HAVANA THROUGH HAVANAN EYES

With its call girls and sleazy casinos, Havana re-creates the decadent last gasps of Cuba's old regime vividly enough, but what happened after Fidel Castro took over? For an insider's glimpse at life after the revolution, check out Cuban filmmaker Tomas Gutierrez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment (1968, New Yorker), widely regarded as the best Cuban film ever made. While Gutierrez Alea, 62, is aligned with the Castro government (he is a founding member of Cuba's state-run film institute), Memories of Underdevelopment is anything but Communist propaganda. The black-and-white film depicts a bourgeois dilettante as he languishes in Havana, fantasizing about women and typing dull prose to while away his time. Intellectual, funny, and profound, it intersperses stark documentary footage of the revolution with the splintered tale of apolitical Sergio, who begins an affair with the priceless pickup line: ''You have beautiful knees. Do you want to have dinner with me?'' How can Robert Redford even touch that one? Other films on video by Gutierrez Alea include The Last Supper (1976, New Yorker), based on the real story of an 18th-century slaveholder, and Letters From the Park (1988, Fox Lorber), a romantic drama adapted from a portion of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera. His Death of a Bureaucrat (1966, New Yorker), a satire made in response to the overwhelming bureaucracy of the '60s, will be released on video in June.