Five Months of Deterioration

This week, 760,000 of Cuba's 2,300,000-man labor force--roughly one-third--are without work. With the sugar cut and milled, 200,000 seasonally employed cane cutters and millworkers will join the 400,000 Cubans chronically unemployed and the 160,000 workers made jobless by the construction slowdown. Says a Havana businessman: "The country is going broke in a hell of a hurry." Said a sugar broker: "Cuba is being reduced from a first-rate nation with a sound peso to a third-rate nation."

The statistics of the first five months of this year compared with the same five war-filled months last year show far-reaching deterioration: P: Havana province construction permits fell 63%, undercut by Castro's law reducing rents up to 50%.

P: Nationwide cement sales dropped 50%. P: Sales of small appliances, car parts and other necessities are down as much as 27%, while sales of necessities, e.g., food and drugs, just hold their own. P: Big, long-term purchases reflecting confidence in the future, such as automobiles and heavy machinery, are off 20% to 50%. P: U.S. investment, which rose $25 million (to a total of $850 million) even in the war year of 1958, has virtually stopped. P: Tourism, such a bright prospect that three big new hotels opened for the 1957-58 season, is nearly dead, with 60% to 80% of the rooms empty. The largest hotels are running up to $100,000 a month in the red; Havana-Miami airlines traffic is off 20%.

Net effect has been to increase the very problem--unemployment--that Castro promises to attack through land reform. As Puerto Rico, Brazil and other Latin American states have discovered, the fastest, surest way to provide mass high-income employment is industrialization; all of Fidel Castro's measures so far have scared off the capital that builds factories. Last week, deeply concerned that for the masses his revolution is coming to equal joblessness. Castro announced that during the next six months he will spend $135 million on public works to build roads, parks, bridges, schools and hospitals.

So far, the economic effect of Fidel Castro's promises has been to worsen the plight of the Cuban people.

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