The Hemisphere: Angry Defectors

Cuba’s revolution now seems aimed at taking over every institution, business and property of note in the country. Fidel Castro’s National Institute for Agrarian Reform (I.N.R.A.) has blanket authority to seize land, and it is doing just that at a hectic pace. His Ministry for the Recovery of Stolen Government Property grabs all possessions of “counter-revolutionaries,” real and imagined. To this pair of communizing agencies, Castro last week added a third: the Labor Ministry, which got decree power to take over any business or labor organization.

Other signposts on Castro’s crazy course toward total dictatorship:

¶ A former I.N.R.A. official in the Manzanillo area, Lieut. Manuel Artime, reported from Mexican exile that he had quit in disgust after Castro told a secret meeting of I.N.R.A. officials last October that he had no intention of giving plots of land to peasants, planned to keep it instead in state-run cooperative farms. Artime also said he was sick of hearing “youth brigades” chanting their military drill cadence count outside his window every evening:” Uno-dos-tres-cuatro-viva-Fidel-Castro-Ruz!”

¶ Publisher Jorge Zayas of the afternoon Havana paper, Avance, which has fearlessly criticized Castro, fled to Miami, broken by threats on his life and by the new right of newspaper employees to insert beneath articles critical of Castro the “clarification” that the workers consider the story untrue. Zayas said that the head of the newsmen’s union. Baldomero Alvarez Rios, is a Communist. The Stolen Government Property Ministry thereupon seized Zayas’ house and newspaper. Havana’s other leading opposition newspaper Diario de la Marina, struggled on against “clarification”—sometimes running a story, followed by a compulsory “clarification,” followed by an angry editorial protest to the “clarification,” followed by a second “clarification.”

¶ Captain Manuel Rojo del Rio, an old fighting comrade of Castro who lately has borne the title of Cuba’s paratroop commander, defected while on a visit to Costa Rica. Of Castro he said: “There is something in his eyes that frightens even the bravest man. They reflect madness.” Rojo called Fidel’s brother. Armed Forces Chief Raúl Castro, a “vindictive jelly bean” with a “resentment against the masculine type of man,” and said that “all .his aides are Communists.”