It was Fidel Castro's first major speech since the July 26 anniversary
of his 1953 attack on the Moncada barracks that started the Cuban revolution.
There he stood last week before a crowd of 50,000 in Havana's Plaza de
la Revolucin, meandering for hours about everything and nothing —
poverty, classroom shortages, taxes, new houses, and the problem of
bureaucrats who do “absolutely nothing.” Then, amid the
chatter, he dropped two electric statements that instantly set
telephones jangling from Miami to Washington. Castro offhandedly
promised to 1> let any Cuban with relatives in the U.S. depart from the
Communist island free and clear after Oct. 10, and 2> make a statement
“in a few days” that would clear up the mysterious
seven-month disappearance of Ernesto Guevara, 37,
the Argentine-born Marxist who ranks as Cuba's top theoretician, ace
guerrilla fighter and longtime No. 2 to Castro himself. Taken together, the two announcements said a lot about what was going
on in Castro's ugly little dictatorship six years eight months and 28
days after the bearded revolutionary marched triumphantly into Havana,
with the worshipful cheers of 6,500,000 Cubans ringing in his ears. What has happened to Castro is disappointment, disillusion and decay.
After nearly seven years of power, the grandiose dreams are ended.
Gone is the hope of a swift socialist transformation to make
agricultural Cuba a Caribbean industrial colossus; the Cuban economy
is in tatters, back where it started as a one-crop sugar producer. Gone
is the vision of leading a vast Latin American popular revolution; that
revolution is being ably led by the democratic left of Peru's Fernando
Belaunde Terry, Venezuela's Raul Leoni and Chile's Eduardo Frei—while
Castro's once-great mass appeal has faded. Gone is the assurance of
being the greatest Cuban national hero since Liberator Jose Marti; Cuba
today is populated by a sullen, lifeless people who dream their own
dreams—of fleeing to somewhere else, as they say, “on the other
side.” Gone even is the ebullient, wildly spinning personality of
Fidel Castro himself, replaced by a brooding, gloomy figure, rarely
seen, rarely heard, struggling like any other Communist subchieftain to
run a country for his masters in Moscow. That is the reality in Cuba today. The Cuban dictator's heart may still
lift at thoughts of a violent, Chinese-style revolutionary struggle
against “Yanqui imperialism.” But his stomach is in
Moscow—and he finally seems to realize it. Castro survives only because of a $500 million, Soviet-supplied military
machine and a subsistence-level economic dole amounting to about
$1,000,000 a day. In return, the Kremlin demands the imposition of a Soviet-style
political rule on Cuba, the institutionalization of the regime, an end
to the “cult of personality,” even coexistence with the
U.S.—up to a point. As one U.S. Castrologist says, “Castro will
never become the apostle of peaceful coexistence. Yet it does seem
clear that he is subject to Soviet pressure and has no choice other
than to accept it.” The refugees and Che Guevara are two sources
of acute embarrassment to Castro, and therefore to Moscow.
