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The U.S. decided last week to send Ambassador Philip Bonsai back to his post in Havana after a two-month absence. The move was made not because there was much improvement in relations--there was little--but because the State Department believes in a keen eye at diplomatic trouble spots and wants its top man on the scene so long as there is no personal danger. Cuba, said the State Department, had given assurances that there were "no charges" against Bonsai despite accusations last January that he was actively conspiring against the Cuban government.

The move had no apparent effect on Castro. At the news of President Eisenhower's request for powers to adjust U.S. sugar quotas (see BUSINESS), loudspeakers in Havana's Central Park blared "Death to Eisenhower" and "Let the Yankees come--we'll show them how to fight." Cried Castro, who reportedly has spent $120 million on munitions in the past year: "We have many more arms than the Algerian patriots. Work with your rifles beside you."

Three more names were added last week to the growing list of Cubans disenchanted with Castro. In Washington Cuba's naval attache and chief delegate to the Inter-American Defense Board, Lieut. Commander Miguel Pons Goizueta, stood before his colleagues from 20 nations and announced his resignation. "Fidelismo," said he, "is a mask hiding international Communism." Next day Cuba's military attache in the U.S., Captain Angel Saavedra, a onetime Castro agent in Batista's Washington embassy, also requested and got U.S. asylum. Finally, in Havana, Economist Rufo Lopez Fresquet, Castro's Finance Minister from the start of his takeover, announced that he was leaving the government for "reasons of health." With the departure of U.S.-oriented Lopez Fresquet (a onetime Columbia University student, with an American wife), out went the last moderate, the last professional, and the last at-least-halfway friend of the U.S. in Castro's Cabinet.

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