A Time for Diversion

It was an art exhibit truly worthy of that old master, Fidel Castro. For lovers of impressionism, there was a blurred U.S. combat film showing a Green Beret trooper slinging grenades into a peasant's hut in Viet Nam. For pop-art fans, there was a cartoon drawing of Donald Duck, Superman and Foxy Fox representing three American oil companies fighting for petroleum rights in an underdeveloped country. Lovers of camp art could watch a carefully edited Tarzan film that illustrated Johnny Weissmuller's "white supremacy" over African tribesmen. And for the surrealist school, there was a likeness of a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion that slowly turned into a growling Lyndon Johnson.

Castro's art exhibit was the highlight of an eight-day international cultural congress that ended in Havana last week. Though the congress was a flop as such affairs go--only a few of the big names invited showed up*--it was part of an old Castro strategy: when things go sour, divert the people's minds.

The minds of Cuba's 7.8 million citizens have rarely needed more diverting. Che Guevara is dead, and with him Castro's dream of leading a continent-wide revolution in Latin America. Cuba's relations with its Russian allies are at their lowest point since the 1962 missile crisis. The economy is a shambles. Perhaps most serious, there is a new mood of frustration abroad in the land. "If the people could just complain," says Jacinto Cabal'ero, a Cuban exile newly arrived in Miami, "it would be a lot easier. But you can't even say the soap is lousy, because the revolution makes the soap, and therefore you are criticizing the revolution, which is forbidden."

Two New Adventures. Nine years after Castro's victorious march into Havana, rationing is still the Cuban's biggest gripe. The monthly rice allowance is down to 3 Ibs. per person, meat to 1/2Ib. Men are allowed only one new shirt and pair of trousers a year; women, one new dress a year, if available. Because of a similar shortage of spare parts, appliances and machines are constantly breaking down. Anything that does run fetches a capitalist's ransom. A nine-year-old G.E. refrigerator that "still cools" brought $2,000 in Havana recently; a rusted-out 1960 Buick went for $10,400--despite the fact that severe gas rationing keeps most cars at home.

In an effort to strengthen the economy, Castro has tried one fruitless scheme after another. He built a new, modern commercial-fishing fleet of 300 boats, then found that most Cubans simply do not care for fish. He expanded cattle herds, but the distribution system is so bad that most of the beef still is not reaching Cuban tables. Now he has launched several show projects, including a "Che Guevara Invader Brigade" to open up more than 150,000 acres for farming in central Cuba by stamping out the ubiquitous Marabu weed, and a campaign to clear a 100,000-acre "belt" of land around Havana and plant it with fruits and vegetables. Many workers have no choice about where or when they labor. Army troops, militiamen, bureaucrats and even cabinet ministers are expected to "volunteer" for field work. Those who do not often wind up on forced-labor details, and are sent off to the fields for weeks or months at a time.

Graffiti & Sabotage. With the gradual rise in frustration, Castro's government has split into activist and conservative factions--but neither seems to know how to get anything done. Even the university, which Castro has always courted, has seen a rise in dissent. Last summer, 40 professors, students and minor party officials at the University of Havana were arrested for disagreeing with party policy. The rank-and-file Cubans are much subtler in their opposition. Some scribble graffiti on restroom walls ("Down With Russian Imperialism," "Fidel, Traitor"). Others indulge in a little spur-of-the-moment sabotage. Sailors or railroad men urinate in bulk sugar; a farmhand may toss a wrench into a sugar-cane harvester.

Ins & Outs. To keep tabs on his countrymen, Castro has created a spiderweb of security organizations that reaches all the way down to the neighborhood and block level, where special "people's courts" are set up to try offenders. In school, students are trained to be good spies as well as good Communists. They learn their arithmetic with "socialist distribution" problems, study geography in terms of "friendly" and "enemy" nations, and still learn to chant praises of what Castro had hoped to create in Latin America: "One, two, three Viet Nams."

Life in Cuba is a dreary affair, and it would be much worse were it not for the Russian dole of $1,000,000 a day--even though the Russians are no longer appreciated for their contribution. The desperate urge to move in some direction, coupled with the proven inability to do so, has caused Castro's regime to lean more and more on such spectacles as last week's cultural congress. As the congress ended, Castro came up with yet another diversion. Countering the suggestion of Bolivian President Rene Barrientos that Bolivia's Marxist Prisoner Regis Debray be swapped for Castro Prisoner Huber Matos (TIME, Jan. 12), Castro offered to release 100 political prisoners in return for the body of Che Guevara. He may have in mind something like Lenin's tomb.

* Among them: U.S. Cartoonist Jules Feiffer, Mexican Communist Painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, British Poet and Art Critic Sir Herbert Read and, from Cambodia, Prince Norodom Sihanouk's son, Prince Ranariddh.

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