Helicopters beat low over Havana, and Russian-built MIG-19 sweptwing jets sent sonic booms thundering down the capital's seafront Malecon Drive. In every town along the 760-mile length of Cuba, the speechmakers mounted their platforms to trumpet victory to the assembled populace. The first anniversary of Fidel Castro's triumph over the haphazard U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion was at hand, and May Day lay just ahead. It was time to celebrate in Communist Cuba.
But this year, unlike last, Cuba's revolutionaries have very little to congratulate themselves about. The regime still stands —a well-armed dictatorship is not easily overthrown, as the Bay of Pigs fiasco demonstrated. Yet it is a leadership in disarray, increasingly ostracized by its hemispheric neighbors, beset by economic catastrophe and torn by a bitter, not yet settled internal struggle for power.
The falling out among Marxists was something new for Cuba. Suddenly, Fidel Castro, until now Cuba's Maximum Leader and self-declared No. 1 Marxist, had lashed out publicly at the island's official Communist Party and had posed a fascinating question: Who is the real boss in Cuba—Castro, who takes orders only from himself, or the Communist Party's old-line professionals, who get their instructions from Moscow? Revolution in a Raffle. Castro's answer was as clear as he could make it—he was still in charge. Last month, in a marathon 3½hour speech to his countrymen, he accused the old party regulars of undercutting his revolution, of shunting aside his followers in favor of its own cadres, of lowering a yoke on Cuba. Cried Castro: "The only comrade who could be trusted, the only one who could be appointed to an important post on a people's farm, a cooperative, in the state administration, any place, had to be an old Marxist militant. They thought that they had won the revolution in a raffle."
As quickly as the split was opened to public view, Cuba's Communists hurried to smooth it over. "There is no breach, but rather more unity for all," insisted Hoy, official organ of the Communist Party. Yet only a unity of necessity joins Castro's wild-eyed impulsive revolutionaries and the party's longtime regulars. And it is doubtful that any lasting meeting of minds can come between the mob-rousing and vain Fidel and the shadowy, heavy-set mulatto who heads Cuba's Communist Party and commands its maneuvers.
He is Bias Roca, 53, secretary-general of the party, for 26 years Moscow's most trustedly servile man in Havana, and now determined, if he gets the chance, to shape Cuba to the Kremlin's liking. Bias Roca is an orthodox Communist, cynical, opportunistic, dedicated. He believes in party discipline, and in a Cuba run by committees of technicians under the rigid control of a politburo of himself and his fellow professionals. By nature and by training he distrusts Castro's messianic brand of Marxism, his barefoot government-by-impulse, and his insatiable appetite for personal adulation. Because he could do nothing else, Roca joined forces with Castro, offering the party's organization in return for mass support. But so far, the partnership has brought only ruination to what was once one of the richest countries in Latin America.