The stream of emigration has drained the country of the well-educated entrepreneurial classes, and it has sown the seeds of social rupture. In a Marxist sense, Cuba has turned into a truly socialist nation, consisting mainly of poorly-educated workers and peasants. There are still intellectual elites, many of them dissident, some of them dissident in theory but owned by the secret services in practice, and others brainwashed. But the middle class in between, the backbone of every society, is now missing. A further strain comes from the division of society into those who get money from relatives abroad and those who don't. Ironically, socialist Cuba is a society of unequals and of unequal opportunity. Private initiative is discouraged, merit doesn't matter. A young girl from Morón, an eight-hour train ride from Havana, sums it up bitterly: "We can work ourselves to death and we will never get anywhere." If you do, it is with regular cheques from relatives abroad.

In the streets of Havana, Trinidad or Santiago, one can admire plenty of these subsidised nouveaux-riches in glittering T-shirts, brand-name jeans and sunglasses. Some of them venture out into state-run restaurants where they dine for twice the price of the average monthly salary, £15. Their showing-off comes with proto-colonial disdain for the waiters. Privileged as they are, they live in a shockingly different universe from those factory workers who earn their few pesos in places such as Moa, near the Eastern tip of the island, for example, where nickel is processed, poisoning their lungs forever. They also live in another world from the multitude of poor peasants who spend their days in flea-ridden shacks in the countryside, more or less employed as workers in stunningly archaic and inefficient kolhoz-style "agricultural co-operatives". With its fertile soil and generous climate, this lovely Caribbean island could be rich. If it had more appropriate agricultural structures, Cuba could easily feed its population and earn more from exports. But the co-operatives, together with an inefficient and deeply corrupted system of central allocation, make nothing of nature's generous endowment. Food needs to be imported, even from the US.

Theoretically, economic and political systems can be mended. But what about society? How to restore the values of Western civilisation? How to re-establish honesty, civility, courage, responsibility, morality, solidarity, trust? In Cuba, they have vanished, and it is hard to see how they could be retrieved. Hardly anybody behaves according to a higher moral imperative or a simple sense of honour — except, perhaps, people in the not-so-quaint Baracoa, remote, isolated and protected by a high chain of mountains, the Sierra de Guantánamo. It is here that a unique miracle occurs: when offered a propina, a tip, the attendant at the petrol station indignantly shakes his head and then smiles — filling up our tank is his job and his honour. Rather than a real glimmer of hope, however, this anecdote probably isn't more than an exception that confirms the tragic rule. It will take centuries to rebuild social capital in Cuba, if at all. 

"History will absolve me," said Fidel Castro in his famous defence speech after his first attempt at a revolution in 1953. He was wrong. Cuba is a dramatically failed political experiment. And it is hard to see how the verdict of history on the fatal conceit of his revolución could be anything but devastating.