The Mortgaged Island

Fidel Castro last week summoned provincial representatives from all parts of Cuba to an economic accounting in Havana. The jefe maximo had bad news for them. Unless the pace of the 1971 zafra, or sugar harvest, is stepped up, he warned, considerable amounts of cane will go unprocessed. Said Fidel: "We cannot allow ourselves the luxury of leaving one pound of sugar unexported."

Lately, Cuba's bearded leader seems to be delivering nothing but stern exhortations. Two weeks ago, he wrote to Regis Debray, the French intellectual who was captured shortly before Bolivian soldiers killed Che Guevara in 1967 and was recently released from prison. "We are working hard and facing great difficulties," Castro confessed. "The march is truly long, Debray, because it is when power has been taken that we revolutionaries understand that we are barely starting."

Castro's longtime critics agree that the regime's economy is in serious trouble. Pointing to a severe labor shortage, excessive absenteeism, low productivity and a woeful lack of modern machinery, a U.S. Government analyst said last week: "Something is radically wrong--wrong priorities, wrong emphasis, wrong administration--in short, chaos." Castro admits as much in his speeches. Last year, for example, he told the nation: "Our enemies say that we have problems, and in reality they are right. They say there are irritations, and they are right."

Surprisingly, some of the sharpest criticism of Castro is coming from European leftists who have frequently visited Cuba, talked with him and supported his goals. Polish-born Journalist K.S. Karol, who writes out of Paris for Le Monde, Le Nouvel Observateur and Britain's New Statesman, is one. His Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution has become required reading for U.S. intelligence and Latin American specialists. French Agronomist Rene Dumont also faults Castro in his Cuba: Is It Socialist?

Prolonged Sacrifices. Both authors contend that one of Castro's earliest mistakes was setting up incorrect goals and improper procedures. "An encircled country like Cuba could not permit herself the luxury of gradual progress," admits Karol. "Sacrifices that have been [too] prolonged have become unbearable for the people today," says Dumont.

Karol found el Caballo--"the Horse," as the peasants affectionately refer to Castro--personally vibrant. "Fidel finds it difficult to sit still while he speaks. He moves about all the time, gets up, takes a few steps, sits down, stalks back and forth as if every argument were a kind of hand-to-hand struggle with a wily opponent." Castro has spent altogether too much time serving as a national ombudsman, Karol complains, forever touring the country and leaving the government to bureaucrats. "The new proletarian class," reports Karol acidly, "is quite unable to control and use the bureaucracy for its own ends as the bourgeois used to do."

Costly Crop. Both observers agree that Castro's greatest error in judgment has been what Karol calls his "sugar obsession." To pay for Russian oil and aid, which is now running at the rate of $1.5 million a day, Castro called on Cubans to harvest an unheard-of 10 million tons of sugar. The whole island was mobilized for the harvest. Christmas '69 and New Year's Day '70 were postponed until it was finished.

But there was one monstrous miscalculation: Years before, that old harvester Nikita Khrushchev had ordered his experts to design a cane cutter, and 1,000 of the machines were shipped to Cuba. But while the cutters worked adequately when tested in the Ukraine, they failed completely in Cuba. Karol blames it on hilly ground; others maintain that the Russian machinery overheated in tropical weather. Faced with a 1970 avalanche of sugar cane, some 400,000 mostly inexperienced Cubans had to bring in the record crop by hand. Castro himself cut cane instead of administering. Visitors ranging from Soviet Defense Minister Andrei Grechko to the "Venceremos" (We shall overcome) brigade of radical American students went into the canefields. Eventually an estimated 8,500,000 tons were harvested, a commendable record but short of Castro's goal.

Such a harvest, Karol maintains, was more harmful than helpful. Fully 7,000,000 tons of sugar went merely to settle Cuba's accounts with the Soviet Union and other Communist providers. Writes Karol, who was educated at Rostov University, served in the Red Army (and Stalinist prisons) and is virulently anti-Russian: "The Soviet Union really has no moral right to insist on her contractual rights and on the superhuman sacrifices these entail for Cuba." Castro commented angrily to Karol: "They give us nothing for nothing and then act as if they were showering us with gold."

Tobacco Ration. Since other work had been abandoned or cut back to bring in the harvest, the 1969-70 zafra damaged the rest of the economy. Power is now so short that there are continual brownouts. "Click patrols" of small children have been mobilized to go about turning off unnecessary lights. Cubans routinely face long queues and shortages. In a land famed for its tobacco, Castro warns that smoking is unhealthy and rations his people to two packs of cigarettes and two cigars every week. Rents are cheap, prices are low and, with little available to buy, money is plentiful. The bolsa negra, or black market, flourishes as a result. Rum costs 90 pesos a bottle and cigarettes 5 pesos a pack (black-market pesos are seven to the dollar), but there are plenty of buyers. Other Cubans line up outside such Havana restaurants as Monseigneur La Torre and Floridita to spend 40 pesos on dinner for two.

The Loafer. Castro has apparently read his critics. He has referred to them as "these little leftist writers" and as people who "build hypothetical, imaginary worlds." At the same time, however; he has been carrying out some of the changes they suggested. One was to allow workers more power of decision. Cuba has held a series of widely publicized trade-union "elections," in which 2,000,000 workers approved 148,000 union representatives. Supposedly, these representatives will be the channel through which the workers can voice their complaints or make suggestions.

Meanwhile, the government is clamping down on slackers. This year has been designated "the Year of Productivity." New regulations have been introduced against el vago, the loafer. Cuban men from 17 to 60 who are chronically absent from work face up to two years on state farms. Women, however, are exempt. "Our people would not understand if we treated men and women alike," explains Labor Minister Jorge Risquet. Meanwhile Castro is weeding his Cabinet of those who, as he puts it, "have worn themselves out" in the revolution. Ominously, each change seems to bring more army officers into civilian Ministries. Of 20 Ministries, eleven are now run by captains and majors.

No one suggests that Castro will soon be overthrown. Most of those who might have opposed him have left Cuba or hope to do so aboard one of the ten-a-week Varadero-to-Miami flights. Though no new exit permits have been issued since 1966, some 130,000 people who were granted permits before that time are still waiting to join the 600,000 Cubans who have departed for what Castro scornfully calls "the dolce vita and the consumer society." What the critics do suggest is that socialist Cuba is in dire trouble. They argue that Castro's charisma has worn thin and that his reliance on Russian aid will not solve his problems. "One wonders," says Karol flatly, "if he has not mortgaged the entire future of the revolution."

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