Unhappily, by the Eighties virtually no Cubans had dollars to buy foreign cars. The proof is straightforward, that hardly any cars from that period are visible on the roads. Certainly in the Special Period purchases of foreign cars must have stopped altogether. An obvious first deduction is that the ability of the Cuban people to buy cars was radically less by the Nineties than it had been 30 years before. True enough, some more modern cars are to be seen in Havana, although they are rare in the countryside. (For the first time in over 20 years I saw a Dagenham-made Ford Zephyr, clapped-out but going, on a rural road near the pretty tourist town of Trinidad.)

According to the Economist last January, the Cuban government announced that special permits would no longer be required if people wanted to buy the latest imported cars. This was dressed up, in the best Potemkin style, as a deregulation measure. But there was a catch, that the cars would be available only from state-owned suppliers and at fantastic prices. A standard Peugeot saloon car sold in Europe for $30,000 costs about $250,000 in Cuba, which is ludicrous in a nation ostensibly with an average annual income of $300. A second fair deduction is that the ability of the Cuban people to buy cars must be less — drastically less — in the 2010s than in the 1950s.

The enthusiasm for colonial buildings also says much about the island's economic trends. Havana and the principal towns do have modern structures. Blocks of flats were built in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, before the economic situation became too dire, and over the whole island they must provide accommodation to hundreds of thousands of people. However, Cuba's population has been depleted by the emigration of more than a million people, as well as by 20,000 state executions. Several towns therefore have smaller populations now than 50 years ago.

As a result, when blocks of flats are located in the outer suburbs of the main conurbations, they are often empty and vulnerable to the elements, and they are deteriorating. Brutalist in design and cheap to construct, they are hideous and tacky in decay. The buildings that are worth preserving are much older ones, usually in the town centres, that date from the colonial period. It is these, not the products of contemporary Communist architecture, that can be happily represented on postcards.

In Havana whole sections of the city are in an appalling state of dilapidation. Guidebooks still refer to the Malecón, a famous oceanfront esplanade, as a tourist must-see. From a distance the buildings look big and grand, but the salt from the Atlantic necessitates constant repainting and maintenance if they are to stay presentable on closer inspection. Most of them were stolen from their original owners over 40 years ago and the Cuban state has not looked after them subsequently. Only a fraction of the structures are new, and the decay of the old is proceeding at such a rate that a high proportion of them are uninhabitable and unoccupied. Again, the conclusion must be antes mejor ("better before"). The Cuban construction sector produces less today than in the Batista period, while the quality of housing stock, and indeed of the built infrastructure as a whole, must have gone down compared with the Fifties.