Cuba: Voice of Castro

All day, every day, Fidel Castro’s strident Radio Habana Cuba fills the hemisphere’s airwaves with Communist propaganda in an effort to stir a rebellion here, provoke a riot there, create chaos everywhere. Last week one of his neighbors had had enough. In Washington, Foreign Minister Jose Antonio Bonilla Atiles of the Dominican Republic went before the Council of the Organization of American States to lodge an official protest that Radio Habana was “attempting to destroy−by inciting to riot and murder−our beginning democracy.”

Calling itself “The Free Voice of America,” Castro’s radio spends 22 hours a day broadcasting its Marxist spiel in Spanish, English, Portuguese and French from six powerful transmitters, five of them 100,000 watts, in the Cuban town of Bauta, 23 miles west of Havana. Built with Swiss and Czechosloyakian equipment at an estimated cost of $35 million, the station started operating in April 1961, and ever since has blasted the hemisphere with half-truths and diatribes.

Boss of the show is Marcos Behemara, about 34, a longtime Communist who once wrote Cuban television comedy scripts. “Guest stars” on his programs are the hemisphere Castrophiles, who, in the fashion of World War II’s Tokyo Rose and Lord Haw Haw, sometimes outdo even the Cuban Communists. Three times a week, Radio Habana turns its antennas directly at Guatemala for a rabble-rousing half-hour broadcast by Jacobo Arbenz, 48, the Red-lining ex-President of Guatemala who was overthrown eight years ago and now hopes to return via Cuba.

Before his return to the U.S. last March. ex-CBS Newsman Robert Taber, a founder of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, figured in Castro’s English-language broadcasts. Another who still does is Barbara Collins, also known as “Beardless Barbara,” the 25-year-old daughter of a New Jersey clergyman. With her small daughter in hand, she skipped to Havana on a cruise ship, took out Cuban citizenship, and now chats winningly about the charms of Communist Cuba. Robert Williams, 37, a North Carolina Negro who fled the U.S. to escape kid nap charges, denounces the U.S. for its “vicious caste system . . . designed to permanently dehumanize all colored people.”

Counting the 138 hours directed at Latin America by Red China and Soviet Russia. Latin Americans are being bombarded by an overlapping 300 hours of Red propaganda a week. While this strident Red voice becomes something of a bore to Latin Americans, it is louder and longer than the Voice of America, which beams a mere 63 hours of Spanish-language broadcasts and 21 hours of Portuguese each week toward Latin America.