White Elephants on Parade

Among Fidel Castro's top lieutenants, none is more outspoken than Che Guevara, the Argentine Marxist who now serves as Cuba's Minister of Industry. Che, in fact, is so painfully frank that Castro has several times told him to soften his speeches. But Che keeps on talking. "We don't make little white ponies here," he says. "We've got little white elephants in Cuba." On Havana TV last week, in a remarkable confession of economic failure, Che paraded the elephants in full view.

There was last year's 3,800,000-ton sugar-cane crop--the lowest in modern Cuban history. The ministry's industrial investment plan for last year, said Che, was only 62% fulfilled, and for this year has been cut to 75% of the 1963 schedule. Raw-material imports reached only 70% of their scheduled level; because of this, Cuban industrial production was off 16%. Moreover, said Che, "we are undergoing serious tension in a number of factories because equipment is rapidly going to pieces." The only sources for parts are "cannibal" shops, which strip spares from worn-out equipment and graft them onto salvageable machines. In some cases not even cannibalism will stir the equipment back to life. Guevara complained angrily about the "absence of labor discipline." But he also admitted that there was not much to work for these days. "The people want more things," he said. "They are constantly asking for food, shoes, clothing--all the consumer goods necessary for life." He then announced that there would be emphasis on consumer goods from now on.

Yet there seems to be a strong question, even in Che's mind, of just how much better things can get. Occasionally, the Argentine seems almost contemptuous of his adopted people. "Cubans," he has said time and again, "could not even make Coca-Cola."

An OAS investigating committee last week found Cuba guilty of attempting "to overthrow the democratic government of Venezuela through terrorism, sabotage, assault and guerrilla warfare." Venezuela's documented evidence included a three-ton cache of smuggled Cuban arms and a fantastic battle plan for the capture of Caracas by Castro-directed local Communists. Later, Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt summoned the ambassadors of England, Spain and France and warned them to choose between trade with Cuba--about $100 million as presently proposed--and trade with Venezuela, worth some $400 million annually. Betancourt also threatened to expropriate Venezuela's Shell Oil Co., owned jointly by British and Dutch interests, if it sells oil to Cuba.

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