Cuba: Exporter of Communism

The bearded visage of Fidel Castro glowered from posters in every Cuban hamlet. In Santa Clara (pop. 100,000), an interior city in Cuba’s Las Villas province and scene of the 1958 battle that climaxed Castro’s revolution, the presence was particularly overwhelming.

There, last week, on the anniversary of the July 26, 1953, attack that began the revolution against Dictator Fulgencio Batista, more than 200,000 Cubans gathered to hear Fidel.

“Revolution!” As the mob chanted “Fi-del! Fi-del!” beads of sweat matted Castro’s unkempt beard in the broiling afternoon sun. For a Castro speech, it was mercifully short: three hours. Inevitably, he mocked the OAS, upbraided the U.S. Neither the U.S. nor the OAS, Castro boomed, could stop his chief export: Communism. “We call ourselves fighters for Communism! We want revolution; we want the liberation of the peoples of Latin America!”

He also gave some clues to the scope of counterrevolutionary effort in his own country. In Las Villas province, 2,005 rebels had been captured or killed since 1961, he said, and in the struggle, 295 soldiers of his “anti-bandit battalions” had been killed. When Castro turned to the economy, the crowd fell silent under some withering criticism from the Maximum Leader. Cubans, cried he, “are going at 25% of their capacity 80% of the time!”

Depressed Market. Fidel’s impatience was understandable. In the past five years, per-capita income has dropped 15% in Cuba. After an abortive attempt at crash industrialization, Castro has again turned priority effort toward sugar, Cuba’s one cash crop. The current harvest has produced a healthy 6,000,000 tons. Trouble is, so much of it (4,800,000 tons) has already been committed—to Russia, Red China and other countries, under barter agreements—that only 800,000 tons are left, after domestic needs, to sell for badly needed foreign exchange.

Meanwhile, under pressure from a starving economy and Castro’s brutal security forces, the ragtag exodus of Cubans from their homeland continues. Last week a yachtsman off Miami rescued onetime Camagüey Province Governor Luis Casas Martinez, 36, from a raft on which he had drifted alone for twelve days after escaping from a Castro prison. Casas Martinez, whose sister fled to Florida in 1964, had once been a Castro official, but he fell into disfavor. An X tattooed over his heart marked him for death for plotting against Castro. He was the latest of more than 8,000 people who have escaped from Cuba by sea since mid-1961. No one knows how many have failed.