The panel above my head read "ESCAPE ROPE INSIDE." How reassuring. I'd just boarded the noon flight on Cubana Air, which promised to take me from Cancun to Havana, and I was having serious doubts. The flimsy seat creaked under my weight, and it was so humid inside the plane that the air conditioning steamed from the floor in white clouds of vapor. I started to look around for a seatbelt.

Oh, well. If we crashed, at least the ocean was warm here, and in some ways the rickety plane was making me like Cuba already. I arrived safely, if a little unsteadily, at the Havana airport, and when I hailed a taxi, giddy with relief, the car that pulled up to the curb was a gleaming navy blue Rambler. As I climbed in and sank into the vast back seat, I was well on my way to a terminal case of nostalgia. It's almost impossible not to romanticize Cuba, and I was immediately sucked in by the weird, lost-in-time charm of the place. I soon wondered if Cubans were looking for more than just a conversation starter when they stopped foreigners on the street, pointed to their own wrists and said "Que hora es?" -what time is it? In Cuba, it's a complicated question.

Havana is a harbor city, and most of its citizens seem to spend their hot July evenings looking out to sea. They walk, talk and flirt (a national pastime) on the wide, seawater-pitted promenade called the Malecón, which winds along the waterfront from the suburbs to the decaying palaces of Old Havana. On weekend nights, young men ride by on one-speed bicycles with their elegant dates balancing sidesaddle on the rear racks.

Many of the cars on the quiet streets, like the taxi I took from the airport, are American models from the 1950's, imported before the U.S. trade blockade. They're lovingly kept alive with Russian parts, a bit of elbow grease, and not a little Cuban ingenuity. One morning, we saw a man near the university bent over a bombed-out vintage car - no windows, no seats, no tires, and about six coats of peeling paint he was patiently removing with a blowtorch. As two of his friends looked on, he proudly opened the hood to show us the original engine, and told us that all the removable parts (like the seats) were in his apartment for safekeeping. Parts are hard to come by, he said, and a car left on the street is fair game.

Even the billboards in the city are from another time. Most Havanans are eagerly waiting for political change ("Things won't get any better for us," one man told us, "until -" and he paused, stroked an imaginary beard, and pointed to the clouds with a significant nod) but you wouldn't know it from the political slogans that are still part of the city's landscape. One billboard on the Malecón shows a cartoon of a cringing Uncle Sam, with a brave Cuban shouting "SENORES IMPERIALISTS! WE HAVE ABSOLUTEMENTE NO FEAR OF YOU!" Paintings of Che Guevara are everywhere, exhorting Cubans to keep fighting for victory over the gringos. And most sidewalk booksellers stock enough books about Fidel Castro to fill a small town's library, except one who asked us to bring him a copy of Henry Miller's Plexus if we ever came back.

We walked around in a daze for days, trying to make sense of the contrast between shining Oldsmobile tailfins and banners reading VIVA LA REVOLUCION. One afternoon, my friend tried to find a way to send e-mail, a hopeless search that eventually took us to a large, empty student center. We asked in an office. "Oh no, I'm sorry," a young man told us in solemn English. "Only members of our organization can use the computers." What organization is that? "The Young Communists League," he answered. Back on the street, we tried to remember the last time non-membership in the Communist Party was a disadvantage. Sometimes, the fact that only ninety miles of ocean separate the Cuban coast and the Florida Keys seemed like a very good joke.

"We only hear about your poverty and homelessness and crime," a sidewalk vendor of medicinal plants said to me. (I didn't have a lot of trouble believing this: I'd just bought a Marxist journalist's handbook that defined objectivity as service to the revolution.) I agreed with him. There are terrible things about the States, I said. But there are some wonderful things, too. Like my home in Colorado, I tried to explain in my lousy Spanish. I live in a wide-open, quiet kind of place. "Ah!" he says, nodding. "Como `Bailes con Lobos.'" Like `Dances with Wolves.'

Unfortunately, Kevin Costner knows no boundaries.

We were surprised to find some signs of American culture, usually ferried over by relatives in Miami, or New Jersey, or Atlanta. American flag t-shirts. Nikes. Yankees baseball caps (this in a country where "Cuba Si, Yanqui No!" is often painted on walls). And American movies, showing in theatres around the city.

But even these familar goods have an antique twist in Cuba. At movie theatres, ushers hand out squares of corrugated cardboard at the door. We were puzzled at first, but as the sweat started to pour down our faces we finally figured out that they're to be used as fans. Halfway through the movie, a huge chunk of the ceiling fell into the audience. Everybody jumped up, exclaiming, but when it was clear that no one was hurt we all sat down again and turned back to the movie, most people laughing and shaking their heads. "That's Cuba," people said when we told the story later.

The blockade that keeps most American goods from reaching the country adds to Cuba's romance -other than a few baseball caps, the place is buffered from cultural change by the backward political forces of another time. Somehow, before I went to Cuba, I absorbed the mistaken idea that it's isolated from everyone on earth, and while I was there it seemed like a secret I'd been trusted to keep. For me, and for other travelers from the States, it's the world inside the wardrobe, a country living in the ruins of its own past.

It's not just Havana that's a cracked-mirror world for visitors. When I caught a train to Cienfuegos, a small city on the south side of the island, the train moved so slowly I could step down and walk beside it. The view was filled with blue skies and red earth and sugarcane fields, stretching one after the other into the distance, and I stood in the doorway with the breeze in my face, watching waving children and grazing goats and handsome men. It was a good thing I wasn't ready to get off, anyway. I was traveling about 150 miles, but it took me close to nine hours.

I was happy in Cuba. It's too beautiful, too fascinating, for me not to have been happy. And I laughed a lot while I was there, since it's a place addicted to irony and wit. But I was also sad and angry much of the time, and embarrassed more than I'd like to admit.

Here's part of the reason. "Let's go to the Museum of the Revolution," one of us might say in the morning. We would set out, full of purpose, determined to be good tourists. Around dinnertime, footsore and grimy, we'd finally arrive at the museum, with hardly time to get a good look at Che's asthma inhaler before the place closed for the day. You see, it was hard to walk more than a few blocks in Havana without getting distracted. Strangers would constantly strike up conversations with us, usually just out of curiosity, and they'd almost always let loose a stream of insights into their culture and our own. Through those conversations, we started to learn why people have so much time on their hands.

Everyone has an education, since free university education is one benefit of the far-reaching Revolutionary social programs, but it doesn't seem to lead to work. A college student majoring in computer science at the University of Havana said to us, "We're studying here because we're interested, not because we think we're going to make more money when we get out. We just have to hope that things are going to change."

We stayed in a casa particular, a private home whose owners rent out rooms to tourists, and started talking to our hosts. Marina has a degree in business, and spent six years working in Russia. Now, she can't find a job, and even though she rents her rooms for the standard rate of 25 U.S. dollars a night she struggles to pay the hefty government taxes. Her son Johandry, who has a beautiful 18-year-old girlfriend ("A twin!" he tells us with glee) and a law degree from the University of Havana, is out of work as well. Education is easy to get, but very hard to sell.

Everyone seemed to be a thinker, from the taxi driver who'd worked in Russia as a translator to the waiter who served us spaghetti night after night at a little cafe in Old Havana. But most Cubans scrape by on a government salary or work in tourism, living off their dollar tips as drivers or tour guides. Dollars are precious to Cubans, because most American-style goodsCfrom new paperbacks to fast food to clothingCcan only be bought with U.S. currency. The bright lights of Cuban dollar shops make some Havana streets look almost prosperous, but Cubans suffer from chronic shortages of almost all essential goods, including medicines and school supplies. Even traveling on the cheap, we were horrified to realize that we spent in two weeks what many Cubans could hope to make in ten years.

Recent reforms are bringing some badly needed relief for some people, but we did worry about the changes that people talked about in Cuba, the growing desperation for dollars above all. The strong sense of Cuban identity has been bolstered by years of fighting a common enemy. If the blockade ended, would the inevitable arrival of U.S. goods (both useful and useless) spell the end of Cuba's uniqueness?

We argued about this with each other as we walked along the Malecón for the last time, just after Carnaval wound down at the end of July. We were close to the U.S. Interests Office, the tall, forbidding-looking building that houses an embassy that's not quite an embassy. No one is allowed to walk past it on the same side of the street, and Cuban guards motion you away if you linger too long nearby. We complained again about the arrogance of this, embarrassed about our passports.

Then we heard some shouting and laughter from across the street. We walked over to find a volleyball game in progress, played in a court that's half sunken into the ground, just hidden enough for the guards to be able to ignore. We stood on the sidelines and watched the sun set over the embassy, silhouetting its prickly antennae and satellite dishes, and we listened to the Cubans good-naturedly arguing over the score. And I finally realized that they're old hands at this -this endearing but troubling time travel, this country where nothing is familiar but everything is as it used to be. No matter who thinks they're in charge of Cuba, we told each other later, the Cubans themselves are probably going to be crafty enough to get by with their selves intact. Here's hoping their escape ropes hold.

Michelle Nijhuis is a staff reporter for High Country News and the Carribean Bureau Chief for the Canyon Country Zephyr.