Message from Fidel

Sent to Havana last month for a rendezvous with an escaped prisoner, Miami Herald Reporter James Coe Buchanan, 43, easily found his man and just as easily got himself arrested by Fidel Castro's police (TIME, Dec. 21). Accused of concealing the escapee--an anti-Castro plotter named Austin Frank Young--Buchanan for 13 days languished in a cell with up to 18 other prisoners, dirty, unshaven and scared. Last week, with scarcely any advance notice, Cuban authorities hustled Reporter Buchanan off to Pinar del Rio province for trial.

Scene of the hearing was the movie theater of a Cuban army base, where the piano was shoved aside to make room for the bench. Five uniformed judges sat at a table while guards with machine guns watched spectators munching sandwiches and sipping soft drinks. At times the presiding judge would snap his fingers and send a boy off for coffee. After a two-hour trial and 20 minutes of deliberation, the court produced a four-page typewritten verdict of guilty. The sentence: 14 years at hard labor, suspended on condition that Buchanan get out of Cuba in 24 hours.

Buchanan got out in twelve. Met at Miami International Airport by colleagues from the Herald,/- his wife Pat, and a cheering cluster of Pan American Airways help, Buchanan went back to his paper to write a byline series on his experiences in Castro's police state. He had no doubt as to the meaning of his experience.

"It's going to be awfully rough," he said, "for the next newsman who goes down there and gets arrested." This was exactly the message that Fidel Castro wanted the case of Jim Buchanan to deliver: a warning to the press, both Cuban and foreign, to play the game Castro's way, or else.

/- Which had given its man's plight big play every day he was in jail, including some fond embroidery. "His empty chair in the news room," said one story, with the picture of a chair, "carries the faded old motto he pasted on its back a couple of years ago." The chair actually belonged to Herald Religion Editor Adon Taft, and the motto -- "Do unto Others" -- was pasted on years ago by a mischievous copy boy.

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