By Its Own Lights

The importance of Canada's trade with Fidel Castro's Cuba is not so much the money as the principle of the thing--and Canada and the U.S. incline to differ sharply on the principles at stake. When the U.S. first embargoed trade with Cuba in 1960, in retaliation for Castro's seizure of U.S. property, Canada decided that Washington's quarrel was none of its own. Canada has steadfastly declined even to join the Organization of American States. Going it alone, Canada's exports to Castro rose from $13 million to $24.5 million last year--a healthy jump, though still less than 1/2% of Canada's sales in world markets. Last week, as Washington moved to cut off Castro from the U.S. market entirely, Canada's Prime Minister John Diefenbaker made clear that Ottawa still intends to follow its own trading lights.

In the House of Commons, Diefenbaker was asked for his reaction to Secretary of State Dean Rusk's hope that other countries would join the OAS in its quarantine of Castro. Enunciating the principle on which Canada not only trades with Cuba but last year concluded a whopping $425.6 million grain deal with Red China, Diefenbaker replied coldly: "The decision as to the course Canada shall take should be made by Canada on the basis of policies which she believes are appropriate to Canada."

Presumably, the Prime Minister was irked by a Rusk comment last week on Canadian-Cuban trade. Asked if the U.S. felt that Castro is using dollars earned from Canada to promote subversion in Latin America, and whether the U.S. plans to ask Canada to cut them off, Rusk replied: "That is something we will take up." Diefenbaker's view is that there is nothing to take up. Noting that Canada's 1961 exports to Cuba (mostly farm products) were five times greater than its imports, Diefenbaker tartly observed that rather than provide Castro with dollars, Canada's trade absorbed them.

Earlier in the week, another Kennedy Frontiersman, passing through Canada, got himself on the bad side of Ottawa. In Vancouver en route to Tokyo, White House Aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. declared in an airport interview that "anything that supports Castro threatens the prospects of democratic success in Latin America." Retorted Canada's External Affairs Secretary Howard Green in the Commons: "If it was made in the terms suggested, it was a most unusual and, I think, improper thing for an official of another country to do."

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