The Marxist Neighbor

Warm spring thunderstorms flicked lightning across the sky, crackled, then poured soft rain on Havana's tree-shaded streets. Sea birds screeched and wheeled, and lovers ran to cover from the concrete sea wall along Malecon drive. The air smelled, as always, of strong tobacco and stronger coffee. Most of the prostitutes and pimps that used to degrade the city were gone, cleaned out by Fidel Castro's moralistic revolution. In eastern Santiago, teen-agers danced in the streets to the latest Afro-Cuban rhythm, a hip-buster called the pachanca.

Cuba's outward tranquillity, however, was being synthetically inflamed by Fidel Castro, who was crying that the U.S. planned to do him harm. He almost seemed to be trying to taunt the U.S. into intervening--and most Cubans thought a J.S. attack to be a live possibility. Hotel telephone operators answered calls by saying, "Fatherland or Death! Number, please." For the second time in less than a week, the U.S. protested Castro's "slander'--specifically a propaganda pamphlet charging the U.S. with blowing up a munitions ship in Havana harbor last March. At week's end Castro seized the Hotel National (managed by a subsidiary of Pan American World Airways, Inc.) and the Havana Hilton, which Conrad Hilton operated for its owner, a Cuban labor union. (The rebels told Nacional Manager William Land he would have to start paying for his room.) The hotels have been losing $100,000 a month since U.S. tourists began staying away. Castro accused the American management of not doing enough to stir up U.S. tourist trade.

As Castro waxed more frantic against "Yankee imperialists," he grew ever friendlier to Russia. In Moscow, his henchman Antonio Nunez Jimenez presented a Cuban flag to the top Russian of them all, and soon Nikita Khrushchev will visit Cuba. If Castro was not yet enlisted in the Communist camp, he had become too comradely for comfort, in a place just 100 miles off Florida.

The jargon in Castro's speeches and in his captive press these days is increasingly Marxist. Aureliano Sanchez Arango, 53, a former Minister of State of Cuba and one of the early fighters against ex-Dictator Fulgencio Batista, charges that "while Castro had ideas, he had no program; the Communists gave him the program." The man most responsible is Major Ernesto ("Che") Guevara, 32, an Argentine physician, Castro's best field commander, and a Red. A Castro official recalls that when Guevara returned from a three-month trip around the world in September 1959, "things began to happen." Part One: Brainwashing. One big part of what has happened is brainwashing--sometimes subtle, oftener crude. The political prisons now hold 6,000, and a recent visitor to the jails on the Isle of Pines reports: "They're stacked in like sacks of sugar." The government silenced opposition newspapers, put together a network that includes four of Havana's six television stations and 128 of Cuba's 149 radio stations. The policy line is clearly proSoviet, U.S. SABOTAGED THE SUMMIT! headlined the official daily Revolution. KHRUSHCHEV STILL YEARNS FOR PEACE, says La Calle. Yet, though not free to criticize home-grown Communists, the influential weekly Bohemia frequently plays up historical, deadpan articles on the Nazi-Soviet pact and the Khrushchev butchery in Hungary.

U.S. baiting has no ceiling or cellar. The daily Combate is currently charging that the Chilean earthquakes were caused by U.S. underground nuclear explosions. Radio Mambi crows over the U-2 episode: "Any day now, His Majesty Caesar Au gustus Eisenhower I may lose his trousers." In a third-grade Havana classroom last week, when the teacher asked what happened on Feb. 15, 1898. a tiny girl shot back the answer: "The United States blew up the Maine so they could intervene in Cuba." The rest of the "correct" answer: "And most of the crew members were Negroes."

Part Two: Collectivization. Under the pretext of preparing for an invasion by U.S. Marines and "gangsters" from "that decadent democracy," the government crowd is herding Cubans into mass institutions--militias, cooperatives, government youth groups, and labor unions. The man in charge of collectivizing the economy is Che Guevara, head of the National Bank. A slender asthmatic with an un-Latin habit of curtness, he mastered the complexities of banking in a few months on the job, is all the more feared by anti-Communists for his efficiency.

Guevara has concluded a twelve-year trade treaty with Russia calling for $100 million in Soviet aid, has sold a million long tons of sugar to Russia, 130,000 to Communist China, 60,000 tons to East Germany and 150,000 tons to Poland. He ordered Esso, Texaco and Shell to start processing 900,000 tons of Soviet petroleum arriving regularly aboard Russian tankers. The oil companies, whom Cuba owes $60 million for previous shipments from Venezuela, refused, and Castro threatened last week to nationalize them.

The Big Boss. By ignoring foreign obligations that now total $125 million. Che has built up his exchange reserves to $196 million. Che's money has gone largely to finance the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA), which now owns almost half of Cuba--13,246,800 acres out of its 28 million acres. Last week 605,333 head of confiscated INRA cattle grazed on 2,091,600 acres of confiscated pasturelands. Operating from a ig-story Havana headquarters, complete with piped music and two offices for INRA President Fidel Castro, INRA is running 1,392 collective farms, 2,000 "people's stores," 1,215 new schools, 15 fishing coops, 80 sewing schools, 1,000 "alphabetization centers" for adult illiterates. It even collects the tolls on the auto tunnel under Havana Bay.

INRA's work, spearheaded by idealistic young army officers, zealous female social workers and, as of last week, at least 70 Russian technicians, is having a deep effect. Said straw-hatted Luis Zaya, 31, jawing away a rainy afternoon on the porch of People's Store No. 9 in Pinar del Rio: "I'm 100% better. Before, there was no work. Now there's work all year. Now we are eating--rice, eggs, beans." Assured of $88 a month on his INRA coop, Zaya says: "If this is Communism, let it come."

Big Picture. The Popular Socialist (Communist) Party, echoed by Che Guevara, sees the revolution as only "the first step toward the inevitable goal of socialism." But knowing that the step is a big one, party headquarters displays not a portrait of Lenin but one of Fidel Castro. Could Castro ever turn on his ardent backers? "That could never happen," smiles Communist Party Boss Juan Marinello, basking in the thought that establishment of relations with Russia and Czechoslovakia will probably be followed by Cuban recognition of Red China.

What stands in Khrushchev's way in Cuba? A rash of opposition groups have sprung up, all taking anti-Communism as their theme. An anti-Castro junta will soon form in Miami (a city called "West Berlin" by its bitter Cuban exiles). One group beams shortwave broadcasts to Cuba nightly at 9 over Boston's WRUL; another, the Movement for Revolutionary Recovery, is headed by four former Castro officials, has cells all over Cuba, and publishes a clandestine newspaper, Rescate (Rescue). Nine small guerrilla bands are operating in Cuba's mountains--though a government patrol last week claimed the capture of the most publicized insurgent, ex-Castro Captain Manuel Beaton.

Encouraged by a Cuban Roman Catholic pastoral warning of Communism "within the gates," the rebels expect Castro's headlong reform to collapse, bringing the regime down with it. It is a remote prospect; in the predictable future, the U.S. apparently will just have to get along with, without giving in to, the truculent neighbor who now presides over a people the U.S. once thought its good friend.

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