The Hemisphere: Five Months of Deterioration

This week, 760,000 of Cuba's 2,300,000-man labor force—roughly one-third—are without work. With the sugar cut and milled, 200,000 seasonally employed cane cutters and millworkers will join the 400,000 Cubans chronically unemployed and the 160,000 workers made jobless by the construction slowdown. Says a Havana businessman: "The country is going broke in a hell of a hurry." Said a sugar broker: "Cuba is being reduced from a first-rate nation with a sound peso to a third-rate nation."

The statistics of the first five months of this year compared with the same five war-filled months...