Red Star over Rio

Along Rio's tree-fringed dockside, some 5,000 Brazilian Communists last week patiently waited for two hours in the hot winter sun to see the notable newcomer walk down the gangplank. They did not consider Jacob Surits, the new Russian ambassador and in-&-out Soviet big shot, as great as their own "cavalier of hope," Luis Carlos Prestes. But as the first Russian ambassador to Brazil in 29 years, he deserved the best welcome Communism could give him.

In his fifth-floor suite in Rio's gleaming Copacabana Palace Hotel, one floor below ex-King Carol of Rumania, Surits looked out on the white sands of Copacabana Beach. Politely he said that it reminded him of Russia's Black Sea beaches. As soon as Brazilian Foreign Minister Joao Neves da Fontoura had loudly and lengthily denied his undiplomatic blurt to New York Herald Tribune Correspondent Joseph Newman ("Russia is the greatest danger to the world"), Surits presented his credentials at palm-shaded, swan-graced Palacio Itamaraty, the Foreign Office. Pint-sized Surits beamed at pint-sized Neves da Fontoura.

Since popular discontent forced Dictator Getulio Vargas to permit free politicking last year, long-undercover Communism had bloomed like a jungle flower. In last winter's elections, the Communists had rallied 600,000 votes behind a presidential candidate little known three weeks before. One Rio senator was a Communist: Leader Prestes, for the anniversary of whose liberation from prison Communists last month had rounded up the largest rally in Brazilian history. The majority of Brazil's topflight intellectuals--artists, writers, architects--had lined up for Communist membership cards. Communism was so strong in Brazil that there was talk of moving hemispheric headquarters from Havana to Rio.

Heavy Hand. Brazilian President Eurico Caspar Dutra and his military supporters, no lovers of Communism, were alive to its threat. But their answer had been crude, soldierly. Instead of slamming a cap on Brazil's runaway inflation (200-300%), linking wages to living costs, the Government had outlawed independent labor unions and suspended the right to strike.

The day before Surits walked down his Rio gangplank, three Brazilian destroyers had steamed 200 miles southward to strikebound, Communist-controlled Santos, the world's largest coffee port, and landed 227 marines. Abashed by armed force and the jailing of their Communist leaders, the striking bagrinhos (dockwork-ers--literally, "shadfish") promised not to do it again. Minister of Labor Octacilio Negrao de Lima rushed into town, reiterated the Government's conveniently forgotten pledge to replace airless, lightless dockside tenements with modern housing. The workers accepted his offer of a 54% pay hike.

In other parts of Brazil, the anti-Communist drive continued. The Government, in breaking up a strike against the Leopoldina Railway staged by $25 a month firemen, blamed the work stoppage on Communist "millionaire Luis Carlos Prestes." Brazilian democrats hoped that heavy-handed Dutra, in stamping out Communism, would not also crush democracy.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.