REDS AROUND CASTRO

At the recent foreign ministers' meeting at Punta del Este, Cuban delegates hinted that their country will soon be run by a "politbuiro." Besides the original triumvirate of Fidel Castro, Brother Raul and Che Guevara, these Reds are favorite candidates for the "collective leadership":

BLAS ROCA (real name, Francisco Calderio), 53, Secretary General of the Communist Party and usually regarded as the No. 1 Communist in Cuba. The son of a Manzanillo shoe-factory worker. Roca became secretary general of the Cuban Communist Party in 1934, a post that he has held ever since. In 1938, at a secret meeting with Dictator Fulgencio Batista, Roca agreed to a Batista-Communist alliance (assuring legality for the party in return for organizing a pro-Batista labor movement) that lasted until 1954 when Batista bowed to U.S. pressure and outlawed the party. Nevertheless, Roca managed to hold the party apparatus together in Havana, rose to power again with Castro. He led the Cuban delegation to last October's 22nd Communist Party Congress in Moscow, at a review got the place of honor next to Nikita Khrushchev atop Lenin's tomb.

CARLOS RAFAEL RODRIGUEZ, 48, editor of the Communist newspaper Hoy, professor of economics at Havana University and now: president of the vitally important Agrarian Reform Institute. Fond of good eating, good tailoring and fancy cuff links, Rodriguez joined the Communist Party at Havana University in the 1930s. A Marxist theoretician, he served as a government minister without portfolio in 1942-43 during Dictator Batista's long honeymoon with the Reds. At the recent Punta del Este foreign ministers' conference, the Cuban voice was that of puppet President Osvaldo Dorticos. but the words were Rodriguez'.

FABIO GROBART, age unknown, a director of the policy-setting magazine Cuba Socialista and the Kremlin's shadowy man-in-the-Caribbean for almost 40 years. Born in eastern Europe--probably Poland--Grobart earned a reputation in the Cuban Communist Party as a stern disciplinarian,:' and in the tradition of such hard-top Reds, liked to be seen passing out candy to children, inquiring solicitously about the health of party members' families. Perhaps Grobart's most important assignment: the establishment in the middle 1940s of a second Communist apparatus--removed from the official party--in case relations with Batista should sour. When they did, Grobart's alternate team swung smoothly into action to infiltrate the Batista party organization itself. Presumably Grobart is now laying similar plans in case of a successful anti-Castro revolution.

LAZARO PENA, 61, Secretary General of the Cuban Labor Confederation (C.T.C.). A mulatto tobacco worker who was born in Havana and joined the Communist Party in 1930, Pena called a Havana convention of workers' organizations from all over Cuba in 1939 to form the C.T.C. For eight uninterrupted years, Pena and his fellow Communists controlled the confederation. But in 1947 anti-Communist Labor Minister Carlos Prio Socorras began a campaign to oust Pena and his fellow Reds from control of Cuba's labor movement.

Pena fell from power and wandered through the fringes of the Communist world--touching in Mexico (1953) and Moscow (1957)--until Castro took power in 1959 and Pena could return to take control of the C.T.C.

ANIBAL ESCALANTE, 52, organization chief of the Communist Party and a national director of the Communist Party-26th of July movement amalgamation called the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations.

Scion of a famous Cuban family (his father was a hero of the 1898 War of Independence against Spain), Escalante drifted into the Communist Party in the early 1930s. His talent for words, ideas and persuasion was quickly noted; in 1938 he founded and became the first editor of a Communist daily, Hoy. As executive secretary of the party and a leading formulator of its policies when Fidel Castro entered Havana in 1959, Escalante praised Castro as "nationalist, progressive, democratic" but complained at the time that the bearded rebel's 26th of July movement was "not completely integrated or clearly defined." The failing has now been corrected.

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