Full Circle at Punta del Este

"The eighth meeting of consultation of ministers of foreign affairs resolves:

"1. That adherence by any member of the Organization of American States to Marxism-Leninism is incompatible with the inter-American system . .

"2. That the present government of Cuba, which has officially identified itself as Marxist-Leninist, is incompatible with the principles and objectives of the inter-American system.

"3. That this incompatibility excludes the present government of Cuba from participation in the inter-American system."

By a vote of 14* to 1 (Cuba) with six abstentions, the resolution won the necessary two-thirds majority, and Fidel Castro's Cuba was declared an outlaw in the hemisphere. After ten days of negotiation, the Foreign Ministers Conference at Punta del Este, Uruguay, had come full circle. The 14 who originally voted to discuss the Cuban problem were the same 14 that agreed to exclude Cuba. The six who abstained were the same six who all along urged the OAS to go slow. They included the "big three"--Brazil, Argentina and Mexico--who between them hold two-thirds of Latin America's area and three-fifths of its people.

Nobody changed sides. But the U.S. could take considerable comfort in the fact that every one of Cuba's 20 neighbors saw--and in their speeches condemned--the dangerous presence of a Communist dictatorship on their door steps. Of the six abstentions in the formal vote on expulsion, Mexico balked by declaring that under inter-American treaties, only "moral" condemnation was legal. Brazil, torn by economic and political chaos since Janio Quadros' renunciation of the presidency last August, was clearly afraid that a yes vote would further divide its people. Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador and Chile had home problems as well. Even those four important Latin nations were willing to go along with the exclusion clause if, instead of saying that Cuba had excluded itself by its behavior, the phrase was changed to say that its conduct "is contrary to participation in the inter-American system." This revision seemed too weak to those nations around the Caribbean (and thereby closest to Cuba) firmly determined to take action.

Bitter Deadlocks. To the end, a hardy band of negotiators, led by U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, spent long nights trying to reconcile the two positions. Short tempers were magnified by skipped meals and lost sleep, causing bitter deadlocks over the position of a comma or the sense of a word.

Trying to persuade the hard-line anti-Castro nations to tone down their demands in the interests of unanimity, Rusk worked for hours in his suite at the San Rafael Hotel, in a Cantegril Country Club bungalow, over chilled coffee at the Bife de Oro restaurant--patiently listening, explaining, mediating.

Rusk entrusted the delicate task of talking a little firmness into the "soft six" to Argentine Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Carcano. The Argentine at one point got President Arturo Frondizi to telephone Brazilian President Joao ("Jango") Goulart from Buenos Aires to plead for modification of Brazil's rigid hands-off-Cuba position. The U.S. had high hopes that Chile would come around; instead, it turned down every plea. Nothing worked, and at the end, although sympathetic with the majority cause himself, Carcano was forbidden to cast Argentina's "big" vote with the U.S. and the smaller countries, in order not to get out of line with fellow giants Brazil and Mexico.

No Warsaw Pact. To those critics who thought that the U.S. should not have pushed matters to a split vote because it jeopardized the spirit of unanimity in the OAS, Rusk replied: "This is not a meeting of the Warsaw Pact. This is a meeting of the organization of free and independent American states." There were also mutterings that the four U.S. Senators and Representatives who buttonholed delegates, warning that the election-year mood of Congress was one of "No cooperation, no aid," had damaged U.S.Latin American relations. The Congressmen had pressed the point hard. But few Latin Americans seriously believed that the U.S. was about to, or could, return to the arrogant days of dollar diplomacy--though Congressional opinions are a fact of U.S. political life that Latin Americans might as well understand.

The Springboard. The result was no clear-cut victory for the U.S.; but it was certainly a defeat for Cuba. If only 14 nations voted to exclude Cuba from the inter-American system, there were 20 votes in favor of Cuba's immediate exclusion from the Inter-American Defense Board, and 16 votes not only to suspend arms trade with Cuba but to instruct the OAS Council to "study the feasibility and desirability of extending the suspension" to other items. At week's end, using the resolution as a springboard, the U.S. let it be known that it was prepared to use its naval forces to cut off Cuban gunrunning to subversive groups in other American nations. And it set about cutting off the last vestigial remains of U.S. imports from Cuba: $35 million worth of tobacco, fruits and vegetables last year.

*Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the U.S., Uruguay, Venezuela.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.