Showdown in Havana

Tito and Castro collide for the "soul" of the Third World

As Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito, 87, the grand old man of global neutrality, stepped off a Yugoslav air force Boeing 727 at Havana's Jose Marti Airport last week, he was stiffly embraced by his host, Cuban President Fidel Castro, 52, the tireless huckster of import-export revolution. It was hardly the sort of comradely bear hug the two leaders have exchanged in the past. This time they were preparing for a fierce showdown over the direction and leadership of what some diplomats called "the very soul" of the Third World.

The arena was the Sixth Conference of Nonaligned Countries opening this week in the Cuban capital, which had been unusually well scrubbed and widely festooned with anti-American slogans for the occasion. For the 93 delegations from mostly Latin American, African and Asian countries, plus three guerrilla organizations, it promised to be the most critical ideological tug-of-war in the quarter-century-old identity crisis of the emerging Third World. The main question: Can the nonaligned family of nations continue to maintain its uncertain neutrality between the U.S. and Soviet superpowers--or will it lurch east and left and effectively become a political appendage of the Soviet camp?

Ever since its first meeting, attended by Tito, Indonesia's Sukarno, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and India's Jawaharlal Nehru, at Belgrade in 1961, the so-called nonaligned movement has usually espoused a form of neutrality with a distinctly leftist flavor. The rhetoric has sputtered with buzz words like "anticolonialist" and "progressive." But official pronouncements increasingly have also been careful to try to keep both superpowers at haughty arm's length with even-handed warnings against Soviet "manipulation" as well as U.S. "imperialism."

For the past few months, though, Cuba has been campaigning aggressively both to seize the leadership of the movement and to steer its political direction squarely into the orbit of its principal ally, the Soviet Union. Cuban delegates insist there is a "natural alliance" between the nonaligned movement and the "socialist world," meaning the Soviet bloc. In Havana the pro-Soviet drive can probably count on the support of such far-flung fellow Marxist regimes as Angola, which still harbors Cuban troops on its territory; Afghanistan, which relies on Soviet assistance to stave off an Islamic insurgency; and Viet Nam, which has been a fully official Soviet ally ever since its "peace and friendship" treaty with Moscow last year.

Lining up against the Cuban takeover bid is a broad group of mostly older nonaligned members led by Yugoslavia and including India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and others that are all determined to maintain the authentic independence of the movement. With equal fervor, they have been waging their own behind-the-scenes battle in diplomatic chanceries and ministries around the world in the name of moderation and the status quo.

Since a Cuban victory obviously would spell bad geopolitical news for the U.S.--raising the specter of a grandly legitimized Cuba promoting the Soviet cause as spokesman for the Third World--Washington too has been actively, though quietly, trying to rally support for the moderates. For that matter, so has China, another nonmember just as opposed to the pro-Soviet initiatives.

The main bone of contention in Havana is a Cuban draft of the communique to be issued at the end of the summit, which froths with Pravda-like anti-U.S. agitprop. It calls for the immediate independence of Puerto Rico, for instance. It denounces U.S. naval activity in the Indian Ocean without mentioning the Soviet naval force there. It blames all of Indochina's recent troubles exclusively on the U.S. with no mention of Viet Nam's interventions in Laos and Cambodia. It calls for the reunification of Korea on strictly North Korean terms. On the Middle East, it condemns both Egypt and the U.S. for the separate peace of Camp David, and calls for "the expulsion of Israel from the international community."

Vote bartering among rival and undecided delegates was already turning the beachside Palace of Conferences into a diplomatic bazaar. On the precedent of past summits, the informed betting was that the moderate majority could succeed in blunting the Cuban offensive. But much depended on the crucial personal confrontation between Tito and Castro, who were set to huddle privately through the weekend before their public encounter at the summit. Clearly, Tito was ready to fight for his political heritage. He assigned an oversized 160-man delegation to the conference, and warned Castro that "the non-aligned movement is not and cannot be either the conveyor belt or the reserve of any bloc." Added a Yugoslav official pointedly: "The old man knows that Castro has aspirations to succeed him as the principal figure when he is gone. But he's not gone yet, and he means to impress that fact on Castro." sb

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