Clarified & Defined

"Thank you, Senor Mikoyan," said the Havana newspaper, Diario de la Marina. "Your visit has clarified many things and defined the camps: on one side the Communists and their knowing and unknowing accomplices; on the other side Cubans who want to continue being free men in a free world." Leaving Cuba after ten days, Russia's Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan had scored high, winning a trade treaty and a promise of resumed diplomatic relations. But there were many signs that the common Cuban found the new warmth between Havana and Moscow distasteful and even dangerous.

Fidel Castro and Anastas Mikoyan could hardly have been closer. They flew around Cuba in a huge blue-and-white Russian-marked helicopter. Castro showed Mikoyan the tobacco lands in the west, the Isle of Pines, a government agriculture cooperative, the Moncada barracks in Santiago, where Castro's revolution began, even the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, scene of Castro's insurrection. Mikoyan kept murmuring: "The work of the revolution is very good." One day he took time out to call on Ernest Hemingway at his country house outside Havana, presented the writer with a set of his books printed in Russia. In Moscow, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that Hemingway told Mikoyan: "In my long years in Cuba I have not seen a government as honest and incorruptible as the present revolutionary government."

Concealed from Hostility. Mikoyan's flitting was also notable for the fact that he was concealed so carefully from the people he was visiting. Between his first full day in Havana, when he precipitated a riot, and his final day, when he made no appearances in public, Mikoyan's whereabouts were a mystery. Reason: large numbers of Cubans did not hesitate to show anger and disapproval. In movie houses, audiences booed newsreels of him. A meeting of the pro-Castro Havana University Federation of University Students, called to vote censure for anti-Mikoyan demonstrators, adjourned with students shouting: "Out with the Reds!" and "When do we have elections?" Wrote "A Cuban" in the guest book at the Soviet scientific and cultural fair that Mikoyan came to Cuba to open: "Now the Russian exposition is in Cuba; soon Cuba will be in the Russian exposition."

The Castro-admiring magazine Bohemia ran a section titled "What the Soviet Exposition Does not Show," included in it: "The powerful military apparatus to oppress the people, the extremely low level of the popular classes, the crimes of Hungary," The old Autentico Party, once Cuba's strongest, sensed an issue; in its first public declaration of the Castro era, the party raised what it called "the anti-Communist banner."

Opened to Trade. Unperturbed by these dissents, Castro plunged ahead. Four hours before Mikoyans departure, he and Mikoyan signed a detailed trade treaty. Russia promised Cuba a twelve-year, $100 million, low-interest (2.5%) credit for "equipment, machinery and materials," contracted to buy 1,000,000 tons of Cuban sugar yearly for the next five years at world market prices.

A U.S. embassy statement promptly pointed out that the U.S. buys three times as much of Cuba's sugar at prices 1-c- to 2-c- per lb. above the world market. Had the U.S. paid Cuba last year according to the Russian schedule, "Cuba would have received approximately $140 million less for its sales of sugar to the U.S." Moreover, Cuba can spend its U.S. sugar receipts wherever it pleases; it must spend most of the Russian payments to buy Russian goods. Mikoyan came to Cuba to open a fair; it may turn out that he also opened the Cubans' eyes.

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