But earlier I'd visited Cuba's leading music school, the Instituto Superior de Arte, which sprawls with a kind of tattered luxury on a campus that, before the revolution, used to be a country club. There I watched a lively small conducting class, strongly taught by Jorge López Marín, another composer I'd met in New York. The students, none too advanced, were deeply into Brahms and Beethoven, but where will they conduct? The school, incredibly, has no orchestra of its own, because, I was told, students with professional ambitions don't choose to study orchestral instruments that can't be used in pop.
At home, Mr. López Marín has faded posters from concerts he conducted in the '80s in the Soviet bloc., But now, he says, he's lucky to conduct four times a year in Cuba. Yes, the country has four professional orchestras, along with an opera company that rarely performs. But these groups aren't in strong condition; they're depleted, everybody says, because the best musicians take jobs abroad, in Spain, perhaps, or Latin America. Even the conductor of Havana's National Symphony, Leo Brouwer (also a composer and guitarist, and arguably Cuba's most famous classical musician), lives in Spain.
Apart from the National Symphony, Havana has just three professional classical ensembles, and one of them, Camarata Romeu, an all-female string ensemble, is strikingly distinctive -- its musicians dress in stylish outfits and play from memory with arresting warmth and spirit, if not the smoothest sonic gloss. But when I watched the group rehearse, I couldn't help but notice that its concertmistress had a broken bow, which she'd patched with tape. "Did you see that?" the Camarata's conductor, Zenaida Romeu, asked me afterward, explaining what I'd already guessed, that instrument repair -- along with instruments themselves, music paper, and information about music in the outside world -- is hard to come by. The Camarata tours, but it lost two members when it played in Mexico, and two more when it visited New York. Would it be allowed to tour again? "Shhh!" she said, lowering her voice and almost whispering: "I hope so."
But not everybody speaks in whispers, and for sheer moxie the prize goes to Juan Blanco, who's 80 years old, has been married eight times and runs Cuba's electronic music studio. Mr. Blanco was a Communist before the revolution, and feels free to cheerfully denounce the years of what he calls "the Russian occupation," when, he said, dogmatic Cubans opposed electronic music because their Soviet comrades believed it wasn't socialist, Even so, he told me, he was asked in 1970 to create an electronic work for public performance on a big Havana street. He used a recording of Lenin's voice, which at times he speeded up, once more angering the dogmatists. "They said I made Lenin sing like a woman!" But still the piece was played, and years later, Mr. Blanco had the last laugh. "After glasnost [came to Russia], I noticed that Lenin was not what I thought. So I took his name out of the title, like Beethoven taking off the dedication of his Third Symphony to Napoleon!"
I also heard a mouthful from Juan Piñera ,a soulful composer I'd met in New York, and two friends of his, Raysa White, a poet who produces segments on the arts for Cuban television, and Rosario Cárdenas, a choreographer whose company has danced in Australia and Mexico. All three agreed that in the '70s, at the height of Russian influence, the arts in Cuba were politicized. But that is not true now, they told me. And when I asked them who decides which artists get government support, they said that they themselves do, along with other artists like them, serving on peer-review panels much like those at our own National Endowment for the Arts.
"So there's no political requirement?" I asked. "No!" replied all three, even before I'd finished my question, Mr. Piñera, speaking only for himself, did note that "in totalitarian systems" (and here he raised a wry finger to stress that this theoretical observation would apply to tyrannies of the right or of the left), "you become marginalized, or else they buy you." He's 50, wears his long hair in a ponytail. and clearly hasn't been bought, though his life on the edges -- teaching private students and writing music for theater and dance -doesn't seem entirely marginal. He even wrote in opera that was seen as an anti-Castro allegory, and incredibly, perhaps, it was produced. "My censorship," said Mr. Piñera, "was that I wasn't paid." More painfully, he talked about an uncle, a famous writer whose books were suppressed in 1968, though now they're rehabilitated. "I hope to have a long life," he said, with his always sad and playful smile, "and someday laugh at all of this."