Khrushchev's Protectorate

Nikita Khrushchev last week claimed Cuba as his to protect from a hostile U.S.

Appearing on only 15 minutes' notice before a convention of schoolteachers in the Kremlin, Khrushchev climbed the rostrum to deliver a televised and broadcast warning to the U.S. to keep hands off Cuba--an ultimatum Castro has been asking him to issue. Soviet rocket tests in the Pacific, said Khrushchev, proved that Russia could accurately hit the U.S. interior. He blustered on: "Now the U.S. is not so unreachable as it once was. Speaking concretely, Soviet artillerymen can support with their rocket fire the Cuban people if aggressive forces in the Pentagon dare to start intervention against Cuba." What is more, said Khrushchev, "we will help our Cuban brothers by causing the failure of the economic blockade declared against Cuba by the U.S."

On vacation in Newport, President Eisenhower got busy with a tough reply. Khrushchev's statement, said Ike, "underscores the close ties that have developed between the Soviet and Cuban governments." Then he firmly laid down an Eisenhower amendment to the Monroe Doctrine: "The U.S. will not permit the establishment of a regime dominated by international Communism in the Western Hemisphere."

Mutual Hate. Touring Czechoslovakia, Raul Castro, brother of Fidel and head of Cuba's armed forces, showed that Communism's affection for Cuba was mutual. On a visit to a dam near Pisek, in western Czechoslovakia, he met a troupe of junketing Red Chinese and North Korean military brass, chatted about the common struggle of the Chinese, Korean and Cuban peoples against "the American aggressors." A few weeks before he set out on his trip, Raul Castro remarked to intimates in Havana: "My dream is to drop three atomic bombs on New York."

The full measure of Russia's ambitions for Cuba was made plain last week in its choice of an ambassador for Havana, Sergei Kudriavtsev. The name should be familiar. Kudriavtsev was, in the findings of a Canadian royal commission, the real head of the Canadian spy ring exposed by the defecting Russian cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko in 1945. The Russians then brazenly assigned him to the U.N. as adviser to the Soviet delegation in 1947, but the appointment stirred such bad publicity that he was recalled inside four months. Russia's man in Havana is obviously expected to head Soviet penetration of Latin America.

Communists, So What? Cuba was having its own diplomatic headaches. Four Cuban ambassadors (to Italy, Switzerland, El Salvador and Britain) quit or were fired. All had dared to warn against Cuba's drift toward Communist control. Even more embarrassing to Castro was the defection of the man he had recently designated to be ambassador to the U.S. A law professor at the University of Havana, Jose Miro Cardona was Castro's first Prime Minister after the fall of Dictator Fulgencio Batista. His disenchantment had increased as the months went by. In a letter of resignation last week to Castro's puppet President, Osvaldo Dorticos, Miro explained that "ideological differences between government policies and my conscience are insurmountable." Then he ducked for cover in the Argentine embassy in Havana, as a hail of manufactured hatred clattered around him. Behind, Miro left a memorandum of the final conversation he had had with Dorticos. In the heat of discussion, Miro suggested to Dorticos that he had a totalitarian concept of the state. Dorticos' angry reply: "If Cuba wishes, we will say 'Yes, we are Communists. So what?' "

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