(See Cover) 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 Revolución, 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 ("Che") 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.