The Other Face

With 100 cases of good-will rum in his baggage and a permanent grin on his bearded face, Prime Minister Fidel Castro flew into Washington last week and spared neither energy nor charm in putting a good face on his revolution and trying "to understand better the United States." He even kissed a baby in a Washington park. In a town where winning friends rates high on the scale of admired talents, he won a lot of admiration.

The only tough critics were a few Cuban exiles, some of whom had lost relatives to Castro's firing squads. They mailed so many threats of stoning, bombing and shooting that the State Department and police kept some 200 men on duty guarding Castro right from the time his turbo-prop Britannia touched down at Washington airport two hours late. Castro wheeled dauntlessly through his guards to a wire fence and flung out his arms to the hundreds of cheering Cubans. "He must be crazy," muttered a guard. "I'm getting more cops than Mikoyan," said Castro.

Champagne in Fatigues. Still dressed in fatigues, Castro marched into the Hotel Statler next morning, precisely on time for a friendly champagne-and-steak luncheon with Acting Secretary of State Christian Herter. "Ha, they gave me little [new] potatoes!" said Fidel. That afternoon, strolling through Meridian Hill Park, he signed autographs for teenagers. "What do you call your government?" asked one. "Socialism, or what?" Castro smiled. "Cubanism!" he announced. "I feel very good," he added, scratching his chest.

In the book-lined Senate Foreign Relations Committee room next morning, Castro talked to 18 Congressmen. Relaxed, amiable and assured, Castro declared: "The July 26 movement is not a Communist movement. Its members are Roman Catholics, mostly." On U.S. investment, he said: "We have no intention of expropriating U.S. property, and any property we take we'll pay for." The Congressmen were charmed--but one of them, Florida's Democratic Senator George Smathers, got up on the Senate floor that afternoon to say: "Castro hasn't yet learned that you can't play ball with the Communists, for he has them peppered throughout his government."

Not Since MacArthur. By this time Castro was charming the American Society of Newspaper Editors, which in January invited him to its convention-luncheon (and noted last week that "the demand for tickets was the greatest since General MacArthur returned from the Far East"). In 15-minute answers, Castro criticized the U.S. sugar-quota policy, defended the execution of "war criminals." (Firing squads in Cuba shot 28 more last week, raising the total to 521.) He evaded questions about his stand for neutrality in the cold war.

The editors applauded loud and long at Castro's ringing defense of a free press, "the first enemy of dictatorship." Back in Cuba, a war crimes court sentenced former Pueblo Columnist Fernando Miranda to ten years' hard labor in the Zapata swamps for calling the Castro rebels "thieves and bandits."

Black Tie. Guests at a Cuban embassy reception, including Soviet Ambassador Mikhail Menshikov, ogled a revolution in clothes: Castro, in a sharp green uniform, with comandante's star, white shirt and black tie. "It was orders," explained the Prime Minister, pointing to Cuban Ambassador to the U.S. Ernesto Dihigo. "I don't like it."

On a lazy Sunday afternoon, Castro laid wreaths on the monuments to Lincoln and Jefferson, noted that Jefferson "understood what revolutions should do." On NBC's Meet the Press, he sweated his way past a few sharp questions. (How soon elections? "Not more than four years. The people don't want elections.") Then he rushed off to the deserted Capitol for a two-hour session with Vice President Nixon. After another week, in New York, Canada and Houston, Castro will fly back to Havana, where he has always found Yankee-baiting the easy way to please the crowds.

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