The Hemisphere: P.M.’s First Week

It took only a week in office to show that Fidel Castro, the Prime Minister, was little different from Fidel Castro, the talkative, disorganized rebel. He moved out of the confusion of his Havana Hilton suite and into the confusion of a stucco chalet named High Ranch, on a hill east of Havana. Typical scene one noon in the living room: a woman travel writer asleep on a couch, cigar butts on the floor, a disconnected chandelier. Outside on the porch a cassocked priest sat reading the funny papers.

In speeches and on TV, Castro rambled loquaciously on. He said that the U.S. role in the 1898 Spanish-American War was merely belated intervention after the Cubans had effectively beaten Spain. He attacked demagoguery and nepotism (his brother Raul is chief of the armed forces). He saw to it that Captain Jesus Sosa Blanco—the Batista officer convicted of mass murder in a circus trial in Havana’s Sports Palace—got a new hearing. The judges were the same and so was the verdict: death by firing squad. Counting Sosa Blanco, 14 “war criminals” were executed last week, bringing the latest total to 316.