begins when the depressing little thespian group arrives in a rustic village of restless peasants (were there any other kind?) in time to witness the trial of a deaf-mute woman accused of killing a boy in the nearby woods. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the actors risk their lives by ditching the Scriptures and staging an improvised play about the events of the day that will solve the murder, as well as the mystery of why so many other boys have disappeared without a trace. Obviously, they have neither the information nor the talent to bring it off convincingly, but they are ahead of Pirandello in the improv department and somehow manage to enrage the local citizens and their landlord, a flamboyant count whose blood turns out to be more lavender than blue, dilly dilly. In the final few minutes, this predator emerges from the mist like Dracula to reveal a ravenous appetite for raping the local lads. Nor does his taste stop short of culinary feasting on an occasional priest, as the strapping Mr. Bettany finds out too late-but not before he redeems his own sins and finds salvation in saving the innocent.

Spiritual morality tales in chain mail are not exactly the stuff of box-office miracles, and The Reckoning already opened to less-than-spectacular business two years ago in Norway and Sweden. (I'm all for new test markets, but I never heard of boffo business in downtown Oslo.) Still, there is more to this Gothic yarn than a bunch of knights in clanking armor hacking the tar out of each other with swords and crossbows. Strongly reminiscent of the 1986 medieval thriller In the Name of the Rose , The Reckoning could use Sean Connery once again as a wayward man of God instead of the milk-and-freckles Paul Bettany. Director McGuigan doesn't show much interest in tempo or character development, and the pace is numbing. Still, the strange, desolate landscapes and icy trails in the British countryside add a bleak visual matrix to the medieval melodramatics. And there is always the charge of watching Vincent Cassel in action. Last seen rolling around the Paris underworld in the altogether in the controversial film Irreversible , this edgy French actor really heats things up in the last 10 minutes of an otherwise torpid exercise. In a brief but colorful cameo as the dastardly feudal count who is a cross between Jeffrey Dahmer and Caligula, he proves that even in the 14th century, you couldn't go around littering the backroads with the mutilated corpses of hunky toy boys and blame all the damage on the mice.

One Twisted Sister

The anemic and tiresomely routine crime opus Twisted opens with closeups of Ashley Judd's eyes and dilating nostrils while a knife plays dangerously across her throat. No problem. As soon as the credits end, she grabs her gun and kicks her attacker's gonads every which way from Tuesday. What took her so long? She was never in any real danger in the first place. She's a hard-drinking, sexually promiscuous post-feminist San Francisco homicide cop looking for Mr. Goodbar and finding another (yawn) serial killer on the rampage. The predictable twist in the tangled script by newcomer Sarah Thorp makes this twisted cop with the Peter Pan coif a prime suspect when the murder victims all turn out to be one-night stands that she's slept with. In the ludicrous chain of events that follow, she suffers from bad dreams, hears voices in her pierced earlobes and wakes up in designer jeans after each murder in a drugged stupor. One by one, mutilated torsos turn up with the killer's trademark cigarette burns on their hands. Somebody is clearly trying to turn her into Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight (a better film in every way). Verily, I say unto you, this is a twisted sister. But "I'm not pulling her from her first homicide case-it would kill her career," says Samuel L. Jackson, her dead policeman father's former partner and the godfather who raised her. So she sticks around to kill the movie instead, avoiding jail even when the fourth corpse turns up in her own bed.

Meanwhile, the bored audience is asked to sift through the red herrings and contrived motivations of cardboard characters to identify the real killer. Is it her shrink (the wasted David Straithairn)? Maybe it's her horny partner (Andy Garcia), who is always slamming her up against the kitchen stove for a feel, like Mark Ruffalo does to Meg Ryan in the catastrophic Jane Campion sex thriller In the Cut , which this misguided film resembles in all the wrong ways. Does anybody care? The potential for suspense is so quickly smashed that if you don't spot and label the real lunatic in the first 10 minutes, you flunk Hollywood Forensics Lab 101. (Hint: Pick out the star with the most minimal dialogue, the least amount of business being there, nothing to do with the plot and no justification for a paycheck.)

The outdated, cliché-riddled direction is so inept and indifferent that it's hard to believe Twisted was lensed by the same Philip Kaufman who made The Right Stuff . Could there be two Philip Kaufmans? One wag has written that Twisted was directed by Rip Van Winkle. I can't improve on that. Anyone, however, could improve on the phony, one-dimensional performance by Ashley Judd. As weak and clueless as she was onstage in the calamitous Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , she's no less wooden onscreen. Playing an irritable, sluttish, stressed-out cop on the boil, traumatized by rage and slowly going loopy, is a challenge that is sadly but demonstrably light years beyond her range. She needs a transfusion, and so does Twisted .

Horny in Havana

Seventeen inexplicable years after Dirty Dancing , we now get Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights . The Catskills are now played by Cuba, and despite a guest appearance by Patrick Swayze and a dishonestly misleading title designed to suggest a sequel, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the popular 1983 original. The year is 1958, under the pre-revolutionary reign of Battista, when Cuba was at the height of its exotic splendor. To this tourist mecca comes an automobile executive and his luscious wife (John Slattery and Sela Ward), who have uprooted their two teenage daughters in their most crucial high-school years. Older daughter Katey (pretty-in-pink Romola Garai) is miserable in her privileged-immigrant status until she meets Javier (Diego Luna), a waiter in the four-star oceanfront hotel where her family lives. He's as poor as a slum rat, but that boy can dance.

When the Ivory-scrubbed Katey gets her first taste of salsa and sin in Havana after midnight, there's no turning back to root-beer floats in the malt shop at high noon. While her snobby American classmates drive their convertibles to the school prom at the country club, Katey is drawn to the undulating sway and dirty pelvic thrust of the Cuban beat, following Diego to the throbbing, sweaty and very sexy Latin music at La Rosa Negra, a club where body slamming has replaced the fox trot and the bananas are not the only things fried. As her new friendship turns to physical attraction, Katey is exposed to a different Cuba-the real country behind the golf links and casinos. Through Diego's eyes, she sees the class prejudices, and watches the seeds of Castro's revolution.

But forget about politics and violence. The conflicts can wait. First there's a dance contest to be won, and with the $5,000 prize, Diego's dream of a trip to the States could finally come true. Despite tango lessons from Patrick Swayze, Katey enrages her parents, who look down condescendingly at Diego's Third World manners. This is one of the film's many odd incongruities, since Katey's parents were once a champion dance team themselves. Everyone sees the light in time for a happy Havana sunset. Katey learns that it's better to lose your guy to a revolution than never love at all. Her folks learn what it cost them to give up show business for the Ford Motor Company. And Javier's Afro-Cuban sensuality unleashes the inhibitions in all of the gringos and puts them in touch with the people they really are in their hearts. Pure schmaltz, but not without its share of feel-good entertainment value.

A whirl around the ballroom floor doing the lambada can do wonders, but it can't make up for a paucity of logic and wit. The Romeo and Juliet love story doesn't fully jell. The direction by Guy Ferland is sluggish, and the screenplay by Boaz Yakin and Victoria Arch is dead on arrival. But Havana Nights has its pleasures. The infectious big-band music is lush and full of vitality, the dancing has verve, and Puerto Rico never looked so good. The shark-fin cars, watermelon-tinted sets and full-fitted 50's costumes are a wonderful throwback to the three-strip Technicolor movies with Lana Turner and Ava Gardner. The kids are attractive and appealing, although the all-American Romolo Garai is really British and the fiery Cuban Diego Luna is really from Mexico (he was one of the stars of the terrific Y Tu Mamá También , the memorable and highly acclaimed Mexican film about the two horny pals who set out to conquer an older woman and ended up seducing each other). Best of all, there is Sela Ward, the warm and vibrant star of my favorite late, lamented television series, Once and Again , in the small but pivotal role of Katey's mother. The film doesn't begin to show off the emotional depth of her artistry as an actress of intelligence and sensitivity, but in those full skirts, halter tops and fruity, edible 50's lipsticks, she looks stupendous. Why Sela Ward is not one of the biggest movie stars of the 21st century is a bigger mystery than the ongoing celebrity existence of the Horrible Hilton Sisters. More than anything else in this film, she makes Havana Nights worth waiting for daybreak.

The obvious contradiction lies between the American President's multilateral aspirations and his unilateral impulses-and between policies that promote the enduring interests of the United States and those that serve only the immediate interests of Mr. Bush and his political clan. There could be no better example of those irritating conflicts than the latest installment in the endless soap opera of Cuban-American relations.

The most troubling aspect of that episode wasn't the scornful response of the White House to Jimmy Carter's remarkable visit or Fidel Castro's unprecedented welcome. After all, nobody expected the Bush administration to revise our pointless, punitive policies toward Havana simply because they have failed to achieve any of their objectives for 40 years.

No, the disturbing moment came just before Mr. Carter's trip, when a top State Department official duplicitously spoke of "terrorism" and "weapons of mass destruction" to help justify the same old stupid policies. We now know for certain that there was absolutely no basis for those alarmist words.

Alert readers will recall that on May 6, as the former President packed his straw hat, Under Secretary of State John Bolton appeared at the Heritage Foundation in Washington to deliver a speech entitled "Beyond the Axis of Evil." There he shrilly warned against the new "threat" of germ warfare supposedly fermenting in the biomedical laboratories of Cuba. For those who may not be aware of Mr. Bolton and his brief, he is an emissary of the Jesse Helms ministry of foreign affairs, posted at the State Department by the White House to thwart any excessive moderation by the Secretary of State (who did not select him for his job).

In this instance, Mr. Bolton's purpose was to undercut an expanding consensus on Cuban policy that ranges from The Wall Street Journal to The Nation magazine, from conservative Republicans in Texas and Arizona to liberal Democrats in Massachusetts and California. Unable to argue that the present sanctions accomplish anything for the Cuban people, and aware that Cuba's courageous dissidents are seeking change in both Washington and Havana, Mr. Bolton attempted to play upon the fears aroused by last year's terrorist assaults, particularly those deadly and still-unsolved anthrax attacks.

The news-making revelation in Mr. Bolton's speech was the following sentence: "The United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological-warfare research and development effort." That was more explicit and categorical than previous statements by U.S. officials, although they have occasionally mentioned the "potential" for such mischief in Havana's thriving biomedical industry, which exports vaccines and medicines all over the world. He provided no evidence to support his accusation, and it seems fair to say that there probably is none.

Mr. Castro denied the charges vehemently, as might be expected, but it isn't necessary to accept his word on this point. On May 23, the Cuban dictator's denial was bolstered by Major General Gary Speer of the U.S. Army. He is the general staff officer overseeing all American forces in the Southern Command, which encompasses Latin America and the Caribbean. In an interview published by The Miami Herald, General Speer said he knew of no evidence to support the Bolton charges.

With amusing candor, the general admitted that after he learned about Mr. Bolton's inflammatory remarks from "news reports," he made his own inquiries to the Southern Command's intelligence directorate in Doral, Fla. He thought he had better look into the matter: "I called my J-2, the intelligence officer, and said, 'What's the deal?'"

No deal at all, apparently. Speaking in the most diplomatic terms, the general suggested that the under secretary's speech might have been misunderstood. "I think what Mr. Bolton said in his statement, it kind of got reported as an accusation that the Cubans were … that we had evidence that they were actually producing bio-weapons. And I'm not sure that's the case." In other words, the general is quite sure that it isn't the case.

Perhaps the general was relieved to learn that those charges had been fabricated. Or perhaps he was dismayed when he realized that the international credibility of the United States had been diminished again, for reasons that had nothing to do with combating terror or protecting the American people.

The washing was out in the courtyard, and a man used a pulley to get a bucket to an ironwork balcony. It was an old mansion cobbled into a score of apartments, and it had that liberated feeling you often experience in Cuba, the feeling that the inmates have taken over the institution.

The guy had a neat little place with a table stacked with boxes. Colorful Romeo y Julietas. Masculine Cohibas. Partagas. Montecristos. We opened different boxes for a while, enjoying the luxury of it all, before settling on Cohiba Robustos, a five-inch cigar with a good heft, packed neatly in a dovetailed cedar box. Cuba only began making Cohibas after the revolution, and they say Fidel smoked Cohibas before he gave up cigars. A box sells for nearly $230. I paid $40 U.S. and figured I'd worry about customs later.

My friend John, an architect on Lafayette Street, and I smoked a couple of them walking down the Prado. We felt grand. The cigars were fabulous, and the setting majestic and ruined.

A few days later, I stopped by John and Susan's "casa particular," or private house, for breakfast. Under pretty strict regulation, private homes are allowed to serve as hotels and get around $35 a night. The place looked like a house in Pasadena. Marble floors, a white formica kitchen. Halogen lamps.

John was at the table across from a bullfroggish man with short blond hair, in a black shirt.

"This is Bobby," John said. Bobby had a gold ring with his initials on them. (I've changed his name and a couple of facts about him.)

Bobby was from Chicago. He was in town for the annual Cigar Fair. Like us, he'd come through a third country, in violation of the embargo. But he said he also had a license to travel to Cuba to supply hospital equipment, under a humanitarian exemption to the embargo.

Bobby liked to talk, and I was at once spellbound by his cold intelligent eyes and oleaginous manner, and pretty confused by his layered agendas, cigars and hospitals. He told us why George Burns favored White Owls (they wouldn't go out when he put them down on stage) and how much a good Cuban cigar could fetch back in New York–up to $50. The Cuban government price for a Robusto is $9. That's why you have mules smuggling large quantities into the U.S. from Mexico. It seemed like Bobby had known a mule or two.

"The two big problems the Cuban government has is, one, the parallel market–people selling cigars for way less than the real price," Bobby said. "The other is counterfeits–people selling fakes on the street, damaging the brand."

John told him about my cigars, and Bobby shrugged. "Almost everything on the street is fake."

A little later, when he got up to leave, he glanced at me and with an air of false modesty said, "Hey, what am I, the cigar macher –"

A bit of Yiddish in Havana. It was his way of saying he could tell I was Jewish. He had me; I smiled.

Later I told my wife about Bobby, and we were both fairly contemptuous. The fat know-it-all is a familiar type–at one point, Bobby even made a crack about my Spanish–and it bugged us that he would dismiss my cigars offhand.

John was also of the opinion that mine were authentic. They tasted great; the box was perfect down to stamps and embossing. You couldn't fake that; there was a taut silk ribbon that went around the cigars and made it hard even to get them out.

That night, John and I did the town. We ended up at the Comodoro, a disco run by the Cuban government, teeming with young prostitutes and foreign men. The girls stood at the edge of the dance floor without acknowledging you. They looked like college freshmen, but with a hard, cool expression. I bought a woman named Maria a drink. She talked to me about how the economy will change when Castro dies. "Oh, when is he going to die!" she said. In 10 days in Cuba, it was the most open discussion I had about the future, something everyone there is secretly concerned about.

Our cab ride home was with a guy who spoke perfect English. It was clear he was professionally trained, and I felt a little embarrassed, but John pointed out later that self-esteem is a luxury of a rich society. The guy wasn't ashamed; he was doing what he had to do to get dollars.

Since the Russians pulled out 10 years ago, Fidel has allowed two economies to exist in Cuba: one the socialist peso economy, where kids' sneakers cost 15 cents and a bottle of rum 50 cents; the other a dollar economy, where you can get TV's and fancy clothing. Anyone with material aspirations in Cuba has to claw their way into the dollar economy.

The next morning, my wife had an idea about how to set Bobby up, and we headed over to John and Susan's.

First, we stopped at an artist's house nearby. Under Fidel, artists, musicians and athletes are privileged. Art is everywhere, and there's been a frenzy among New York galleries and museums to acquire Cuban art.

My wife had met one of Havana's rising artists and was getting a painting on paper for $300 cash (it's all an American can use in Cuba). The artist, whom I'll call Haydee, lived in a beautiful neoclassical house with a garden and iron gate. She kissed my wife, and my wife said she smelled great.

"It's Gio," Haydee announced.

We went on to John's. Bobby was sitting right where he'd been the day before, reaching for papaya chunks with his fork. We soon got to talking.

My wife said, "How do you reconcile a dual career in cigars and health care?"

Bobby stayed cool. "The people who get mouth cancer are the slobberers and the tonguers."

Then I said, "Bobby, how would you feel if I brought by two of my Robustos and two authentic ones, and you try and tell them apart?"

Later, John said that he saw a spark of panic in Bobby's eyes just before he said yes. Bobby did seem a little nervous.

"Don't be a chozzer ," he said, the Jewish word for trickster, and wanted to make sure I stuck by the rules and brought two of each.

We went to the Partagas' factory in Old Havana for the authentics. The place was crammed with Europeans smoking cigars and magazines with Michael Douglas on the cover. I bought two Robustos at $9.15 a shot, then we walked to the Hotel Inglaterra for lunch. John lit up a Partagas.

The smoking test struck Susan as a little cruel, but John was in stitches over it.

"Don't you see? There's no upside for Bobby," he said. "What's the upside? We're going to think he's so smart? There's only a giant, yawning downside. There goes his whole reputation, sliding downhill, right in front of us."

My wife said that Bobby really had had no choice. If you're an aficionado, you're constantly testing yourself, trying to improve your powers of discernment. He couldn't not accept the challenge.

Suddenly a big guy with a furtive look came running up to John and said, contemptuously, "You're smoking a banana." The guy plunked a box of Robustos in John's lap and passed around his identification card that showed he was a tobacco worker.

The guy was desperate to cut a deal before the police came up.

John didn't move from his chair. "I'm negotiating with my butt," he said, with a laugh.

The man dropped his price from 40 to 35 to 30, and finally to 20, before picking up his box and rushing off.

I had to run, too. I was going off to San Jose, 20 miles outside Havana, to see Fidel give a speech opening a new school.

But police were crawling all over the town, and they wouldn't let me in. As they turned my car away, I watched a man in worn-out boots bicycle slowly by. He had a giant cake for Fidel balanced on one shoulder. Nearly 50 years after he defied the court that imprisoned him by saying, "History will absolve me," and 45 years after he stole back from exile on a tiny boat jammed with Che Guevara and 80 men, Fidel's dedication and vision are still staggering.

It's his hardheadedness about the future that seems a little insane. Under Batista, a lawyer like young Fidel Castro was allowed to engage in controversial discussions. Today, the lawyers are driving cabs. Ten days in Cuba and I never saw a newspaper. There was something intellectually suffocating about that. But then, all the thinking has already been done.

Bobby looked pale. He explained that he'd been out till 3 a.m. at the final dinner of the Cigar Fair, at the Tropicana. They'd auctioned off elaborate humidors stuffed with cigars for over half a million dollars to Arabs, Europeans and some closeted American buyers, too. One humidor went for more than $200,000, he said. Fidel had been there, in fatigues, to accept the money on the behalf of the Ministry of Health. So Bobby had seen Fidel; I hadn't.

Finally, Bobby turned on the fan and fetched an ashtray from the kitchen.

Then he went to a back room and came back with a fiercely handsome sidekick, a Cuban man in shorts with a shaved head and a passing resemblance to Antonio Banderas, who looked around the table with a sneer before sitting down. Bobby introduced him as Nelson.

I held the street cigars in one hand and the authentics in the other. I asked John if he wanted to play, and he said, "I don't think you want the yard man to appraise the Van Gogh, now do you?" That seemed to up the ante.

Bobby got very calm and very quiet.

The test was over before it began. My cigars were fakes; they knew it instantly.

Nelson and Bobby rolled them around next to their ears, listening to the density, then shoved them up their noses and shut their eyes. Nelson dropped his on the table a couple times. Falso, he pronounced.

"Look at the way it sits there. Like an egg," Bobby said. "And the way it's rolled–it will smoke like a chimney."

I didn't say anything. What was I going to say? My only retreat was epistemology, and Bobby beat me there, too. When I pointed out that he was smoking my cigar all the way down, so it couldn't be all bad, he said, "It happens to be a Cuban cigar. So what if it doesn't have a name on it?"

Somewhere in there, it turned out he came from a line of rabbis, and I realized what a perfect operator Bobby was for the new Cuba, occupied Cuba, Cuba secretly teetering on a dollarized future. Cuba is at once the most hedonistic and sternly righteous place you'll ever be. It takes a deep and cold understanding of the human condition to navigate it, to drift down between layers of morality and shamelessness without getting bent out of shape about dignity. You had to have a deeply ingrained sense of irony. At the

Comodoro, the state disco and meat market, the bartenders were wearing priests' robes as a costume. The prostitutes were the intellectuals.

Nelson went back to the room for a box of Robustos. He carefully broke the seal with his fingernail and lifted out all 25 cigars in a clump, holding them by the silk band.

"Smell that," Bobby commanded. "It smells like the earth. See how dark and oily it smells. Yeah, a good cigar smells like shit."

He had a whiff and gave them back to Nelson. "Nice box," he said with the understatement of a connoisseur.

They had to run. Bobby shot me a last look through the smoke and turned with empathy to my wife.

"If I were you, I wouldn't go through customs with him. He can be a putz ."

Without trying to walk away from the fact that Fidel Castro is a bloody dictator, let's recall what kind of Cubans fled the island when the Red brigades took over. For all their talk about small-D democracy, they were the adherents of the previous bloody dictator, Fulgencio Batista. As poor and miserable and gray as Cuba is under the Reds, it was probably much worse when the Miami Cubans were riding high. The average annual wage of rural workers, which was most of the population, was $91; 75 percent of the island's arable land was in foreign hands as was 90 percent of the country's utilities and transportation.

There's something else about the Miami Cubans. Whenever I see them on television holding one of their indignation meetings, the faces are all white; whenever the camera pans the crowd bused in to listen to Fidel, the only world figure who talks longer than Bill Clinton, I see many black faces. One can only surmise that there are some racial aspects to the politics of the Miami Cubans. Why don't they have more dark-skinned adherents, or have they brought their own Cuban racial divisions here? The press has carried occasional articles for years about the low esteem in which Miami's American-born, African-American population hold the white Cuban immigrants, or should they more aptly be called émigrés?

Even though the immigrants-émigrés have been in Miami nigh on two generations, when they have press conferences they often leave the impression that they are simply waiting to hear that Mr. Castro has kicked the bucket before they take off for Havana to re-establish a new Batista in the President's palace and bring back the exploitive foreign corporations, the whores, gangsters and class-caste rule of the past. As with the return of the Bourbons and the Stuarts in the persons of Louis XVIII and Charles II, restorations of old regimes are seldom happy affairs and from the looks of that bunch poised to swoop in on Havana, well, God help the long-put-upon Cuban people.

Nevertheless, how Cubans run their island nation is their own business, although you'd never know it from looking at American behavior throughout the last century. Let us look to our own knitting and pose some questions prompted by Miami Cubans, such as, "Are there limits to diversity?" Politically correct goodspeak demands that diversity be "celebrated" on any and all occasions, but do the culturally diverse owe something to the American generality? What about the question of divided loyalty? Can we demand allegiance to the nation and to certain cultural and political norms? Or is America to become a place where any group is invited to come for its own purposes without the previous inhabitants requiring certain behavior in return?

The question of divided loyalty has come up before in our history in connection with American foreign policy and Germans, Jews, Japanese, Communists of various backgrounds, Irish and Italians. Heretofore, the judgment of the nation has been that you may not take the oath of allegiance to the Stars and Stripes while holding as a silent reservation a greater love for das Vaterland . Jonathan Pollard, the American who spied for Israel, sits in a Federal penitentiary, a warning to those who would serve two masters. The American citizen of Chinese ancestry currently under indictment for taking home classified information is another case in which divided loyalty strongly figures.

Then is diversity to be encouraged and protected as long as it does not extend to espionage or outright treason? Political systems are culturally based and culture-specific. A value such as "free speech" is a universal but with different definitions in different democracies, based on different cultures. Hence, the British regard our form of free speech as a species of license, and we look on their rules governing speech, especially the Official Secrets Act, as an intolerable suppression. Sharing the same set of abstract values is not the same as playing under the same rules, especially when those rules are rooted in the accidental quirks of culture. When freshly arrived ethnic groups have piled up in large numbers in one place and played politics according to their rules and with their attitudes, there has often been hell to pay. Diversity, under those circumstances, may become division and disunity. The system will not work unless, somewhere inside every citizen, there is a sense of being joined with others beyond his parochial, ethnic or other allegiance, to a larger community and to the nation. If political life and process is reduced to a squeaking, grunting contest among groups, who feel nothing in common save mutual contempt, the larger systems we all depend on will be damaged or destroyed.

The special considerations squeezed out of Washington for Cubans has complicated immigration law and practice possibly past the fixing. Gay politics, with its heavy emphasis on AIDS and its success in getting through special-interest legislation, has made it much harder to develop a national health program for all.

It's obvious some cultures have not been as receptive to American democracy as others. Because nobody can stand them at the moment, a noncontroversial example would be Russians in Russia and Russians in the United States. More controversial, indeed, would be any speculation as to how receptive the gay subculture is to a democracy based on adherence to a commonweal. And then there are the various Hispanic subcultures in the United States–Cuban, Mexican–which are part of the Hispanic world that got clobbered by the idealism of the French Revolution. Most Spanish-speaking countries have had the devil's own time turning those glorious abstractions into stable, functioning democracies. The reasons, doubtless, are many and complex, but elements in culture such as romanticism and what you might call jefismo must play some part in the fragile and often unhappy history of democracy in those lands.

Our own history of cultural diversity and democratic politics has been a mixed bag. Big-city, ethnic political machines in the 1860-1950 era made a sewer out of the democratic process. The persistence of corruption to this day in New York City has its origins in the folkways of ethnic and cultural diversity. However, as various ethnic groups made their way up and began to confine their diversity to cuisine, national "days," festivals, arts and crafts, democracy, which often translates into honest government, has taken a turn for the better. As intermarriage between all our ethnic groups grows, we seem to be creating a commonality within diversity. We are finding out how to have essential unity and a society in which a large variety of cultural strains flourish.

Anyone who's spent any time around Cubans knows how splendid they can be. I for one would hate to see any of them go home when Mr. Castro finally makes his long-overdue exit, but the mishegoss in Miami ought to tell us that diversity has its limits and that we don't have to embrace everything that everybody brings here from everywhere.