Castro, still a darling of America's aging, pot-smoking Left, has ordered a vicious and random crackdown on prostitution and vice over the past few weeks, closing four downtown discos and chucking Havana's ubiquitous and state-approved jineteras (literally, horse-riders) off to the island's cockroach-infested jails.

In one case reported yesterday by the Associated Press, two prostitutes and their foreign juans were rousted by the ever-present police at 4 a.m. and taken into custody. Three neighbors were also arrested on charges of renting out rooms to hookers. A dozen people in all now face prison time.

Among the suspects is 71-year-old Maria Garcia, a former revolutionary who was one of the few hundred bandits to fight with Castro and Che Guevera in the Sierra Maestra mountains in the late 1950s. She now faces up to eight years in prison.

"I didn't ask them what they were going to do. I just rented the rooms," Garcia told AP.

There are few original revolutionaries left in Cuba -- Castro has either killed, imprisoned or alienated most of them, erasing their names and pictures from the endlessly revised histories of the era.

This has come in handy during the "special period" of the 1990s, when the Soviet collapse shut off the spigot of free money and oil, crippling a country whose dysfunctional economy was already suffering from the U.S. embargo. Quite literally faced with mass starvation in 1993, Castro has been forced to allow the re-introduction of the very things the revolución was supposed to destroy -- U.S. dollars, private beaches for the rich whites, a yawning gap between rich and poor, and -- especially -- prostitution.

In present-day Havana, a white foreign man strolling alone through the streets of downtown will be approached roughly 100 times in the space of an hour by prostitutes, taxi drivers, cigar and rum peddlers, restaurant runners, pickpockets, families wanting to emigrate and people who just want to talk about baseball for a while. He will also pass by hundreds of loitering cops, and a Committee for the Defense of the Revolution on every single city block.

Most families in Havana have at least one member renting a room, working at a tourist restaurant or prowling the hotel lobbies -- where a disgusting parade of pot-bellied middle-aged Canadians and Italians sit grinning with 14-year old mulattas on their laps. With typical salaries running between $10-20 a month in pesos -- which, of course, cannot buy much of anything in an economy that respects only American greenbacks -- a quick bang can feed a family of eight for a week.

For the last five years, Castro -- himself known for his taste in pretty young things -- has tolerated this degradation with a concerned but helpless frown. He might rail against the jineteras in one of his seven-hour speeches, but the state-owned dollar shops selling purses and women's shoes at state-owned hotels would be stone empty if it wasn't for the constant presence of young girls in working the lobbies.

Prostitution is not a crime in Cuba, but pimping can draw a long sentence. Both were tolerated until the past few months, which have seen a general increase in crime that has spooked the generally passive islanders.

Suddenly, the aging commies started blaming vice for the country's ills.

"They're going to do us in," said regional Commie leader Esteban Lazo, according to the AP.

Havana's streets, which usually teem with life until sunrise, have been all but deserted, the AP reported, with the exception of new white Peugots on patrol. Those ominous cruisers now prowl the streets, stopping to interrogate anyone they please.

MATT WELCH: Letter from Havana
(FEB. 24, 1998)