And Now by Air

Since Sept. 28 when Fidel Castro opened the gates for Cubans who wanted out of his Communist dictatorship, some 3,000 refugees have come streaming helter-skelter across the storm-tossed Florida Straits in everything from 110-ft. cruisers to leaky outboards. Last week the U.S. and Cuba were finally close to a formal agreement that will guarantee the "safe and orderly exodus" that the U.S. has been seeking from the first. In Havana, Swiss Ambassador Emil Stadelhofer spent more than seven hours talking to Castro, including one long session in a suburban pizzeria. Stadelhofer then reported that the Cuban dictator had agreed to do it more or less the U.S. way.

The agreement, according to Washington, will do away entirely with the dangerous small-boat traffic from the port of Camarioca. Instead, the U.S. will set up an airlift of at least two flights a day--six days a week--between Miami and Varadero 70 miles east of Havana. The flights will carry 65 refugees each, or from 3,000 to 4,000 a month, and begin about ten days after the official announcement. More than 150,000 Cubans are expected to sign up. Immediate relatives of exiles in the U.S. will get first priority, then anyone else who wants to leave--save only military-age youths and possibly some technicians Castro wants to hang on to. By week's end the U.S. had asked Pan American to act as carrier, and Castro workmen were enlarging and improving the Varadero airport. Camarioca, said Castro, was being closed to all exile boats from Florida. Those boats already in port --and there were more than 100 of them--were to load up and shove off immediately.

The resulting scramble was like Dunkirk in miniature. Despite ten-foot waves in the Straits, Castro officials were climbing all over the boatmen, prodding them on their way. "I told them my boat just couldn't make it," reported one exile, "but they said, 'You have the green light--go.' " Out on the open sea, the exile's cabin cruiser began taking water; a U.S. Coast Guard cutter hovering near by had to rescue everyone aboard. In all, the Coast Guard picked up more than 100 Cubans from a dozen boats swamped by the rough seas. "You just wonder how many went down unnoticed," said an exile, who lost his own boat 50 miles south of Key West. And then there was the distraught exile who could not get up the price of a boat to Cuba to get his family out, and unsuccessfully tried to hijack a National Airlines Electra bound from Miami to Key West. Washington could only sigh with relief that an agreement for a "safe and orderly" evacuation apparently was near.

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