DOLLARS BUY CASTRO BREATHING ROOM./by Jorge G.Castaneda

-Cuba: Consumer trade in goods and services has eased tensions somewhat, buyng time for the limping revolution.

Given the Castro regime's proclivity for mking matters worse, and given the sometimes atrocious nature of scarcities and deprivation in Cuba today, it seems brash or imprudent to suggest that the situation on the island is improving. And yet several factors indicate that tensions have dropped, and that the economic outlook has changed slightly for the better since last summer. Three shifts in Cuban life explain this somewhat surprising turns of events.

First is the return of the peasant markets, now known as agro-mercados, and the opening of markets for individually manufactured crafts and goods. Food now can be obtained outside the rationing system and the black market; not everything is always available some poducts vanish quickly, but fruit and vegetables, some meat, chicken and eggs and staples such as rice and potatoes can be purchased, a major improvement over the past few years.

Critics in Havana argue, not without reason, that prices at the peasant markets are outrageous: A pound of anything can cost the equivalent of half a week's minimum wages. And the markets encourage price-gouging and hoarding. But if one use the price issue in dollars, the perspective is quite different. In dollars, at the unofficial rate of exchange, the goods available at the agro-mercados are affordable, as are services provided by newly authorized, so called independent professions, such as plumbers and automechanics. Here lies the second factor contributing to the slight Cuban upturn: the U.S. dollars.

Most of the dollars held by the ordinary cubans can be traced to three points of origin: remittances from Miami (the Clinton Administration's restrictions notwithstanding); tourism, benefiting both the state, which receive payement for airfares and hotels, and society, which rakes in cash for everything from art to prostitution; and spending by the burgeoning foreign non tourist community in Havana. The market works: between the availability of dollars and the losening of restrictions on business, demand has generated its own supply. The most convincing sign is the rise in the value of the Cuban peso, from more than 100 to the dollar a few months back to 40 to 1 today.

No doubts , the growing circulation of dollars has delat a blow to what is left of the Cuban Revolution. Citizens are increasingly divided into two groups: those with access to dollars, thanks to family in Florida, wares or talents to peddle or jobs in certain sectors, and those lacking such access. Inequality, the bane of all Latin Americaqn societies, and the reduction of which has been the pride and joy of Fidel Castro's experiment, has returned to Cuba, with vengeance. But it has accompanied a rise in living standards for some Cubans, a minority, but a substantial one. Castro's uncanny and legendary political skill underlies the third and the last factor that explains why life and politics are less tense in Cuba today than months ago. The rafter crisis of lkasty August was no minor affair: Once again, the revolutionary regime prjected to the world the dismal spectacle of a population willing to risk anything - sharks, storms, exposure, life itself - to leave a Caribbeaan inferno. Yet, as so many times i

n the past - in 1959, with the exodus of the Cuban professional elite; in the early '60s, through the Camaguey airlift; in 1988, thanks to the Mariel boat exiles - Castro put to good use the theory that to leave is to forsake opposition, political strugle and dissidence. The tens of thousands who took to the sea in August were not opposition leaders, but they did include many of the island's most fiercely discontent. As Castro cornered the Clinto Administration into reopening a minimal legal emigration safety valve, the rafter's sea-lift gave others hope that they, too, soon would be able to leave Cuba for the land of milk and honey across the Florida Straits. This expectation, of course, makes little rational sense. But Castro's genius always has been to sense and tap the passions and the dreams of the Cuban people. He hasn'n lost his touch, even if the price of keeping it has stretched wel beyond the bounds of any democratic acceptance or accountability. What the loosened restrictions have given Castro is

what he nedds most: time to outlast another American President, time to recover from the loss of his Soviet subsidy, time to restructure the Cuban economy before popular discontent forces open the political system and sweeps away the last vestige of revolutionary rule.

Fidel Cstro just may have bought himself breathing room, no small feat after 40 years of single-handed political survival.

(Jorge G.Castaneda is a political scientist in Mexico and longtime Cuba-watcher)