Many of the Cubans I met expressed frustration with the way police broke up conversations with tourists. A handful of these dissenters were simply Jineteros looking for more freedom to sell me cigars, or get a gift out of me. But others seemed genuinely disappointed, if not angry, about their inability to travel where they wanted and speak to whom they pleased.

Some chose to simply break the policy when police were absent, a practice especially common in Havana. Others overtly resisted the segregation. The group of teenagers in Trinidad, for example, refused to move from a table at an outside bar, confident perhaps that the cops wouldn't make a scene in front of the 100 European and American visitors.

And at least a few seem to have found creative ways to undermine not just the tourism policy, but also more general Cuban restrictions. Take the woman I met in the Varadero bus station -- I'll call her Maria. Smartly dressed in a navy blue miniskirt suit set, she told us about how she planned to use her Italian boyfriend to buy a house. Cubans aren't allowed to purchase private property, she explained, but foreigners are. And since Maria's sister was a lawyer, she was confident that the plan would come off without a hitch. She already had money saved. The fact that her boyfriend came to Cuba for only a few months a year seemed to be nothing more than an irrelevant footnote.

Of course, these anecdotes do not an opposition movement make. For every Cuban who expressed opposition, there were at least a dozen more who seemed perfectly happy to remain outside the tourist clubs and beaches. Many were happy just being within earshot of a band, picking up enough of a beat to justify a hearty dance.

Acceptance is the norm in Cuba, some argue. Tourism apartheid is not "an issue that will cause an upheaval," Smith says. The segregation may be visible and important to tourists, he says, but Cubans have other concerns. "Resentments over tourism would recede quickly if the government would but move ahead with other reforms, such as a small-business law and giving more land for private cultivation," he says.

Yet, perhaps Cubans will once again surprise the experts and the world, as they did in 1959. The tourism policy, unlike other Cuban forms of repression, strikes at the heart of both the Revolution and the Cuban psyche, says Max Castro at the University of Miami. "It's self-discrimination," he says. "That creates a different psychological response in the population. It's a point of stronger frustration -- especially for a people that are as nationalistic as Cubans. It's a real hard pill to swallow for a lot of people."

Some sort of showdown may not be inevitable, but it seems to be, at the very least, possible. Cuba's tourism expansion continues, even in the midst of a worldwide recession that's sucked the life out of the industry. The tiny, peaceful key off the coast of Caibarien is only one example of many projects being developed. New hotels seem to be everywhere and some of the most beautiful plazas in Havana are being refinished and essentially set aside for tourists. Even in Varadero -- which is already full of luxurious, if boxy and functional, hotels -- new construction is common.

Perhaps more disturbingly, the ironies and hypocrisies continue to add up. History seems to be disappearing. Not only are the coastal islands once frequented by Hemingway being gobbled up by the government, but so too are the shreds of literature that praise open access.

Remember Guillen's poem "Tengo," for example? Well, says Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, a comparative literature professor at Yale, "Guillen is dead now and so is his poem, which I understand is not allowed to circulate because, indeed, certain hotels, bars, restaurants are not open to Cuban blacks. There is an irony for you."

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