By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

Soon after he took his post at Time in 1993, managing editor James R. Gaines expressed a desire to set up a meeting with Fidel Castro. Last August negotiations between Time and Cuban officials began in earnest, and Time Inc. chairman Reginald K. Brack requested a meeting as well. On Feb. 1, with an agreement near, Gaines and Brack traveled to Havana, accompanied by Time International managing editor Karsten Prager, chief of correspondents Joelle Attinger, deputy chief of correspondents Richard Hornik and Miami bureau chief Cathy Booth.

For two days the Time delegation was bounced back and forth among Cuban bureaucrats, and at times an audience with Castro seemed in doubt. Finally a message was delivered to the group: ``You're invited to dinner. Be ready to go at 7:30 p.m. promptly.'' A few hours later they were dining with Castro--and recording the exclusive conversation that appears in this week's issue.

The setting was a vast hall in Cuba's government office building, the Palacio de la Revolucion. At first the 68-year-old Cuban leader ``struck me as looking rather frail,'' observes Prager. ``Older than I thought.'' But ``as we got to dinner and we got into a conversation and the adrenaline began to flow, he became the kind of Castro you think Castro ought to be. Lively. Articulate. Talks with his hands, looks you in the eye.''

Dinner was a five-course affair--salad, soup, fillet of sea bass, lamb, and ice cream for dessert. Castro, who spoke in Spanish, talked ``nonstop, pausing only to eat and drink,'' according to Booth. He joked that he held an ``Olympic record'' in assassination plots against him, and chided Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev for being apologetic about communism. ``He appeared to be very well informed,'' says Attinger. ``He did not strike me as someone who was isolated.''

The three-hour dinner ended at 1 a.m. Cigars were offered, but Castro, who stopped smoking several years ago, abstained. Throughout the evening, Castro displayed a puckish sense of humor, a fondness for martinis, and a willingness to discuss any topic, no matter how controversial. But despite Castro's openness as a dinner host, there remained something deeply intractable about the man. ``At his core, there was no flinching from what he had always believed, in terms of the virtues of the revolution and the virtues of communism,'' says Gaines. ``However much you might disagree with that, there's something admirable about his consistency.''