A well printed new editions of juveniles, Ivanhoe, Moby Dick, Robin Hood, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Gulliver's Travels around the world in 80 Days. Lenin's Memoirs of my youth English in the classroom with Frank and Nancy, including the text of the US National Anthem, top sellers for adults in one book shop, Tolstoy's Anna, Karenina, Louis Babbitt, Dos Passos, Manhattan transfer and the CIA, the invisible government, by wise and Ross Tuesday, bought my aromas today from a sad, elderly little man in the tobacco kiosk he's occupied for 21 years. Can't compete with the state owned smoke shops. He said, they won't take back old merchandise. Won't provide him with cameras, film lighters, pipes and novelties that once give him his profit. So why hadn't he accepted the job they offered him to run a store, then I'd have no place to meet my old friends. He said, free enterprise here is not quite dead. Some classified ads from El Mundo. Don't throw away that old wig we repair and diet for $80 learn to dance. Private cigar manufacturer requires traveling. Agent with car, private investigators. Special investigators specializes in divorce actions, luxurious Cadillac chauffeur, notary public, flowers, buffet, dinner, beer, 10 pictures in color, our complete wedding service, punctual and serious. $95 Wednesday, to book my return flight to Mexico City on Cubana airlines today, and dreading it on my last visit, they'd passed me like a lost child from one office to another for an entire afternoon now in a spanking new building of glass, a brisk lady who rekindled an unrequited youthful passion for Dolores del Rio had me ticketed long before I could make my move. No organization lost so many key personnel in the elderly exodus to the United States, some 80 senior pilots joined the top echelon of directors and take flight. The company rebuilt its management with inexperienced young people, as did many another large concern today, it claims to fly up to 30,000 passengers monthly on its domestic routes, 18,000 more than in the pre Castro days. It has trained more than 150 pilots, many of whom learned basic Russian to accommodate Soviet flight instructors and 900 mechanics. In 1983 I had flown from Mexico in a tired sub Britannia with soiled seat covers and a general air dilapidation apparently held together with fowling wire. One grounded Britannia, in fact, was being cannibalized to provide parts to the other airborne. Today, the company flies four refurbished Britannias. One is Lisa Czechoslovakia on the Mexico run, as well as transatlantic flights to Madrid and Prague, and has a fleet of 14 Russian made Ilyushin, piston and turbo prop planes for internal flights on delivery are 550, passenger, high wing, two motor 300 mile per hour Soviet transports called the A n2, four, suitable for Cuba's short non jet landing strips. Thursday, a day off to leisurely Site C around the harbor, always a bizarre sight, remembering those gay American cruise ships that once came this way to see the Russian freighters and tankers gliding in the yellow hammer and sickle red funnels against the postcard drop backdrop of the Morro cattle Lighthouse toward the mammoth new fishing terminal that Washington said was really a base for Soviet submarines cited plenty fish, no subs, an out of date billboard near the terminal urges volunteers to turn out for the now concluded sugar harvest. Urges the toilers to cut low and into three pieces. Shows a worker doing just. That to a green sugar stock that looks very much like Uncle Sam Friday at the Santa Teresa de gay farm east of the city of mentenzas, a re Education Center for prisoners convicted of acts of violence against the revolution, peaceful place deep in the country. Birds singing vegetable gardens, neat and green. 80 prisoners here, now mostly in their 20s, unguarded, living in pin neat barracks up at five, working in gardens, taking regular school courses and hearing periodic prep pep talks from visiting lecturers on the advantages of going casters away. 30 graduated from here back into society with jobs and houses provided by the Ministry of the Interior. 72 hour passes given every 2088. Days for behavior, so that inmates visit their families. A young director named Fabio is in charge. He was 17 when he fought alongside Fidel in the Sierra Maestra mountains, says this is being done to ease the financial burden of keeping people in jail. Spoke of political re education. And I reminded him, some would call it brainwashing. Dirty brains should be washed. He said, Very cool, but we prefer to think of it as taking off the blindfolds Saturday, everybody's night out compared with three years ago. Havana is a swing town, a noticeable psychological change since my last visit, young couples in the more elegant bars and restaurants of the Capri the Riviera and the Havana Libra, formerly the Hilton, once seemed touchingly awkward, ill at ease, out of their element, now they're right at home, much strolling through the lobbies to allow Milady to show off her new gown. Nice to see so many mixed couples of light and dark together like a fashion show, since wired music goes day and night, a seeping of Mantovani. Costellan nets, Paul Wesson, Glenn Miller, from every pore of the hotels.