Until the last hour, the U.S. had hoped to win Argentina and Brazil to its side against Castro, but Latin America's two biggest nations would not come around at Punta del Este. Last week in their home bailiwicks, Brazil's and Argentina's leaders had some explaining to do. In Brazil, Foreign Minister San Thiago Dantas went before an angry Parliament to explain his stand. Skillfully dividing and goading the Deputies into ineffectual quarreling, he escaped uncensured. In Argentina, President
Arturo Frondizi, who had also balked at voting Castro out of the hemisphere, ran into an ultimatum from his country's powerful and conservative military men. In the end he was forced to make Argentina the 14th hemisphere nation to break diplomatic relations with Cuba.
Giving In. He made his reluctance plain. Though Argentina's President personally abhors both Communism and Castro (whose Foreign Minister once called Frondizi a "viscous blob of human excrescences"), he finds it politically expedient, both at home and abroad, to play the neutral. Maneuvering for time, he went before the nation to make an angry speech defending Argentina's—and his own—independence in world affairs. If Frondizi expected an outburst of public support, he did not get it. When the military men backed up their ultimatum by boycotting a presidential state dinner for Belgium's visiting ex-King Leopold, Frondizi bowed to the inevitable. The announcement made no bones about the reason: "Considering the resolutions voted [at Punta del Este], especially the sixth,* which obtained a two-thirds vote and is causing repercussions in inter-American policies, diplomatic relations with the government of Cuba are today broken."
Unofficially, Washington was "pleased and happy'' at the break; there was hopeful—overhopeful—talk of similar break-offs by the six remaining Latin nations that still have embassies in Havana. Castro had already made his reaction clear enough on the subject by assembling 1,000,000 (by Cuban count) people in Havana's Plaza de la Revolución. Cried Castro: "The OAS was unmasked for what it is—Yankee Ministry of Colonies and a military bloc against the peoples of Latin America."
Cutting the Ties. And at the U.N., two of Castro's Communist friends, Rumania and Czechoslovakia, offered a resolution appealing for an end to U.S. "interference in the internal affairs" of Cuba. "Uncle Sam,'' cried the Cuban delegate, "took his trip to Punta del Este carrying a bag of gold in one hand and a bloody dagger in the other." Apparently, the Reds hoped to draw anti-U.S. support from the Afro-Asian bloc. But the Afro-Asians seemed to regard it all as an inter-American quarrel. Brazil, speaking as a member of the so-called "soft six" at Punta del Este, told the U.N. that Cuban membership in the OAS was a family affair that the OAS was capable of handling by itself.