Of all the things I saw in Cuba, it’s what I heard one rainy March day that stuck with me. There in a government taxi, blaring from the tape player, Cuban-born salsero Willy Chirino crooned a love song for me to hear in Havana.

I thought I was dreaming. Chirino, who fled the communist island when he was a teen-ager through the Catholic Church’s Pedro Pan program, is persona non grata for the Cuban government, part of the “Miami Mafia.” He sings passionately about the island’s beauty and the regime’s abuses the lovely jinetera prostituting herself to feed her baby son, the melodic cries for Viva Cuba Libre.

Did the Cuban driver humming along to Chirino know all of this? I asked the thirtysomething man who was singing. “Willy Chirino,” he said. “A friend in Miami sent his latest tape to me.”

I noted that, surely, Chirino’s songs don’t play on Cuba’s government-run radio.

He shrugged. “He’s a good singer.”

Want Coca-Cola in Havana? It’s bottled in Mexico and sold in Cuba. Johnny Walker Black? The sign greets you when you arrive at Havana’s airport. Marlboros? A twenty-something Cuban told me she would only smoke Marlboro cigarettes made in the U.S. because the Mexican-made ones always tasted stale.

I left the island thinking the U.S. trade embargo and travel ban of Cuba aren’t doing much to further democracy there.

What’s helping open civil space and the economy in Cuba are the churches, the dissidents and the influence of Spanish, Italian, Canadian, Mexican and other foreigners who run businesses in Cuba. Those foreigners are getting cheap labor, for sure. But they’re also living and mingling with Cubans. They’re opening the eyes of two generations of Cubans, who have grown up under communism, to the opportunities that capitalism holds and the promise of democracy. Cubans are learning that capitalism can and does co-exist with free education and health care, as it does in Europe and Canada. They’re learning that in democracies people criticize their leadership and make suggestions for change without fear.

The regime pays the workers a set amount in Cuban pesos that’s less than the government’s take. It’s not a fair system, but trade surely is putting pressure on the Cuban government to make concessions to allow people to rent rooms in their homes or open home restaurants known as paladares or for farmers to sell their crops, pigs or chickens at open-air markets. The Cuban regime constantly cracks down on those efforts at free enterprise, but it would be difficult even for Castro to put the capitalist genie back in the bottle now.

On Monday, President George W. Bush was in Miami to mark the centennial of the Cuban republic free from Spanish rule. He promised to maintain a trade embargo and U.S. travel ban on Cuba. He called on Castro to permil free elections and implement other reforms. Unless Cuba changes, U.S. policy won’t change.

Well, Cuba has changed. It’s not the same place it was a decade ago or four decades ago. Castro has transformed it many times, always keeping a chokehold on the people, under the most severe circumstances. How will the embargo weaken Castro now?

A decade ago, with Cuba stuck in its “special period” a time that many Cubans recently described to me with tears in their eyes, a time when they went hungry for days because of Castro’s failed policies I wrote that tightening the embargo might help push Cubans to demand democracy from a dictatorship. “Still, it’s hard not to wonder if after almost 33 years of sticking up for what’s morally right and defending the embargo, we in the exile community have taken a long and painful route,” I wrote then. “I only pray our passions have not delayed the inevitable downfall of a megalomaniac.”

Forty-three years now and counting, I no longer wonder. All I hear is Chirino singing in Havana.