Cuba: More Refugees, More Blackmail

The yellow manila envelope postmarked New York arrived in the regular 8:30 a.m. mail and was addressed simply “109 S.W. 12th Avenue, Miami, Florida”—the headquarters of the Second Front of the Escambray, an anti-Castro exile organization. Inside, under the letterhead of Communist Cuba’s mission to the United Nations, was an astonishing four-page “press release” that spelled out the details of Havana’s Oct. 12 note to Washington setting down Fidel Castro’s terms for the evacuation of Cubans to the U.S. Until last week, both the U.S. and Cuba were keeping negotiations more or less secret. Now Castro, in an obvious propaganda ploy, decided to seek publicity.

According to the document, Castro took issue with the U.S. for thinking in terms of only 100 to 130 refugees a day. So small a number, said the Cuban dictator, would mean ” a long and unnecessary wait” for many separated families. He suggested “no fewer than 400 people a day” and proposed an air shuttle between the U.S. and Varadero, 70 miles east of Havana. As previously made public, the first evacuees were to be Cubans with immediate relatives the U.S., but in his note Castro also promised “a list of all other persons want to live in the U.S.”—except, of course, all youths between 15 and 26 who still owe a tour of military duty.

Prisoner for Prisoner. As for the 50,000 political prisoners in Cuban jails, the dictator proposed a typical Fidel-style swap: his prisoners for the Castroite subversives under lock and key in Latin American jails. Said Castro: “In view of the broad and friendly relations that the U.S. has with Latin America, Cuba will consider liberating a number of those jailed for counter-revolutionary crimes equal to the number of those jailed for revolutionary conduct, whose liberty the U.S. controls in countries like Venezuela, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina.”

The U.S., of course, could hardly be a party to such hemispherewide blackmail. Nevertheless, Washington continued negotiating for the release of both political and nonpolitical Cubans. Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko, in Manhattan attending the U.N. General Assembly, made a quick trip to Havana for “friendly” talks. Some Washington Castrologists speculated that Gromyko wanted to caution Castro against any hotheaded action. The same day that Gromyko left Cuba, Swiss Ambassador Emil Stadelhofer, the U.S.’s diplomatic go-between in Havana, flew to Washington to work out details of the agreement.

Very Old & Very Young. Meantime, the evacuation picked up speed. By week’s end, more than 65 boats carrying 1,200 refugees had made the perilous 90-mile crossing, and scores more were on the way. Among the newest arrivals was the 65-year-old astrology editor of Castro’s Bohemia magazine, and a withered 92-year-old fisherman who claims he inspired Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.

Floridians are increasingly concerned about absorbing another 50,000 to 70,000 Cubans along with the 200,000 already in the state. Governor Haydon Burns has asked Washington for “immediate and mandatory resettlement” of the refugees, and the Dade County school superintendent has barred any more Cubans until the U.S. chips in additional federal school aid. But the U.S. Government cannot force Cubans to resettle elsewhere. All it can do is ask Florida to bear the brunt of U.S. hemisphere policy for the moment—and help with problems as they arise.