Let us make Cuba the example. Let us make the Andes the Sierra Maestra of the Americas.
—Fidel Castro
REVOLUTION is fast becoming Cuba's principal export. Perhaps not since the early days of the Russian Revolution, when Lenin used Soviet diplomats to transmit instructions and gold, has a government attempted such large-scale subversion of its neighbors. Cuban diplomats, like Nasser's in the Middle East, are supposed to appeal directly to the hemisphere's people, going over the heads of—and against—the governments. Last month Buenos Aires police raided a strategy meeting of the street-fighting Committee in Honor of the Cuban Revolution, and flushed the Cuban embassy's second secretary. Argentine agents have been able on two occasions to intercept and photograph the bags of Havana's diplomatic couriers. Both times they found copies of the celebrated manual for guerrilla warfare written by Castro Henchman Che Guevara. On at least one occasion they found orders for Peronista terrorists.
The Friends of Cuba. Havana's most consistent effort is probably devoted to developing pro-Cuba fronts throughout the hemisphere. Venezuela's Committee for the Defense of the Cuban Revolution, an amalgam of Communists and street brawlers, has grown so powerful that it is causing serious division within the political coalition backing President Romulo Betancourt. A few weeks ago, at the funeral of a local Castro leader killed by police, angry members carried his co Sin, decked with the 26th of July red and black colors, through the streets for four hours. Recently, when anti-Castro Cubans held a memorial service in Caracas Cathedral, committee members and the Cuban charge d'affaires attacked the church.
Hardly a group or area is too small for Cuban attention: Jamaica police who seized the chief of the island's Mau-Mau-like rebel Ras Tafarians reported finding correspondence with Castro officials. Revolution, Castro's newspaper mouthpiece, devoted a 40-page supplement to calling Puerto Rico "a slave territory of America." Communist-lining Cheddi Jagan, a political power in British Guiana, got a red-carpet welcome in Havana.
Earthquake Aid: Propaganda. Pamphlets, manifestoes, films and books pour from Havana to the hemisphere. Brazilian cops raiding a Cuban attache's hideout found posters calling for "Green and Yellow [Brazil's colors] Revolution." Chilean officials, looking through a ton and a half earthquake-relief shipment flown in by a
Cuban plane, discovered that it was all propaganda and impounded the lot.
As the little Comintern of the Western Hemisphere, Havana has also become a sort of branch office where Communists and their collaborators check in. Recent visitors to Havana range from Mexican Artist-Communist David Alfaro Siqueiros (see Mexico) to a couple of Costa Rican banana-union bosses who stopped in en route home from Moscow. The effect of this spreads all over the map. In Managua, Nicaragua, students rioted, burned the U.S. military attache's car, demanded that Roosevelt Avenue be renamed after Augusto Sandino, Yankee-hating Nicaraguan rebel of the '20s. In Ecuador, students and white-collar workers formed a Revolutionary Union of Ecuadorian Youth and donned Sierra Maestra-type khaki uniforms. In Bogota, rioting pro-Castro students burned Uncle Sam in effigy.