Strawberry & Chocolate started out as The Woods, the Wolf, and the New Man, a nicely told short story by Cuban writer Senel Paz. It uses the backdrop of Havana's Coppélia Park, a once-wonderful mid-town ice cream emporium which had just about every exotic Caribbean flavor on its menu. The story begins when a gay intellectual engages a straight Communist Party member in small talk. "Although there was chocolate that day," the Communist recalls of his homosexual dining companion, "he had ordered strawberry. Perverse." Right from the beginning readers were treated to the two elements of Cuban society for which there will never be a shortage: metaphors and sex.

The two protagonists forge a bond, of sorts, in which the gay fellow criticizes Cuba's many flaws, and the Party member acknowledges some and weakly defends others. When the story came out in a literary journal, so popular was its refreshing theme that it sold out within days. Critiques of this sort could be spoken but seldom printed, especially rolling off government presses. University students painstakingly hand-copied it to pass on to others, as if it were a samizdat.

The following year the short story was turned into a play at Havana's Brecht Theater. This was before foreign currency was legalized for Cubans, and when I slipped a U.S. dollar to a scalper for a ticket to The Ice Cream Palace, as it was then called, he handed me his ticket and deliriously floated away, no doubt to buy something on the black market. The on-stage dialogue of what had previously been taboo kept the audience lingering in the streets long afterward to discuss the play and its critique of the status quo.

As a wide-screen feature film, the name has again changed and the story has further expanded. Its co-director, the late Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, justly famous for Death of a Bureaucrat and Memories of Underdevelopment, made the rounds of interviews explaining that Strawberry & Chocolate showed how a failing of his country's system--its abhorrent attitude toward homosexuality--is handled on the personal level. The film is not, he stressed, a condemnation of the government.

If Strawberry & Chocolate is not an indictment of Cuba's system, then I say call a new grand jury. The movie fairly bristles with criticisms, blatant and subtle, allegorical and all too real. The movie played for months at the Cine Yara across the street from Coppélia Park, and audiences howled at every shortcoming that flashed across the screen. The basic message--tolerance for gays--played well, and for the first time same-sex couples could be seen publicly holding hands and embracing in the theater lobby and in the streets. Yet the system's shortcomings--from underclothes that never fit to food that's never marketed--permeate the picture. Diego, the homosexual, lures David, the faithful Communist, to his apartment by promising to loan him a foreign book. Works by overseas authors unfriendly to Castro have always been absent from Cuba's bookstores, and available only occasionally at libraries. Octavio Paz's poetry, Mario Vargas Llosa's fiction, works by Jorge Luis Borges--these have never been in wide circulation because the writers have been critical of Cuba.

Johnny Walker Red and Time magazine are among the forbidden fruits that Diego tempts David with after literature lures the Communist to the homosexual's apartment. The only material things worth having, the movie implies, come from abroad; Strawberry & Chocolate advances this accepted maxim while simultaneously making fun of it.

The movie also introduces Nancy, a member of the neighborhood Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) who lives downstairs. A somewhat reformed prostitute, Nancy's ostensible role is to note counter-revolutionary behavior. These days, with little revolution left to counter, the CDR has lost most of its power and almost all its respect. Red Cross-type blood drives are what the CDRs do best. Midway through the movie, Nancy, who also runs a petty black market operation, tries suicide. It is her fifth attempt--a reference to Cuba's high but unspoken suicide rate which, until very recently, went unacknowledged.

Nancy drops in on her neighbor Diego one afternoon and complains about what an awful day she's had. "Yes," Diego counters with cheerful sarcasm, "but health care and education are free." This makes fun of the tired but true song that Cuba's cheerleaders, within and without, sing when the country suffers criticism.

Diego, tortured by circumstances in his life, listens to opera in his apartment--the movie exploits homosexual stereotypes--and says of one singer, "We need another voice so badly." In U.S. theaters the comment passes lightly, but in Cuban movie houses, hoots of pleasure acknowledged that the line clearly refers to Fidel himself.

Diego reveals his own racism--"I know how valuable blacks can be," he says paternalistically, "but they're not for drinking tea." David counters that Cuba has solved discrimination and eradicated racism. Effete Diego shows the old, entrenched Cuba, while loyal David, the new, sloganeering one.

The government rewards Germán, an artist friend of Diego's, with a trip to Mexico for adhering to the Party's cultural line. Diego, upset that his friend has sold out, says, "Art is one thing and propaganda is another."

Co-directors Gutiérrez and Juan Carlos Tabío here jabbed at many of their intellectual friends--perhaps even themselves--for dancing the Party rumba to get the ultimate privilege: travel abroad. (Earlier this month, Guantánamera--the pair's last movie, also critical of their homeland's government--won the Best Picture award at the Gramado Festival in Brazil.) As Diego prepares to uproot himself, the camera sweeps through Havana in a melancholy look at buildings in sad decline, with whispers of the city's grandeur.

By coincidence, I once rented a place on Concordia street in Centro Habana, directly across from the apartment house where all the action took place in Strawberry & Chocolate. Neighbors pointed out the building where the famous film was made, proud that the filmmakers chose a real rundown neighborhood and not just a movie set. The film they've taken to heart almost flaunts its criticisms of the state, yet does it gracefully and with lingering respect. Which leads to the underlying question--why is it permissible to criticize the government and the Party in a movie, but not in the streets? It's a question those to whom Strawberry & Chocolate means most deserve to have answered first.