The Press: The Times & Cuba

New York Timesman Herbert L. Matthews, veteran foreign correspondent and champion of causes, scored an enviable news beat in 1957, when he made his way into the mountain fastness of Cuba’s Oriente province, became the first U.S. newsman to interview Rebel Leader Fidel Castro. Matthews reported not only that Castro was alive (the Batista government had been claiming him dead), but that he represented Cuba’s future. Wrote Matthews: “He has strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice, the need to restore the constitution, to hold elections.”

Last week, with Castro’s ideas of liberty, democracy and social justice in serious question, with Cuba’s constitution ignored at Castro’s fancy, with elections not even in prospect, Herb Matthews was back in Cuba. He had been disturbed by growing U.S. criticism of the Castro regime. “The Cuba story was getting all confused in New York,” he told a fellow reporter. “I thought I’d come down.”

He found that nothing—or almost nothing—had changed since he first fell under Castro’s spell. Said he: “The only difference I saw was that he’s putting on weight around the middle.” With other newsmen—including the Times’s fulltime Cuba correspondent, Ruby Hart Phillips —reporting growing discontent with the Castro regime, growing concern about Communist influence, Matthews presented a far brighter picture. Items from Matthews’ Page One story last week: <J “This is not a Communist revolution in any sense of the word, and there are no Communists in positions of control.” Matthews offered a remarkable proof: “Even the agrarian reform, Cubans point out with irony, is not at all what the Communists were suggesting, for it is far more radical and drastic than the Reds consider wise as a first step to the collectivization they, but not the Cubans, want.” But as early as April 23, Times-woman Ruby Phillips, in a story run by the Times (over Matthews’ strong objections), reported in detail on “a Communist pattern in the development of the revolutionary program.” Again, in May, Ruby Phillips wrote: “Since the victory of the Castro revolution last Jan. i, the Communists and the 26th of July movement have been in close cooperation.” Most newsmen agreed. <J “The unrelenting enemies Dr. Castro has made because of his agrarian reform and economic measures are few, have no mass backing and are unarmed,” wrote Matthews. On the same subject, Colleague Phillips had reported: “Many people with modest savings, as well as the wealthy class, have invested in land and property . . . and they now see themselves stripped of their possessions. They are greatly disillusioned.” <I Where Matthews reserved the word “dictator” for Cuba’s ousted President Fulgencio Batista, he sees Castro’s regime as a benevolent sort of one-man rule. Wrote he: “Premier Castro is avoiding elections in Cuba for two reasons. He feels that his social revolution now has dynamism and vast popular consent, and he does not want to interrupt the process. Moreover, most observers would agree that Cubans today do not want elections.”

In the early editions of the Times for the morning after Castro resigned last week, Matthews speculated that the move came not from troubles within Cuba but out of resentment of U.S. criticism: “One must suppose that he has foreign policy and U.S. opinion mostly in mind. The attacks on him in the U.S. have wounded and angered him.” But when Castro himself said that his resignation stemmed from his feud with the President of his own choosing, Manuel Urrutia Lleo (see THE HEMISPHERE), and that a lot of the trouble arose because Urrutia had spoken unkindly of the Communists, the Times withdrew the Matthews analysis from its later editions.

Inside Song. In clearly choosing sides in Cuba’s conflict. Herb Matthews, 59, was following a well-established pattern in his long, award-studded career. In 1929 he went to the Far East, where tension was already rising, came away feeling more sympathy toward the Japanese than the Chinese (“What I responded to, above all, was the charm and hospitality of the Japanese”). When Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935, Matthews enthusiastically supported the Italians, later wrote: “If you start from the premise that a lot of rascals are having a fight, it is not unnatural to want to see the victory of the rascal you like, and I liked the Italians during that scrimmage more than I did the British or the Abyssinians.”

A high point of Matthews’ pre-Cuba career came during the Spanish Civil War, in which he was outspokenly partisan for the Communist-backed Loyalist forces. At one point he was reproached by Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger for having made the Loyalist situation appear brighter than it was. Recalled he, in his 1946 book, The Education of a Correspondent: “Even then, heartsick and discouraged as I was, something sang inside of me. I, like the Spaniards, had fought my war and lost, but I couldn’t be persuaded that I had set too bad an example.”

Tinny Ring. Still recalling his Spanish experience, Matthews wrote: “I admit being highly susceptible to personal contacts, and this is a weakness in a newspaperman.” That may be one of Herb Matthews’ problems in covering Cuba, where he is viewed more as a revolutionary institution than a working newsman. Explained another Cuba correspondent last week: “Whether he likes it or not, Matthews is regarded as being a sort of father confessor of Fidel Castro’s revolution.” Returning to Cuba this month, he was wined and dined by top Cuban government officials, spent some ten hours in close conversation with his friend Fidel. Talking to fellow newsmen, he steadfastly defended Castro. Did he feel any disenchantment at all? “No, I see no reason to,” replied Matthews, and in effect repeated the explanation he gave of Castro’s conduct in his Times story: “Youth must sow its wild oats.”

It is an explanation that rings tinnily in a reporter’s accounting of desperate hours in the history of a people. And however it may fit the uses of a historical sum-up, it has even less use as an explanation of the course of seasoned Correspondent Matthews or of the vagaries of the Cuba story in the seasoned (108 years) New York Times.