Winning Friends

For the intellectual, politician or celebrity, a tempting proposition this year is a trip to Fidel Castro's Cuba, where a visitor can see real revolution in action while enjoying the uncrowded comforts of a winter resort. The invitation usually comes from an overseas official of Castro's July 26 movement, who arrives bearing a free, first-class ticket on Cubana

Airlines and free reservations at such luxury hotels as the Habana Hilton. At rum-punch receptions and over dinners of Morro crab, the friendly visitor soaks up heady talk of revolution, sometimes from the "maximum leader" himself.

The Loud Praisers. Trips are arranged to schools, hospitals and agricultural coops, or to beaches, cockfights and nightclubs. All that the visitor need contribute is a little quotable praise of Cuba or criticism of the U.S.--and the kind of visitor selected is usually glad to oblige.

Joe Louis says "there is no place in the world except Cuba where the Negro can go in the wintertime with absolutely no discrimination." Jack Paar (who paid his own way down) deplores the "untruthful things I've read about what was happening in Cuba. This man Castro is beloved by these people." Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre called the Cuban revolution "the most original I have known" and dismissed the U.S. as a "headless nation."

The Fair Players. All this sentiment got a loud echo in Manhattan last week from something called "the Fair Play for Cuba Committee," a group of 28 including Sartre, his friend Simone de Beauvoir, Novelists Norman Mailer and Truman Capote (who explained that "my stepfather is Cuban"), and British-born New Yorker Drama Critic Kenneth Tynan ("Americans tend to judge a regime on the extent to which it likes America"). In a seven-column, $4,725 ad in the New York Times, the Fair Players charged that the U.S. press is deliberately distorting the news from Cuba. Item: press reports of Communism in the Castro government are "consistently used to create a smoke screen behind which the social objectives of the Cuban revolution can be attacked and sabotaged."

The nominal head of the committee was Author Waldo (America Hispana) Frank, but the real organizer was Robert Taber, a Columbia Broadcasting System newsman, and one of a group of U.S. journalists who won gold medals from Castro for getting through to interview him in his Sierra Maestra days. Frank has been a guest of Castro, and Taber of a Cuban publisher. Taber drew up the ad, and Frank mailed it out to his many friends among the intellectual set. They got enough names and money to pay the bill, but a more impressive list could be made from those who ignored the plea or pointedly turned it down. This group ranged from Ernest Hemingway, Carl Sandburg and Jacques Maritain to Eleanor Roosevelt and Luis Munoz Marin.

Revealing the side of Cuba that Castro's ad-signing supporters do not seem to see, the Cuban Ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, Andres Vargas Gomez, quit his post last week charging that the government is "totalitarian and Communistoriented." And Commentator Luis Conte Aguero, whose Cuban TV rating was once up to Paar, fled to U.S. exile because, he said, Castro is now a "prisoner of pro-Communists." Inmates in Havana's filthy Principe Prison rioted twice, setting fire to bedding, and relatives of political prisoners in La Cabana Fortress learned that 30 Castro gunslingers, in a predawn raid, had ordered the prisoners stripped naked, then had jabbed them with bayonets and beaten them with clubs and rifles. Castro's bag of political prisoners: 6,000, or three times the peak number under Dictator Fulgencio Batista.

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