Identify the country or countries which recently: a) sentenced a poet to two weeks in prison for penning "a mockery of the Holy Family and Jesus Christ"; b) promoted Pepsi-Cola in full-page newspaper ads; c) gave away choice seashore plots of land to Sophia Loren, Gene Kelly, Kirk Douglas, Doris Day and Frank Sinatra.
The answer is that paradoxical land of six republics, five nationalities, four faiths, three languages and two alphabets—Yugoslavia. For 18 years, Marshal Josip Broz Tito has led his Adriatic nation of 20 million people down the path of a socialism of sorts. Today, as the rest of Eastern Europe begins to catch on, Yugoslavia remains the most autonomous, open, idiosyncratic and unCommunist Communist country anywhere on earth.
The Silver Baton. Symbolic were two holidays last month. One was Tito's 75th birthday, when shopwindows blossomed with red-draped pictures of him, nestling among West German cameras and British textiles, and when 60,000 people gathered at twilight in Belgrade for a fete climaxed by the presentation to Tito of a silver-plated baton that had been relayed for a month through hundreds of Yugoslav towns and villages. The other holiday was May 1, Communism's traditional red-letter day, when there were no military marches in the Yugoslav capital, and Tito wasn't even in town.
On May Day, in fact, most of Belgrade was off on a pleasant bourgeois weekend in the woods or on the beaches.
Many went on wheels, for Yugoslavs have gone car crazy as the number of privately owned autos has tripled in five years. A mounting tide of wheeled Westerners is adding to the crush. They flow in to sample Yugoslavia's sylvan beaches and well-preserved medieval towns. Some 3,000,000 Western cars carrying tourists are expected this year. "I stamp passports in my sleep these days," says one Yugoslav border guard at a Trieste checkpoint. "One day last summer we had 45,000 people come through here."
Pelvis Communism. In pursuit of the tourist's hard currency (9,000,000 foreigners spent $105 million in Yugoslavia last year), the government has abolished visa requirements for 18 nations ranging from Mongolia to such NATO members as Italy, Denmark and Norway. Old hotels are being refurbished to suit Western tastes, and new ones built. Eight new state catering schools offer a four-year course for waiters, cooks and hostelers. Families are being encouraged by the Communist government to indulge in such capitalist practices as investing in restaurants, inns, shoe-repair shops and motels.
Eight casinos, all but one operated by foreigners, who give the state 63% of the profits, are now available to foreign visitors—to the disgust of some orthodox party types. "Yugoslavia's flag should be two crossed croupier rakes on a green baize field," grumbled one in print recently. Tourists also like girls, and the Yugoslavs have obliged with unaccustomed socialist thoroughness: striptease acts so exciting and uninhibited that one goggle-eyed Italian journalist reported that "the Yugoslavs have traded Goulash Communism for Pelvis Communism."