HAVANA CUBA : To see the city today is to glimpse its past, too. In the narrow streets of Antigua Habana, the old town, time seems to have stopped somewhere back in the pre-revolutionary past.

Time is the least thing we have of.

--Ernest Hemingway, quoted in a New Yorker profile by Lillian Ross, May 13, 1950

They still serve big double frozen daiquiris at La Floridita, the ones without sugar that Hemingway once described as feeling, when you drink them, “the way downhill glacier skiing feels running through powder snow.”

They call them Papa Hemingway daiquiris on the menu and charge three pesos (around $3.60 U.S.), double the price of an ordinary daiquiri and triple the cost of beer.

Inside the sheltering midday darkness of La Floridita’s restaurant, time is stuck back somewhere in the pre-revolutionary past. A tarnished silver stand is piled with a Carmen Miranda pyramid of wax fruit, the maitre d’hotel is in correct black tie and a trio of strolling musicians strums silken melodies for families enjoying a leisurely Sunday lunch.

On the streets of the old town area the layers of time peel back like the scabrous paint from once-proud buildings in the unflinching sunlight, until one imagines the hoofbeats of Spanish horses against the cobblestones in the Plaza de Armas amid the restored colonial buildings turned into museums.

Amid the rubble, dust and confusion of buildings being demolished or rebuilt in the narrow streets of Antigua Habana, the Art Deco tile towers of the Edificio Bacardi still loom proudly as a reminder of the boom time during the palmy days of Prohibition.

Just off the square, the Ambos Mundos Hotel, where a wall plaque says Hemingway stayed in the 1930s, is trussed with scaffolding and painted a glowing pink and white. But a quick look inside reveals only grim and rudimentary 1940s furniture, a naked light bulb, a dark reception counter with a few keys hanging from it and a dingy stairwell.

Next door an orderly queue has formed at a bakery, and each customer leaves with an armload of crusty brown loaves wrapped in paper.

We had sailed into Havana harbor in the early morning light on a Sunday, past the sun-gilded old Spanish fortresses that have guarded its mouth since a century after Columbus, through acrid fumes from a refinery that the breeze was stubbornly blowing back toward the city.

We cruised past East German and Soviet tankers and cargo ships, a handful of gray naval vessels including some small submarines, a bright red passenger ferry chugging back and forth across the bay and a clutch of listing, rusty, Cuban-flag derelicts that appear to be in a state of perpetual anchor in the middle of the harbor.

The East German and Soviet ships come to take on sugar and drop off oil and consumer goods, including still more of the small Soviet-built automobiles called Ladas that are used as taxis and private vehicles all over Cuba and a few other Caribbean islands.

But the real aristocrats of Havana’s streets are the rusting tail-fin era Buicks, Chevys, Kaisers, Packards, Fords and Pontiacs--the pre-revolutionary vehicles that have been lovingly cared for, cannibalized, repaired and painted over so many times that their origin is sometimes indecipherable.

They still lumber along, their Miami tropical colors faded in the sun, chrome stripped away, some of them smeared with so much putty-like dent filler that the contours of the vehicle have been altered.

On a 1958 Chevy, the trunk opens and closes with hardware-store hinges, but there is also an unforgettable 1947 Studebaker in lime green tootling along the street near the port, so polished that it could have just rolled off the assembly line. When a visitor lifted a camera to photograph it, the proud owner slammed on the brakes while he and his passengers waved delightedly.

Cuba is one of the last Caribbean ports of call for the Astor, a Mauritius-registry ship sold to the Soviet Union only days before this sailing left Jamaica. From here it goes on to cruise the Mediterranean for the summer, then is scheduled to be delivered to its new owners in October.

Our traveling companions were primarily Europeans--British, West German and a sprinkling of French--although the Cuban tourist office, it is immediately apparent, has expected us all to be German, and so the signs strung along the pier wish us Wilkommen and inform us in Deutsch that we can find anything we could wish to buy.

The going tourist currency these days turns out, to everyone’s great surprise, to be the U.S. dollar, so all the Europeans hurry down to the purser’s office for a good supply of small bills in order to snap up at dockside boxes of 25 Havana cigars for $30, $2 all-cotton T-shirts, $1 cassettes of Cuban music, $4 rum and $3 men’s sport shirts bearing labels from Cuba, Brazil and Mexico.

Only much later, after a teen-age girl at one of the stalls shyly asks if a visitor would take two $1 bills across to another vendor to buy two music cassettes for her, was it apparent that some of these goods are not readily available to the Cubans.

Along the pier a welcoming band in short-sleeved lavender shirts assembled amid a clutter of metal folding chairs, women rolled cigars for tourist cameras and a pretty girl hand-cranked a gadget that peels oranges in spiral grooves.

A group of cheerful men wearing red bandannas sold T-shirts from a hotel, the Habana Riviera, which Miami mob figure Meyer Lansky opened in 1959--in a classic piece of bad timing--at the peak of the revolution. Today it’s one of three or four top hotels in Havana, although an Argentine company is said to be building eight new ones at Veradero Beach two hours away.

The passengers who choose the ship’s half-a-day city tour ($22) wind up, after a ramble around the old town, in the affluent suburb of Miramar at a gleaming white mansion called La Maison.

Beside a cool blue swimming pool in a lavishly landscaped garden, waiters hand out Cuba libres, glasses of rum and cola. At one wrought-iron table, a quartet of Englishwomen old enough to remember a popular 1940s song about drinking rum and Coca-Cola turn giddy and giggly as they sway in rhythm to the sound of guitars.

In the hotel, air-conditioned shops display luxury goods from Paris, London, Rome and New York--perfumes and cosmetics, furs and feathers, silk and fine leather, all of it purchasable by credit card or U.S. dollars in this enclave restricted to diplomats and tourists.

Across the city, three decades after the revolution, the marble building that was once Fulgencio Batista’s presidential palace has become the Museum of the Revolution. In front is a Soviet tank, along with a plaque that identifies it as used for defense during “the Central Intelligence Agency” invasion of the Bay of Pigs in 1961.

Then, in ironic counterpoint, the first sight visitors encounter inside it is a heroic wall mural of Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders charging up San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War, swords drawn and sabers rattling.

In room after room of exhibits labeled only in Spanish, Cuba’s recent history unfolds from the post-revolutionary viewpoint. Photographs of exuberant American Marines gambling in Havana’s glittering casinos are juxtaposed with pictures of slum dwellers and malnourished children.

There is a mass of memorabilia--false identity papers, blood-stained clothing, pamphlets and scraps of writings. Everything Fidel and Raul Castro, Che Guevera and the others of the July 26 Movement wore, wrote, touched or sat on seems to be on display, including two stuffed gray mares from the Oriente Province campaign.

In the back, enclosed in a huge glass exhibit case like the Viking ships in Norwegian museums and flanked by an honor guard that changes every half an hour, is the Granma, the boat that brought Castro and his closest supporters from Mexico to Cuba in 1956, when 83 men crowded into a craft that would normally carry only half that.

In the rough weather they encountered, most were violently seasick and the overloaded, slow boat arrived two days late, throwing off the carefully planned invasion timetable.

All around the Granma are the venerated vehicles of the revolution--the red “Fast Delivery” truck, riddled with bullet holes, that was used to assault the presidential palace on March 13, 1957; a Pontiac Silver Streak driven by the resistance couriers; a turbine from an American U-2 surveillance plane used during La Crisis de Octobre de 1962, which we call the Cuban Missile Crisis.

But rhetoric and politics seem to be confined to the museum exhibits. There are very few slogans and billboards and no graffiti in sight. Virtually everyone is courteous, and many downright friendly.

People on the streets smile, wave and give a “thumbs up” signal to the modern, air-conditioned tourist buses that contrast markedly with the exhaust-puffing, 5-centavo guaguas that locals are crammed into.

At the 1929 Parliament House called the Capitol, when camera-toting Europeans disembarking from the bus are approached by little boys asking for Chiclets, an elderly man in some sort of uniform scolds them and shoos them away, saying to them in Spanish that they “ . . . make a bad impression for the tourists.”

Many of those strolling through the streets are carrying palm fronds from Sunday church services. As the afternoon begins, Cubans in every shade, from ivory to ebony, congregate at sidewalk cafes and in restaurants. Colors are vivid, the tone subdued but unmistakably Caribbean. Teen-age girls in tight new blue jeans walk past, arm in arm, toward a carnival of rides and games set up in a park.

Practicing Swings

Little girls in floral prints and ruffles proudly hold papa’s hand; a 6-year-old boy in a homemade red-and-blue baseball uniform practices his swing while his grandfather watches.

And yet, especially in the old town area, many shops are closed or bare, and the few that seem to be in business display merchandise in a lackadaisical fashion on battered mannequins or draped over coat hangers, with the price and any ration coupon requirement displayed nearby.

One window contains what looks like military garments for both men and women. Prices are moderate on the clothing and shoes, blenders, electric fans and radios, but a small refrigerator about five feet high was priced at 800 pesos (about $1,000).

Our last stop was the tiny storefront Bodeguita del Medio near the cathedral, with Latin American and European tourists along with hiply dressed locals spilling over into the street. Closet-size rooms in the back around the big kitchen stove are jammed with people eating heaping plates of black beans and rice, crisp-skinned roast pork and fried plantain slices.

Inspirational Motto

Over the cramped bar a hand-written motto signed by Hemingway proclaims, “ Mi mojito a La Bodeguita, mi daiquiri a La Floridita. “ Presumably inspired by this, everyone sips mojitos from tall glasses filled with fresh mint leaves, sugar and rum.

We sail away in a golden, late-afternoon light, with a favorable wind blowing the refinery fumes in the other direction. People walking along the Malecon sea wall wave to the passengers along the rail.

Our thoughts come back to Hemingway, who left Cuba after Castro came to power in 1959, never again to see Finca Vigia, his beloved farm outside Havana.

“You and me, we’ve made a separate peace,” he wrote in 1924 in “A Very Short Story” for his book “In Our Time.” It seems to us that he and Havana have also made a separate peace. We watch the city in the dying light until it flattens on the horizon and recedes from view, blotted out by the swelling sea.

Travel to Cuba is authorized under a general license for the following purposes: official travel by governmental organizations, of which the United States is a member; reunification of close relatives living in Cuba; by certain professional researchers, and by news media personnel. A pamphlet, “Tips for Travelers to Cuba,” is available for $1 from the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402. For an updated travel advisory on travel to Cuba, call the U.S. Department of State, Citizens Emergency Center, in Washington, D.C., phone (202) 647-5225.