In a rehearsal studio, a young Cuban ballet dancer turns through the air, pivoting as though some invisible power has unfurled him in an arc. Then, without pause, he leaps once, twice, and I gasp at the height of his grandes jetés and then gasp again because his pointed toe is heading right for a barre .

Welcome to Cuba, a country that dazzles and disappoints, where one finds miracles and monsters, but no easy answers.

Cubans recognize the contradictions as readily as any outsider. Yet even as inflation rises and the 77-year-old dictator tightens Internet access and closes the economic openings that encouraged self-employment in the mid-1990's, it is unlikely that Cubans will turn Castro out before he dies.

The rabidly anti-Castro Cuban exiles clustered in Miami argue that it is fear that holds Cubans back, but that's not true. A visitor in Cuba finds many ready to complain, but the palpable fear and visceral hatred rampant in El Salvador and Chile in the 1980's is absent in today's Cuba. Instead there is a kind of paralysis - born of a mix of loyalty, fear, and indoctrination - as they grudgingly wait for Castro to expire.

Unlike many of Latin America's freely elected governments, Castro has actually provided his constituents with public services - and without earning a reputation for corruption. "All the free education and health care gives a certain balance," said a prominent writer. "Their work is less valuable," he said referring to the pesos Cubans earn in an economy sustained by dollar remittances from the foreign diaspora. But "it's not a total disaster because people have this balance."

So, unlike the East Europeans who overthrew their corrupt political leaders in 1989, and some Latin Americans who did so more recently in Bolivia, Argentina, and Ecuador, Cubans have failed to rally against Castro. Yes, Castro jailed 75 independent journalists and others in an April sweep - that is the monster in him. But other dissidents remain free. That is the contradiction.

Moreover, unlike other luxury-loving Latin American leaders, Cuban officials do not flaunt lavish lifestyles. Among Latin American countries, only Chile and Uruguay rate better than Cuba in Transparency International's corruption index. But this could change as dollars become hard to resist and Cubans use them to cut through ridiculous bureaucratic hurdles. Already, the dollar has created a divide in living standards between those who have greenbacks and those who don't.

Despite a moribund economy, Castro still delivers what the majority of Latin American residents fail to get - free health care and education and a relatively drug- and crime-free environment. With more than 40% of Latin America's population living in poverty, Cuba stands out as an example of a country where being poor does not mean a life of squalor. Even World Bank president James Wolfensohn acknowledged in 2001 that Cuba had done a "great job" on education and health care.

More recently, in discussing the Bank's 2004 report Making Services Work for Poor People , officials put Cuba among countries like Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, and China that "managed to achieve a level of outcomes in health and education that are extremely favorable."

This winter, the Cuban government reinvested some of its income from tourism in upgrading schools that deteriorated in the years following the loss of Soviet aid. "Cubans are still endeared by that," said one Western diplomat.

Amazingly, many Latin America leaders fail to make the connection between reducing poverty and their own popularity. Compare Castro's campaign to improve schools to a poverty reduction program waged by Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party during a six-year period in the 1990's.

Mexico spent 1.2% of GDP per year to provide basic services to communities in Mexico. According to Santa Deverajan, the director of the World Bank's World Development Report 2004 , some studies showed that the program could have reduced poverty by as much as 64%. Instead, the money was doled out to municipalities based on political loyalty, so poverty fell by only 3%. "If they had just given it out equally to the entire Mexican population," Deverajan says, "it would have reduced poverty by 13%."

Examples like this abound in Latin America, but it is a mistake for Castro to think that Latin America is the competition. Cubans don't think it is. Their touchstones are Madrid, Paris, and New York.

An educated professional with a wife and two children takes a breath when he recalls a trip to Spain. "It's hard to explain how I felt when I went there. It wasn't like another world or another planet; it was like another galaxy." With family in Spain, he could immigrate, but he doesn't consider that option seriously. "This is where I want to live, but 5% of the way things are run has got to change. They blame everything on the embargo. We have a self-imposed embargo. We limit ourselves."

More precisely, Castro limits Cubans. They want to breathe, but life with a patriarchal tyrant can be suffocating. Younger Cubans often sound like well-educated teenagers with parents who are too strict. They want to travel, publish what they want, dance when and where they want, and experience the world as Castro experienced it.

"It's not my fight," says one 28-year-old Cuban, referring to the political battle of communism versus capitalism that keeps him trapped on the island. "I'm a new generation. I want to see as they had the chance to see."