A Letter From The Publisher: Oct. 8, 1965

COVERING Cuba without our own Man in Havana on a permanent basis poses problems. But it can be done, as we learned time and again in the 4½ years since our last resident correspondent was compelled to leave. For some months now, TIME editors have been considering a cover story on Fidel Castro in the seventh year of his rule. Last week, as he delivered a strange harangue to his people that unintentionally revealed a lot about Red Cuba’s trouble, the time seemed right to take another look at the frenetic dictator and his simmering island. Castro’s speech, incidentally, included a derisive reading in its entirety of a TIME, Sept. 10, story about Cuba entitled “Talk of Growing Unrest.”

This is TIME’s fifth cover story on post-Castro Cuba* and our second on Fidel since he came down from the hills and took over on the first day of 1959. In reporting this cover, as it happened, we did have a correspondent in Cuba—for a while. He is Gavin Scott, Canadian-born, Spanish-speaking chief of our Buenos Aires bureau, just back from his third visit to the island since 1962. This time the authorities tracked him down and packed him off, but not before he saw and heard enough to bring out a report full of new insights.

In addition to Scott’s on-the-spot perspectives, we had the benefit of research from our Caribbean bureau in Miami and the Latin American desk in our Washington bureau, which monitor Cuban radio broadcasts, read the press, interview refugees and diplomats coming out of Cuba. Bureaus and stringers throughout Latin America concentrated on one meaningful aspect of the story: the extent of Castroite subversion in other parts of the hemisphere. With the help of these reports, Writer Philip Osborne and Senior Editor George Daniels fashioned their study of Cuba’s decaying revolution—and continuing capacity for mischief.

TIME’s cover story last Feb. 12 on the influential but little-known Soviet economics professor, Evsei Liberman, revealed that the winds of economic change were astir in the land of the Soviets—and that they were blowing from the West. The Russians predictably denied that they were edging toward that horrid condition of affairs called capitalism, and Liberman himself fired off a two-page cable (TIME LETTERS, March 5), spelling out his views.

Since then, the Soviet economic reform, marking the ideological bankruptcy of old-line Marxism, has become one of the most fascinating stories for Western journalists. It continued last week as the Russians made their latest and biggest move in the new direction (see THE WORLD, “On Toward the Goulash”). While their road is certainly not marked Private Enterprise, it is startlingly different from the rigidly planned, tightly structured Soviet economy of old—and it involves more than a passing bow in the direction of the profit motive in human affairs.

* The others: Castro, Jan. 26, 1959; Che Guevara, Aug. 8, 1960; Exile Leader Jose Miro Cardona, April 28, 1961; and Communist Boss Bias Roca, April 27, 1962.