A smile is their umbrella:

...I am watching an East European expert speak on a CNN report, sound-bite flawless...

...American policy is often duplicitous vis-a-vis Poland...

...Waiting for miracles can be a frustrating experience...

...As recently as 1981, just before martial law was imposed on Poland, Ronald Reagan promised Polish workers that the United States would help a "reform" Poland grow strong...

...Truth to tell, last summer was the first time I had seen people smiling on Warsaw streets...

...Poles have long experience in being betrayed by promises-why should they trust us any more than their own government...

...I used to compare Poland to Italy in terms of how things operated: a crisis daily-without the Mediterranean humor...

...On the streets of Warsaw, the smiles are genuine...

...The seers of fate, those instant experts of the media capsule report, see Yugo-war looming behind every dour face and inflationary statistic...

...It's possible...

...Between '92 and today, Poles found something to believe in: they found themselves...

...Presidents George Bush and Clinton annually renew China's most favored nation status...

...I was paid to go to Poland the first time where, meeting a Polish woman who became my wife, I got caught up in the tragicomedy that is Polish life and history...

...Yes, they had hopes and ambitions, jealousies and desires, but these centered on position to the status quo of the Soviet-styled state...

...Hope needs to cling onto something more concrete...

...Why this emphasis upon smiles...

...Now I am not so sure...

...We made a movie there: 'White Dragon for CBS, in 1984-86, the first U.S.-Polish coproduction (not services-for-hire...

...ROBERT FLEET Robert Fleet, a writer and filmmaker, lives in Montclair, California.ker, lives in Montclair, California...

...Few Poles today want to give up their adulthood, their individual responsibility...

...Worse, like the apparatchiks blamed for their country's woes, the upper-echelon Polish filmmakers were revealed as equally corrupt: taking bribes from whoever came with outstretched dollar, stealing funds intended for the Polish crew, falsifying documents, and taking money to spy upon our Western communications-not for the government, but from motives of paranoid jealousy...

...They were not ready to accept responsibility for their own actions...

...they were left high-and-dry when General Jaruzelski imposed martial law...

...Short of a devastating civil war a la Yugoslavia (difficult to imagine given Poland's ethnic homogeneity), how would any government engineer the transition backwards...

...A smile's a smile: hard to fake except by the most polished of liars, actors, or politicians...

...Could a Communist government be voted back...

...Today she and her partners can easily buy the food they want to sell, for customers who can afford to pay decent prices, and decide for themselves what works and what doesn't...

...When Poland passed from communism to democracy, from dysfunctional economic socialism to faltering capitalism, the opposition had won the day-but no one yet knew how to dream for themselves...

...The new confidence in Poland is street-level...

...For Roman Catholic Poland, such belief has been the consolation of faith supplied by a religious institution that was often the only entity of national identity left its people: a people partitioned among Russia, Prussia, and Austria from the late 1700s until 1918, and crushed under Nazi and Soviet juggernauts since then...

...This is not a total sunshine observation...

...Poland was "de-socializing" and these people were lost: Democracy had not been the miracle to turn their streets to gold...

...Jaruzelski had been brought in by pro-Solidarity reformers within the party because of his known anticorruption stance...

...Those excuses removed, the Polish filmmakers revealed a paralyzing inability to perform without a tangible scapegoat...

...This danger does not discredit the genuine growth of self-confidence among the Polish people, however...

...They were never really gone to begin with...

...Opposition is a reaction, not an aspiration...

...But they have something to believe: they believe in the power of money-a very crass ideology, to be sure-but they also believe in their power to make money...

...In this regard, one must be more wary than ever about Polish society: the "take where you can get it" mentality of the old Soviet socialist days is not altered much by '80s-style capitalist greed...

...I have heard these words before and always taken this man and his colleagues seriously...

...For all that, the film was successfully completed...

...They may fail-and that scares them...

...After World War II, Communist-type socialism made sense to a Poland devastated by war: When private dreams are shattered beyond recognition, it is better to grasp onto the collective aspiration...

...I had been in Poland for extended periods since 1976...

...I saw smiling faces...

...It's hard to fight a smiling face...

...Not so today...

...Ah, but they love us, that's their crime...

...Even such a pro-Pole as I could see the lie: what strategic folly would ever induce the United States to shore up a Warsaw Pact nation...

...As recently as 1992, on a Warsaw tram with my family, there was a grim contrast between ourselves and fellow passengers: we were the only ones with anything close to a smile upon our faces...

...I am not Polish...

...The Polish saga is not about American promises, though, but about where Matka Polska goes from here...

...They do today...

...Some people in Poland cry for the purity of the old ideals...

...Setting up a situation where Polish filmmakers could work with the freedom and equipment denied them by the Communist government, we discovered the congenital infection of dictatorial socialism: the Poles had forgotten how to take responsibility for themselves...

...Since the sixteenth-century "miracle" of Czestochowa, when an icon of the Virgin Mary was credited with defeating a Swedish invasion, Polish popular culture has relied less on its own efforts than on expectation of some miraculous intervention to determine the nation's fate...

...Nineteen seventy-six: A waitress can expect no tips, knows that the food she serves is second rate, that her rotten-paying job is a life sentence...

...government, embargoed...

...Still, it was a depressing experience in terms of implications for the future...

...We should not have been surprised...

...Prophets within Poland warn of "deep divisions in the people," "the Communists will be back...

...He is talking about Poland, specifically, because he is Polish and because President Bill Clinton is about to be visiting Warsaw in a few days-but he clearly implies a regional dilemma...

...Could that Communist government return Poland to the old regime...

...For this Poland was vilified by the U.S...

...But, I propose, they'll find that turning back the clock isn't quite so easy...

...These tears are much the same nostalgia an adult has for the "purity" of decision making in elementary school, when teacher made the rules, was the responsible adult telling the children what to do...

...Last summer I was in Warsaw watching his kind speak on CNN, looking out my window and seeing a very different Poland than the "crisis waiting to happen...

...Institutions-government and incoming Western business-still inspire well-earned cynicism among Poles...

...Before, when things had gone wrong, the blame was clear: censors, shortages, corrupt bureaucrats, antiquated equipment the bankrupt government could not afford to replace...

...Polish martial law imprisoned only a few thousand, most released within two months, all by 1984...

...Examining American policy toward Poland, any Pole has the right to feel betrayed, bothered, and bewildered...

...Wasn't it FDR who carved a hunk out of Poland in the Yalta Agreement...

...There was no hope-save in the miracle...

...Compare that with China: Tiananmen Square, executions, thousands imprisoned for decades...

...Nineteen ninety-five: The waitress is part-owner of the cafe and makes sure the food she serves is the best for its price because (a) people tip better then, and (b) there are two competitors across the street...

...The Polish workers-uncredited, cheated, and derided by the creative "liberals" of the Polish filmmaking intelligentsia-worked hand-in-glove with our American production team to finish on time and under budget...

...They became easy prey for whoever bullied...

...The Solidarity movement, blinded by its early successes, failed to distinguish rhetoric from reality...

...For decades people had stopped dreaming as individuals...

...Maybe so...

...Jaruzelski' s martial law, for all its grim heavy-handedness, had a clear raison d'etre: to restore order in a country crippled by strikes, to circumvent a Soviet invasion...

...A sign of recovery is when the society reaches levels of education and responsibility where individuals begin to dream again...

...Most of that time Poland was a grey entity, marked by flashes of brilliantly cynical humor and delicate dabs of color, a monochrome of pessimism predominant...