The First 100 Days

Fidel Castro arrives in Washington this week invited there by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He has dates to confer with Vice President Nixon and to lunch with Acting Secretary of State Christian Herter, will go on to see the press in New York and make a speech before the Harvard Law School Forum. A compulsive explainer. Castro apparently expects to win U.S. sympathy by candor and eloquence--despite his growing record of blaming Cuba's troubles on that "bad neighbor,'' the U.S., and of choosing neutralism as Cuba's cold-war course.

The Fidel Castro that the U.S. will see is still an idol to Cuba's masses, but he has lost favor with much of the middle class that financed his way to power, and he has disillusioned many foreign spectators who cheered his rebellion against dictatorship. In his first 100 days he has seemed to savor power more and more while exhibiting the views and comprehensions of a college radical.

Deep Surgery. When Castro was fighting Dictator Fulgencio Batista in Cuba's eastern mountains, he advertised his revolution's aims as a purge of governmental and social corruption and a restoration of justice and democracy. He has carried out the purge, effectively cutting off official corruption and cutting down on the once flagrant prostitution. He has curbed Cuba's feverish gambling by turning the government lottery into a savings institute and confining Havana's gaudy (but currently mostly empty) casinos to the relatively few tourists who brave the new regime's occasional, brusque clothing searches at Havana airport.

But Castro has indefinitely put off the restoration of democracy--elections, a Congress, civil justice--pending a deep-surgery social revolution that he has had in mind for half a dozen years. He spoke little of this kind of revolution during his anti-Batista fight, which was financed by rich and professional Cubans sick of dictatorship. But the revolution is now plainly aimed at soaking the rich--business and landlords--and at favoring peasants (who helped Castro's war) and labor (which sat on its hands). Actions so far:

P:beginning on agrarian reform for the 800,000 country dwellers including landless guajiros (peasants) who live in dirt-floor, thatch-palm huts, subsist on the $3 daily they earn during the three-month sugar harvest.

P: 30% to 50% arbitrary rent cut. which delights urban tenants but has slowed the booming construction business to a walk, adding more than 120,000 idle construction workers to the 500,000 Cubans already jobless.

P: slash in mortgage interest rates to as low as 4% from as much as 12%, further pleasing working-class tenants but virtually paralyzing new real estate ventures.

P:Execution of 493 "war criminals," mostly Batista cops and soldiers. Last week a firing squad executed a marijuana peddler as a "social benefit." Castro says illegal gambling, misappropriation of government funds and counter-revolutionary activities (effective political opposition) could bring the same penalty. Total effect is to make opposition to Castro by speech or writing seem at least imprudent.

P:Postponement of elections. Last week, charging that those who ask for elections really want to "castrate the revolution," Castro announced that before any vote, "we want to do away with unemployment, illiteracy and misery"--a task bound to take some time.

The disillusionment with Castro among his old supporters of the middle and upper classes is becoming obvious. Last week, when his picture appeared in a newsreel in Havana's well-to-do Miramar suburb, not a person applauded. In Washington, Castro's staunchest congressional friend, Oregon's Charles O. Porter, said: "I do not think Castro is a dictator yet, but I do see an ominous trend."

Left-Wing Help. Castro's views clearly derive from the typical Latin American university atmosphere, where bull sessions, filled with hazy Marxism, are the out-of-class fodder of the students. His economics nevertheless remains capitalist: each farmer owning his own land, his own tractor. But around Castro, who tolerantly likens them to Masons or Catholics, sprouts a band of Reds as luxurious as his beard.

Led by Old Bolshevik Juan Marinello, Cuba's Communist Party, which got back into business the day Batista fell, is today at the peak of its influence. Its 24,000 members form the only active political party on the island. Card carriers or sympathizers in key civilian spots include: Carlos Franqui, former proofreader on the Red daily Hoy and now editor of Castro's paper La Revolution (circ. 80,000); David Salvador, chief of the labor federation; Francisco Alonso, head of the National Fine Arts Commission; Vicentina Antuna, chief of the National Institute of Culture.

In the armed forces a leftist and fellow-traveler network reaches high up: Argentine-born Major Ernesto ("Che") Guevara, commander of Havana's La Cabana Fortress, who joined a militia of Arbenz Communists in Guatemala; Army Commander in Chief Raul Castro, Fidel's brother, who spent 1952-53 studying in Prague and Budapest; Alfredo Guevara (no kin to Che), boss of the army information program; Major Manuel Pineiro, commander of Oriente and supervisor of a secret training center in Santiago, where anti-American propaganda is used to indoctrinate officer candidates.

A major Communist achievement: the execution last month of Captain Jose Castano Quevedo, assistant head of Batista's Bureau for Communist Repression who had compiled a big card file of Cuban Communists and their activities. The file has disappeared.

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