THERE WERE EIGHT OF US FOR DINNER. Dinner was prepared and served by Ramón, Hemingway’s Chinese cook, and René, his Negro butler, which only I seemed to find amusing. It certainly wasn’t because I had anything against the Chinese or Negroes. But it struck me as ironic that Noreen and her guests were all solemnly prepared to avow their communism while other men did all the work.

There was no denying what Cuba and its people had suffered, first at the hands of the Spanish, then the Americans, and then the Spanish again. But as bad as any of these perhaps had been the Cuban governments of Ramón Grau San Martín and now Fulgencio Batista. Formerly a sergeant in the Cuban army, F.B.—as most of the Europeans and Americans in Cuba called him—wasn’t much more than an American puppet. So long as he danced to Washington’s tune, American support seemed likely to continue, no matter how brutishly his regime behaved. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to believe that a totalitarian system of government in which a single authoritarian party controls the state-owned means of production was, or ever could be, the answer. And I said as much to Noreen’s left-leaning guests:

“I think communism’s a much greater evil to inflict upon this country than anything that could be conceived and administered by a minor despot like F.B. A small-time thug like him might inflict a few individual tragedies. Perhaps several. But it hardly begins to compare with the rule of genuine tyrants like Stalin and Mao Tse-tung. They’ve been the manufacturers of national tragedies. I can’t speak for all the Iron Curtain countries. But I know Germany pretty well, and you can take it from me that the working classes of the GDR would love to change places with the oppressed peoples of Cuba.”

Guillermo Infante was a young student who had just been kicked out of the Havana University School of Journalism. He had also served a short sentence for writing something in a popular opposition magazine called Bohemia. This prompted me to point out that there were no opposition magazines in the Soviet Union, and that even the mildest criticism of the government would have earned him a very long sentence in some forgotten corner of Siberia. Montecristo cigar in hand, Infante proceeded to call me a “bourgeois reactionary” and several other phrases beloved of the Ivans and their acolytes that I hadn’t heard in a long time. Names that almost made me feel nostalgic for Russia, like some wet character in Chekhov.