CUBA: No Time for Tourists

To the Cuban exiles who live near Miami and glower across the Straits of Florida at Fidel Castro, last week’s opportunity for a propaganda blow was irresistible: 2,000 U.S. travel agents were freeloading on Castro in Havana in a convention dedicated to the fatuous proposition that present-day Cuba is a tourist paradise. Off from Florida went a DC-3 loaded with anti-Castro leaflets, which fluttered down upon the Cuban capital. Fidel Castro, shaken by a key defection in his rebel army that same day, and reports that terrorists were at work, filled the air with machine gun and 40-mm. antiaircraft fire. The wild evening of gunplay killed two Cubans and wounded 48. After that, in frenzied need of a scapegoat, he inevitably launched a TV tirade against the U.S., charging that Havana had been bombed. He had to reach back in history to find a match for the infamy: “This is our Pearl Harbor!”

The first blow in Castro’s bad week came from central Camagiiey province, where Major Hubert Matos, 40, has been boss of the rebel army. For months, Matos had been writing Fidel his misgivings over Communist infiltration in the Agrarian Reform Institute-and over illegal land seizures. Castro gradually shifted most of Matos’ army friends out of Camagiiey, then cut off the major’s ammunition and supplies. Last week, when Fidel’s Red-lining brother Raul took over as Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, Matos quit in protest. “No one can talk to you on the Communism issue,” he told Fidel in a final letter.

“Genocide!” Thirty of Matos’ officer friends urged him to go with them to the hills and start a guerrilla campaign. Matos chose to wait. Tension grew; crowds milled about the city of Camagiiey. Captain Jose Manuel Hernandez, disillusioned by Castro and fearful for Matos, put a bullet through his own head. Flying into town, Castro jailed Matos as a “traitor,” “ingrate,” and an ally of two other prominent Cubans purged because of their anti-Communist pronouncements—ex-President Manuel Urrutia and ex-Air Force Chief Pedro Diaz Lanz. Spat Castro: “The three musketeers have fallen.”

To the travel agents, gathered in their hotels, Castro tourist officials solemnly declared that onetime Hero Matos was a “counterrevolutionary, a running dog of the plantation owners.” Then, just as Castro, returning from Camaguey, stepped out of his helicopter in downtown Havana, the DC-3 from Florida roared low over the skyline and dumped its load of white pamphlets.

Castro ranted on TV for four hours. “Genocide against our women and children!” he shrieked. “We give the U.S. a naval base in our country, and they give war criminals bases to bombard us.”

Search for Facts. In Florida, the U.S. started investigating the charges “with great urgency,” and two days later the FBI got its man: ex-Air Force Chief Diaz Lanz. He admitted to the FBI that he had written the pamphlets (calling Castro “the real traitor of the revolution”) and flown the rented DC-3 out of an airstrip “near Miami.” Searching the books to determine whether Diaz Lanz had violated any law, the U.S. took note that there are 280 airstrips in Florida. The U.S. asked the Inter-American Peace Commission, troubleshooting arm of the Organization of American States, to investigate the flights.

Unappeased, Castro called a “rally of 1,000,000 Cubans” in Havana this week to protest the flights. And he gave in at last to an old Communist request: “We must train and arm the peasants and workers. I don’t believe all those lies against Communism,” he went on. “They tell the same lies against me.”

-Which last week seized 20,000 acres from Ramon Castro, who a year ago bought Fidel’s share of the family holdings.