Tanya loved Cuba, but it had taken a while. She missed Vasili more than she had expected. She realized how fond she was of him, even though they had never been lovers. She worried about him in his Siberian labor camp, hungry and cold. The campaign for which he had been punished—publicizing the illness of Ustin Bodian, the opera singer—had been successful, sort of: Bodian had been released from prison, though he had died soon afterward in a Moscow hospital. Vasili would find the irony telling.

Some things she could not get used to. She still put on a coat to go out, although the weather was never cold. She got bored with beans and rice and, to her surprise, found herself longing for a bowl of kasha with sour cream. After endless days of hot summer sun, she sometimes hoped for a downpour to freshen the streets.

Cuban peasants were as poor as Soviet peasants, but they seemed happier, perhaps because of the weather. And eventually the Cuban people’s irrepressible joie de vivre bewitched Tanya. She smoked cigars and drank rum with tuKola, the local substitute for Coke. She loved to dance with Paz to the irresistibly sexy rhythms of the traditional music they called trova. Castro had closed most of the nightclubs, but no one could prevent Cubans playing guitars, and the musicians had moved to small bars called casas de la trova.

But she worried for the Cuban people. They had defied their giant neighbor, the United States, only ninety miles away across the Straits of Florida, and she knew that one day they might be punished. When she thought about it, Tanya felt like the crocodile bird, bravely perched between the open jaws of the great beast, pecking food from a row of teeth like broken knives.

Was the Cubans’ defiance worth the price? Only time would tell. Tanya was pessimistic about the prospects for reforming Communism, but some of the things Castro had done were admirable. In 1961, the Year of Education, ten thousand students had flocked to the countryside to teach farmers to read, a heroic crusade to wipe out illiteracy in one campaign. The first sentence in the primer was “The peasants work in the cooperative,” but so what? People who could read were better equipped to recognize government propaganda for what it was.

Castro was no Bolshevik. He scorned orthodoxy and restlessly sought out new ideas. That was why he annoyed the Kremlin. But he was no democrat either. Tanya had been saddened when he had announced that the revolution had made elections unnecessary. And there was one area in which he had imitated the Soviet Union slavishly: with advice from the KGB he had created a ruthlessly efficient secret police force to stamp out dissent.

On balance, Tanya wished the revolution well. Cuba had to escape from underdevelopment and colonialism. No one wanted the Americans back, with their casinos and their prostitutes. But Tanya wondered whether Cubans would ever be allowed to make their own decisions. American hostility drove them into the arms of the Soviets; but as Castro moved closer to the USSR, so it became increasingly likely that the Americans would invade. What Cuba really needed was to be left alone.