Pan Am Games

HAVANA -- They were the immovable object of women's basketball, a team with 10 professionals, five former Olympians and seven players taller than 6 feet.They were carrying a 42-game international winning streak, gobbling up gold medals at two Olympics, two World Championships, two Goodwill Games and two Pan American Games.And then, the American women ran into the Brazilians. Yesterday, before a swaying, flag-waving crowd, Brazil shocked the United States, 87-84, in an opening-round match at the Pan Am Games.

HAVANA -- A teen-ager wants to know whatever happened to Michael Jackson and what is the real story behind Milli Vanilli. Sit down, kid, you won't believe this.Another teen-ager wants to change your money or buy your jeans or sell you a woman or a man. He's not too choosy.Waiting is the national sport. Chinese-made loafers arrive at a shoe store, and a line forms. People stand hours for two fist-sized rolls of bread. A 5-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger film plays at a movie theater across from the old capitol building, and hundreds clog a city block for a weekday matinee.

HAVANA -- OK, so you're Carl Lewis and you have a chance to tour Europe during the first two weeks in August, picking up lucrative paychecks for racing at meets in Switzerland and Italy and preparing for the most important track and field event of the year, the World Championships.Or you could turn down the money and spend a few days in an apartment for four without air conditioning in steamy Havana, worrying about the quality of the water and the food, before finally running and jumping for free in a slightly frayed event called the Pan American Games.

HAVANA -- OK, so you're Carl Lewis and you have a chance to tour Europe during the first two weeks in August, picking up lucrative paychecks for racing at meets in Switzerland and Italy and preparing for the most important track and field event of the year, the World Championships.Or you could turn down the money and spend a few days in an apartment for four without air conditioning in steamy Havana, worrying about the quality of the water and the food, before finally running and jumping for free in a slightly frayed event called the Pan American Games.

HAVANA -- The first victory of the Pan American Games is that the facilities are done.Just don't look too closely at the peeling paint, or the cracked concrete, or the toilets that don't flush, or the plumbing that leaks, or the pools that are filled with murky water, or the track that is littered with cigarette butts.Eight months ago, these sites were all just dirt roads and empty shells, a hope and a dream for a country on economic life support. But now, the main venues that overlook the sea east of Havana are built, constructed in the nick of time for tomorrow's ready-or-not opening ceremony that begins a 16-day athletic carnival among 39 nations of the Western Hemisphere.

*TC MIAMI -- In the restaurant called La Esquina De Tejas in the Little Havana section of Miami, they talk of food and politics and sports.And, now, they're talking about the Pan American Games, which will begin Friday in Havana."

They will bring 50,000 gallons of bottled water and 32 years of political baggage to an island where rum is rationed and signs are posted proclaiming "Socialismo o Muerte," Socialism or Death.They will shuttle in on flights from Tampa, Fla., remaining just long enough to compete in what may be remembered as the last sporting event of the Cold War era.They will be strangers in a strange land.Americans in Cuba.The 11th Pan American Games begin Friday with opening ceremonies in Havana and conclude Aug. 18. A delegation of 1,200 American athletes and officials -- plus nearly 500 media members -- will attend the games in what is believed to be the largest one-time invasion of American citizens on the island since President Fidel Castro assumed power in 1959.

Some U.S. athletes will commute from Tampa, Fla., to Havana to participate in the 1991 Pan American Games.But not Pam Shriver.As player-coach of the U.S. women's tennis team, Shriver expects to spend 10 straight days in Havana. That might not seem like a great sacrifice, but Shriver is one of the few professionals who will participate in the games, and the tennis tournament, Aug. 5-11, comes less than three weeks before the U.S. Open."You have to strike a nerve of adventure to play in this event," Shriver said.

HAVANA -- Imagine if Fidel Castro, the world's premier revolutionary leader, had been drafted onto a professional U.S. baseball team when he was scouted more than 40 years ago.Instead of creating the only communist nation in the Western Hemisphere, Castro might have become "a 64-year-old, pot-bellied first-base coach for some mediocre ball club," said James Blight, a research fellow at a Brown University foreign policy institute."