Cuba: View from Havana

For six days the five Cubans paddled north across the sea on a raft fashioned from truck-tire inner tubes, ropeand bamboo poles. By the time a passing Florida yachtsman spotted them 35 miles off Grand Bahama island last week and took them aboard, the raft had disintegrated and the refugees were clinging to the inner tubes, half in, half out of the water. What sort of land is it that drives men to take such risks to escape? Last month Fidel Castro invited 30 U.S. newsmen to Cuba to witness the July 26 celebrations marking the eleventh anniversary of his initial attack against Dictator Fulgencio Batista. Among the newsmen was TIME’S Caribbean Bureau Chief Edwin Reingold. His report:

A handsome old woman rocks on the porch of her once proud but now paint-flecking home. Her husband is dead; her son is in exile; her maid, whom she reared from childhood, will soon be moving out. “And then,” sighs the woman, “who will stand in line for me?” She is painfully alone. This is no longer her Cuba. It is no longer the Cuba of anyone’s memory. “La Roca?” puzzles the young boy in the starched militia uniform. “Oh yes, it was an old restaurant that used to grovel for Yankee dollars before the revolution. I never go there.” A University of Havana student is almost euphoric in his fervor: “We are building a new Cuba. We must waste no time and we must be ruthless.”

A Grey Spectrum. The leaders of the new Cuba have proved after 51 years in power that they can control Cuba. No one has yet proved that they can run it. Rationing and shortages have worsened to the point where an automobile tire now goes for $130 on the black market, the weekly coffee ration is down to 1½ oz. per person, and the monthly butter ration is ⅛ lb. per person. At Havana’s Tropicana nightclub, the chorus is still leggy and kicking, but the food is bad and few Cubans can even afford the tips. A Coca-Cola? Sure, says the obliging bartender at the Habana Libre Hotel. The bottle is certainly a Coke bottle—but the orange-colored stuff inside resembles battery acid.

Day by day there are the continued mechanical breakdowns—automobiles, refrigerators, elevators and sugar-mill equipment. The main problem, of course, is the U.S. blockade, which has choked off the supply of new equipment and spare parts. But there is also Cuba’s own bureaucracy and inefficiency. In factory after factory, production “norms” are blandly ignored. Unfortunately for Fidel, many have-nots simply care not. In Santiago we noticed some workers stacking cases of soda pop, and one man was methodically dropping every fifth case, shattering scores of bottles. As we walked toward the man, down went another case, and he gave us a sly, knowing wink. It seems he was pressed into his job, and he didn’t like it.

Radio stations broadcast and rebroadcast Fidel’s speeches, bookstalls are chockablock with tracts on Lenin and Marx and a grey spectrum of repair and fix-it books. “There isn’t a magazine, a novel, or anything else worth reading,” sighs an exasperated Cuban. “Just this junk about imperialism and stuff on what a happy place Hungary is.”

A Plea for Hope. The stuff, however, is having its effect, particularly on Cuba’s youth. In Santiago one eightyear-old we talked to froze in terror when he discovered that we were “the imperialist monster.” Students are told that they would never have had a chance to go to school except under Communism. To keep them believing it, scholarship students get first crack at the milk, butter, eggs and fruit. Older Cubans can only shrink back into themselves. They are the people who count less and less today. “Can’t you give us some hope?” pleaded one woman in Havana.

The answer one gropes for but doesn’t give is that one sees nothing inside Cuba to give hope. As the regime becomes more firmly entrenched, the older Cubans learn to live with their hardships and the younger Cubans to love them as a symbol of the revolution. The feeling among Western diplomats in Havana is that by 1969, when Castro has half-promised to draw up a constitution, it might actually be safe for him to open the polls. Over the next five years, the shortages may be alleviated somewhat, and the campesinos, true to Castro’s boast, may have a bit more than before. Party control will certainly be more tightly sewed up, dissenters will be driven into deeper silence, and Cuba’s internal power base will be broadened.

Already Minister of Industries Che Guevara has taken control of most of Cuba’s economy, and Fidel’s little brother Raul, head of Cuba’s armed forces, is assuming an ever larger role in politics. It has been suggested that the only thing that could topple the Communists in Cuba would be Fidel’s assassination. If Fidel were to die, there would indeed be turmoil. But a year or two from now, the party may be so strong that one man’s death would make little difference.