The Triste Just Society

Fidel Castro was less than complimentary when Houari Boumedienne replaced Ahmed Ben Bella as leader of revolutionary Algeria seven years ago. "A pimp," was the Cuban Premier's unbowdlerized estimate of Boumedienne. "A reactionary gorilla." Last week, as Castro visited Algeria in the course of a two-month hegira through Africa and the East bloc, Boumedienne had become "a great strategist" and Algeria under his rule was "a just society."

As a determinedly socialist state with an overlay of stern Arab tradition --women have second-class status--Algeria may not necessarily be a just society. But it is an economically more viable one than Cuba. It is also, as Castro may well have observed, a study in paradoxes. Despite the agonies that Algerians suffered at the hands of the French in the eight-year war for independence, ties with France remain remarkably strong. France is still Algeria's principal trading partner; 7,000 Frenchmen teach school or operate medical clinics, while 400,000 Algerians work in France and send home $250 million annually.

French is the primary language not only of the educated but also of the major cities generally. When Castro spoke in Spanish to a crowd of 25,000 in Algiers, his speech was translated not into Arabic but into French. Boumedienne, who studied at Cairo's Al Azhar University, is one of the few government leaders who regard Arabic as their first language. Even so, when Algeria's boss --wearing coat, tie and shirt in contrast to the open-neck military khakis of his guest--appeared in public with Castro, he looked more like a French petit bourgeois than an Arab revolutionary.

Another contradiction is Algeria's growing ties with the U.S., although diplomatic relations between the two have been severed since the Six-Day War. Four hundred American technicians are helping Boumedienne develop the immense oil and natural-gas resources in the Sahara, and even U.S. management firms have been retained to smooth administrative problems. The biggest deal made so far by Sonatrach, the government-owned monopoly, is a $5 billion contract to provide natural gas for the U.S. East Coast. "There is no contradiction in our policy," Foreign Ministry Spokesman Mohammed ben Mehal blandly explained to TIME Correspondent Gavin Scott last week. "The American people are one thing and what the American Government does in the Middle East and Viet Nam is another."

Economic Help. Despite their official commitment to socialism, the Algerians are amenable to economic help from any nation. At El Hadjar, the huge new industrial complex through which they proudly escorted Castro last week, the steel plant is Russian, the cast-iron plant French, the pipe plant West German, and the hot rolling mill Italian. "We take the best of each," says an official. "Some may call us opportunistic. We prefer the word pragmatic."

El Hadjar symbolizes Boumedienne's determination to make a long-range investment in heavy industry rather than light industry, which could produce more jobs more quickly. The justification is that, having broken a French colonial economy tied to agriculture, Boumedienne's Sorbonne-trained Algerian technocrats do not want to re-create what they haughtily dismiss as "a 19th century economy."

But they are taking calculated risks.

Algeria's population is increasing by 3.7% every year, and the birth rate is Africa's highest, in part because Islam frowns on birth control. Less than one-seventh of the land along the Mediterranean littoral is arable, and only in recent months has the government seriously begun to tackle land reform.

Algerians from rural villages are flocking to the cities, where few can find jobs. Roughly 40% of the work force is unemployed, and countless thousands of young men spend their time playing dominoes and drinking beer in murky cafes off the Didouche Mourad, Algiers' principal thoroughfare. One diplomat described them as "hooligans in the making" and suggested that the government ought to be worried. So far there are no signs of incipient revolt, and Correspondent Scott found the atmosphere in Algiers one of phlegmatic indolence rather than seething resentment. Graffiti are rare in a secret-police state, but on one lamppost, he noted, had been scribbled the lament "Triste Algerie."

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