Study in Grey

As an island laboratory for Marxist revolution, Fidel Castro's Cuba is the place where stern Communist discipline meets Fidel Castro's quixotic Latin temperament. To assess the experiment, TIME'S Buenos Aires Bureau Chief Gavin Scott, traveling on his Canadian passport, first visited Havana 17 months ago. Last week he returned from a second two-week trip to Cuba. A summary of his report:

Grey, not red, is the color of Communism, and by that standard, Cuba's Marxists are succeeding mightily. Havana, once the gayest city in the hemisphere, continues its steady decline into uniform drabness. The people are quieter, the buildings shabbier, the cars fewer and more dilapidated. The U.S. cars that once taxied tourists around are vanishing fast--and so are the American buses. As bone-jouncing replacements, canvas-covered Russian trucks with wooden benches for seats rattle through the streets. A year and a half ago, Havana's news stalls still displayed a few back copies of U.S. magazines, but no more. And a monotonous buzz blots out the radio broadcasts from Miami. Even that wonderful old mirror over the bar at Ernest Hemingway's famous hangout La Floridita has been taken down. In its place is one of those sweaty murals of militant struggle, which is enough to drive a person from drink.

A Red at Every Elbow. If the Russians were in evidence before, their presence overwhelms today. Awaiting take-off of their TU-114 at Jose Marti Airport in Havana, 50 flaxen-haired Soviet technicians clutch cardboard boxes of rum still stenciled with the anachronistic legend: "Let's go to Cuba, the inviting island next door." Soviet-piloted MIG-21s scorch over the countryside near the airbase at San Antonio de los Banos; Soviet freighters dot Havana harbor, new arrivals unloading daily.

No one knows how many Russian troops remain in Cuba, but there are at least 4,000 nonmilitary technicians, and they have a say in everything. At each ministry a Russian adviser sits at the elbow of the Cuban in charge. The Russians are well aware that there is no romance left in Castro's revolution; and they are relentlessly pushing the Cubans to get to work. Soviet Ambassador Alexandr Alexeev has told friends: "Let's give the Cubans three or four years to straighten out."

The campaign seems to be having at least some small effect. In Cuba's mis-planned economy, rationing is still severe if not quite at subsistence level. The distribution system is endless chaos --one week an avalanche of avocados, the next week none. But now Cuban officials freely admit having made serious errors, cite poor organization of state farms and premature efforts to industrialize. They talk endlessly of the peasants' and workers' grievances, always promising to give them more--just as Khrushchev does in Moscow.

Public complaints used to be crimes against the revolution--but today Cubans are permitted to gripe out loud.

An increasingly influential advocate of economic revision is Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, 50, goateed, urbane boss of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform. He is a longtime Communist in a land where, as an experienced Western diplomat puts it, "instinctively the old Communists follow the Moscow line, the new Communists the Peking line." Says Rodriguez: "First we must satisfy our population. If we must reduce the tempo of our industrial development in order to produce consumer goods, then we must do it."

Al Trabajo. Fidel Castro still rails at the U.S. in his speeches. But Cuba's Communists do not seriously fear a U.S. invasion. President Kennedy, in fact, has promised them that the U.S. will not invade. Nor do they worry much about an internal uprising; after four years of power, they feel secure behind their 50,000-man army and 250,000-man militia. The slogan "Patria o Muerte [fatherland or death]" was on every wall 17 months ago; today the dinning words are Al Trabajo, meaning "to work."

Confident that they are in for keeps, Cuba's Communists at every level sing Moscow's song of peaceful co-existence with the U.S. Anti-Yankee propaganda is less shrill in tone, and those vicious caricatures of Uncle Sam poking life less Latinos in the belly are disappearing from the papers. "Why is it," asks a University of Havana student, "that Kennedy wants to be friends with Khrushchev, but not with Fidel? After all, both are leaders of socialist nations."

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