CUBA: Away from It All

With a $3,000,000 Cubana airlines jet-prop Britannia at his disposal, Prime Minister Fidel Castro was the Western Hemisphere’s happiest tourist last week, speeding from Montreal to Houston to Brasilia to Buenos Aires. “This one day I spent in Montreal,” said Castro, “has impressed me more than all the time I spent in the U.S. There is a Latin atmosphere.” In Houston, he accepted a blue-blooded quarter horse, gave permission to Oilman Frank Waters to make a movie about the revolution. “To do justice to a story so powerful,” said Waters, “I have hired the top producer in America, Jerry Wald.” Hoped-for cast: Marlon Brando as Fidel and Frank Sinatra as his pony-tailed brother Raul.

Flying over Cuba at 19,000 feet, Castro broadcast a harangue down to his subjects via Havana radio stations: “It is difficult to adapt myself to the idea of passing over Cuba. Naturally, I feel emotional.” But he kept right on going—to Brasilia and a meeting with President Juscelino Kubitschek, to Buenos Aires, where President Arturo Frondizi pointedly kept him from provocative public appearances.

Insiders explained why the Prime Minister had time for all the world but Cuba: after telling U.S. audiences that Communists had “no influence,” Castro did not want to risk embarrassment by a big Red show at last week’s labor-sponsored May

Day parade in Havana. Without the hero, the 15 hours of parades and speeches went on anyway before the brooding statue of Liberator Jose Marti in Plaza Civica. Motorcycle cops led off in new white crash helmets, followed by marines in maroon berets, MPs in black berets, and more than 206,000 laborers. “Fidel,’when you get time, remember the chauffeurs,” pleaded one giant placard. But the Reds knew Castro’s new mood; pro-Communist sloganeering was conspicuously missing.

Have Castro’s travels taught him the peril of Red support? Nothing in last week’s events proved that he doubts the merits of a popular front, though he did seem to want Communist infiltration to appear less blatant. Under wraps, the Red drive for power went on. Items:

¶Red-lining Major Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s second-in-command at La Cabana Fortress, Major Benjamin Camino, an open antiCommunist, was recently arrested for “conspiracy.”

¶Fellow travelers work on the “Commission for the Revision of Cuban History Books.” Suggested change: U.S. troops came to Cuba in 1898 for “imperialistic reasons” after the Spanish were licked.

¶Freedom of the press was under attack. El Mundo Writer Juan Luis Martin, an active antiCommunist, was arrested secretly and held for two weeks without charges. Feeling their revolutionary oats. composing-room workers on two Havana papers last week demanded the right to edit stories before setting them in type.

¶Executions, a prime instrument of terror, went on. Schoolteacher Olga Herrera Marcos, charged with squealing on rebels, may become the first woman “war criminal” to face a firing squad. Her death sentence has been appealed. Four former soldiers, sentenced to prison terms by the trial court, were sentenced to death upon “appeal” by the government. Death toll so far: 549.