As TIME drops into mailboxes and onto newsstands each week everywhere in the free world [and in many places behind the Red curtains], it produces some widely varying reactions. The Aug. 8 issue provided a couple of cases in point:

TIME's off-season valentine to Britain's loverly ladies, including six pages of color pictures and a story savoring the flowering of British beauty in post-austerity Britain, aroused intense national pride. "America's No. 1 news magazine," reported the London Daily Sketch, paid "OUR Fair Ladies" an extraordinary compliment. "TIME," agreed the News Chronicle, "has an expert roving eye." But when British wives and sweethearts began to ask why British menfolk had to wait for an American news magazine to appreciate them, latent male jealousy asserted itself. "On behalf of the Brit ish male," wrote the Star's Columnist Colin Frame, "I resent the implication that we have no judgment. Dammit all, 99.9% of us marry them, don't we?" Britain's Independent Television News set up cameras on Bond Street near TIME-LIFE'S London office, and after some beauty-spotting (to a background reading of TIME'S text), concluded: "TIME did not err."

THAT issue's cover story on Ernesto ("Che") Guevara, president of Cuba's National Bank and brain be hind Fidel Castro's revolution, brought a different kind of reaction in Cuba.

Before the magazine was off the press, shop stewards at the Havana plant where the Latin American edition is printed issued a public statement complaining that TIME'S ideas do not conform to Castro "revolutionary sentiments" and charging that the story contained "false and tendentious pronouncements.'' Within 24 hours after the issue hit the stands, Cubans bought more than twice the normal number of copies. A political columnist for Castro's mouthpiece newspaper Revolucion (who had obviously read the Che story down to the last word) sniffed that he had "little time for TIME." One who obviously had time for TIME: Cover Subject Che Guevara, who has personally ordered that henceforth the National Bank's TIME subscription be sent direct to his office.

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