CUBA: The Triumvirate

In the labels of the Cuban revolution, high government officials have divided into moderate “friends of Cuba” and far-left “friends of China” (for their admiration of Red China’s methods). Last week Strongman Fidel Castro shucked off top friends of Cuba and gave all significant power to friends of China.

Out as president of the powerful National Bank of Cuba went Felipe Pazos, 47, ranking Cuban banker, sound-money man, and onetime International Monetary Fund official in Washington. To replace him in Cuba’s central bank, Castro named Major Ernesto (“Che”)* Guevara, 31, the Red physician, who thereby got vast power over Cuba though he is Argentine born and bred.

Fired at 4 a.m. Economist Pazos was fired in a tense, 4 a.m. Cabinet session climaxing months of disagreement. Privately a stern critic from the start of Castro’s helter-skelter reforms, Pazos had joined a loose alliance with three other moderates: Minister of Public Works Manuel Ray Rivero, 35, a civil engineer who had worked hard rebuilding Cuba’s shattered transportation system; Treasury Minister Rufo López Fresquet, 48, and bearded Faustino Pérez. 39, Minister for the Recovery of Stolen Government Property and a survivor of Castro’s original invasion on the yacht Gramma.

Fighting growing Red influence, the moderates had been meeting every Thursday with Castro for skull sessions warning that his monstrous agrarian reform was devouring the Cuban economy. A few weeks ago, Pazos, Ray and Perez found that they were being followed by Castro’s secret police and guessed that the game was lost. Only López Fresquet survived the shakeup, and he had already asked to be allowed to resign next month. To replace Ray, Castro for the first time named an open Communist, Osmani Cienfuegos, brother of missing Army Chief Camilo Cienfuegos, who only a few weeks ago joined the Popular Socialist (Communist) Party. An obscure leftist navy captain named Roland Diaz Astarain got Pérez’ post.

Economic Commissar. With the shakeup, the form of the Castro government, months in the shaping, came clear. Fidel Castro, who helicopters about the country dispensing largesse from the blue National Bank checkbook he always carries in his breast pocket, is political chief. His pony-tailed brother Raul is military boss, commanding the 35,000-man rebel army that is the regime’s principal arm of force and terror, notably for rounding up all suspected oppositionists on a charge of “counterrevolution” (last week’s bag: 250 prisoners).

Guevara, a slim asthmatic who keeps a glass inhalator close at hand, becomes the country’s economic commissar (while holding onto his auxiliary job as commander of Havana’s Cabana Fortress). The son of an Argentine Communist mother, Guevara got his M.D. in Buenos Aires, then decided that “curing nations is more exciting than curing people.” He turned up in Red-lining Guatemala of the early 1950s, where the man who was instructed to hire him as an inspector in the Agrarian Department remembers only that Che was identified as a “Communist from abroad.” With this sinecure in hand, Guevara settled down in a second-rate Guatemala City hotel, flitted in and out of the country on unexplained missions. With the Jacobo Arbenz government falling, Guevara tried to organize guerrillas to fight, then fled to Mexico, where he joined the Gramma band. Guevara, who denies that he is a Communist, insists that the Hungarian revolution was “fomented against the people’s democracy by Fascists and imperialists.”

Empire Builder. In addition to banking, Guevara has grabbed off half the burgeoning National Institute for Agrarian Reform (INRA), which is rapidly matching the rebel army in size and importance. Its headquarters is the most tightly guarded building in Havana. As boss of INRA’s industrialization division, Guevara has a free hand for revamping Cuba; last week he seized the $14 million Havana Riviera Hotel. His appointment as National Bank chief touched off a run on savings banks—which Guevara thought “logical,” considering his “fame of being extremely radical.”

The people around and under the Fidel-Raúl-Che triumvirate give anti-Communists no cause for comfort. Antonio Núñez Jiménez, chief of INRA’s land redistribution program, once led the campaign for a Communist candidate for Congress, later wrote a Marxist Geography of Cuba that is now a standard textbook in Cuban schools. Another force is Celia Sánchez,* Castro’s onetime Girl Friday in the hills, who offers a patient ear and a radicalism as woolly as Castro’s own. Her apartment, where she keeps a freshly laundered shirt for him and a maid to prepare his favorite fish-and-rice breakfast, is one of Castro’s favorite ports of call in his hectic junketing about Havana.

Torch for the Church. About the only countering voice still around comes not from moderates but from a brand of leftist nationalists who do not like the U.S., but will go along with the Reds only to a point. The top anti-Communist influences are labor leaders and the Roman Catholic Church. Last week, in a rededication to the faith that became a tacit show of strength against the Reds, a crowd of 200,000, including a subdued and silent Castro, paraded by torchlight into Plaza Civica for midnight Mass, paying homage to Cuba’s patron saint, the Virgin of Charity. By radio Pope John XXIII voiced hope that Catholics would “save the Christian face of Cuba.”

The triumvirate still has a popular mandate, but its popular power is dwindling. It has all the guns, but history shows that force alone is no enduring answer in Cuba.

* Pun-prone Habaneros, accustomed to doing business in local branches of New York banks, promptly dubbed the institution “Che’s National Bank.” *Who a fortnight ago joined Che’s and Raúl’s wives as stars at a Communist-sponsored Women’s Congress in Santiago, Chile.