The girl soon shimmied her way toward us again. She fingered the cashmere and silk shawl lightly draped on my shoulder, then pulled it away from me and onto her shoulders. I had a strong urge to punch her hard in the solar plexus. I pictured her crumpling forward, then falling down.

Immediately I felt ashamed. Let the poor girl wear the shawl for a minute. It had cost me a price equal to the fucking of many Cuban girls -- when would she ever have one of her own? She returned it as silently as she took it, after an interval of a minute or two. A Carmen, in her insolence and daring. What did she have to lose? Did her customers use condoms? Had she saved any of the money she had made? Was she supporting a family in the provinces, a child in an apartment nearby?

"Let's go," Tom said. "Los Van Van are going on in about a half-hour at Palacio. This place isn't happening tonight. By the way, you better get rid of that dog of yours. It's giving Lucy and Beth fleas, you know."

We walk out of the club with many eyes following us and I decide this is what it must feel like to be a movie star, except that I feel guilty in a way I don't think I would feel if I were a movie star.

The next afternoon I wait in the courtyard of the Hotel Nacional for my Spanish lesson to begin, and I think about the night at the Palermo. It reminds me of the time I went with a bunch of friends to a strip club in Mexico City that had become an obligatory stop for both local and visiting foreign artists for its perfunctory, sad sex show. The girls on the stage were dwarfish and ill-favored. They looked strongly Indian. Another American, the only black among us, explained to me that all the Mexican artists with us were from rich families, who bought them apartments and cars. They did not have to work.

I knew I would not have gone to a similar place in my own country, because Americans are not allowed to condescend to other Americans anymore. My night at the Palermo felt like the frolics of white people in Harlem in 1920. But why did I choose to feel righteous now? Months of my youth were spent in poor countries. I had visited many: Anguilla, Burma, Cambodia, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Mali, Morocco, Nepal, Senegal, Tanzania, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Zanzibar. I had been happy on those trips.

What is it about these poor countries? What savor do they offer us that Europe does not? Is it just the perfume of misery that makes us appreciate our own lives, frustrating as they may be? Was I happier in these countries when I myself was relatively poor for an American? I used to take $2,000 and go halfway across the world for a few months. That money might have been the income of 10 villagers in the country I visited, but it was also the savings of a year's work for me. Now things were different. I was comfortably off by American standards but the villagers were not.

My everyday behavior could not help but be inflected with unintended cruelty. When I invited my Spanish teacher to have coffee with me in the courtyard for our first lesson, it only struck me after I had ordered our coffees that there was something insulting about what I had done.

It was in the contrast between the two economies: I paid her $5 an hour for the lessons; she had initially asked for $2. That was the price of a cafe con leche at the hotel. Five an hour was great money for her -- half a month's official salary -- but it was two coffees for me. After that time, we still had lessons in the courtyard, but without coffee, which I found too embarrassing to order. And of course this was more her loss than mine. Sometimes I brought us chocolates from my room.

In New York I am a libertarian, a die-hard capitalist. In Cuba, I wish for capitalism for the Cubans also. But what to do now, sitting in the Hotel Nacional? The problem is with the luck of nations, the luck of birth into one place or another. I am starting to have a problem with my trips to the developing -- or, in the case of Cuba, the undeveloping -- world, a problem with the perfume of misery, with the way sadism is imposed by the luck of nations.

Cuba is more interesting than St. Barts, but perhaps I should go back there instead. It might be better to complain about the profit the locals are making on the outrageously priced hotel rooms than worrying about whether they have enough to eat.

A night later, I'm with Tom and Lucy and Beth at a big party at Marina Hemingway. This is the place where people with biggish boats dock them when they come to Cuba and also the place where a lot of expatriates with boats live. It is a respite from the dilapidation of Havana, the sense of tragedy that underlies it. It looks like Southern Florida, with well-kept low-rise apartments set in green lawns and with an enormous swimming pool, tennis courts, nice cars in the parking lots. There are even Cuban families with dogs on leashes, well-groomed dogs whose ribs you cannot see.

The crowd is about half Americans and half well-heeled Cubans. I have come with Perrito in my beach bag, hoping to find someone to adopt him. But although there are Cubans with dogs on leashes in the crowd, it isn't easy. Either the people I approach say they have already adopted two strays or they look away as if I were going to ask them for change. I can't seem to find anyone. Then I do. He's a handsome Frenchman walking a white dog, impeccably groomed, who looks very similar to Perrito, but full grown. Would you know someone who might want him, I ask, hesitantly. "I'll take him," he answers quickly. He invites me to tea the next day but I cannot make it. I watch the two dogs, white and black, big and small, sniff each other, and then I walk back to my friends. Already I miss the weight of Perrito's small body in my arms. Perhaps, I think, this is the last time I will come to Cuba.

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