They Would Be Free

While Havana undergoes its trial by bomb, another city, 200 miles across the Florida Straits, has become a Cuban refugee camp. By fishing boat and by yacht, by commercial airliner or hijacked plane, an estimated 500 Cubans each day are now fleeing Castro's Cuba, and most of them converge on Miami. By last week an incongruous lump of more than 30,000 worried Cubans had crowded into the winter vacationland, and more were coming.

The politically reliable young men can sometimes sign up with a resistance group, or go off to a crude camp in the boondocks, where they learn guerrilla warfare. Only two of the 50 or so exile groups in Miami have much organization. The Democratic Revolutionary Front, a five-group coalition coordinated by ex-Premier Manuel ("Tony") Varona, 51, has a big brick building and the best financing; the Revolutionary Movement of the People (M.R.P.), headed by Engineer Manuel Ray, 37, has less money but is believed to operate the most effective underground inside Cuba. Both make only the smallest dent in the mass of jobless, moneyless Cubans.

Living on Pennies. Most of the exiles are middle-class people uprooted from home and job and just barely scraping by. Arriving in Miami with the single $5 bill allowed them by Castro, they jam into households that already crowd 12 to 18 people into a single house, spend their time talking, arguing and fighting their own civil war against the Fidelistas in Miami's permanent Cuban population of some 40,000. Score in recent weeks: two dynamitings, four Molotov-cocktail attacks, one case of arson, about evenly split between pro-and anti-Castro factions.

Miami's police pray that the Cubans will find jobs to keep them busy. But Dade County already counts 22,000 unemployed Americans, and probably no more than 1,000 refugees have regular jobs. Former Under Secretary of Commerce Carlos Smith, 52, wears a white coat as a Fontainebleau Hotel room wait er; former Supreme Court Justice Jose Cabezas is a fruit-plant shipping clerk; Prensa Libre's onetime personnel director. Diego Gonzalez, 42. sorts soda bottles in a supermarket for 70-c- an hour and is glad to have the work. "We get $6 to $8 a day," said a former customs officer who finds casual work on the docks. "We split with the others, of course." A surgeon and his family live off the wages of their 14-year-old son, who is a printer's devil.

Aid from Ike. The influx has reached the point where organized aid must replace warm hearts and individual assistance. A year ago, the Miami diocese of the Roman Catholic Church pioneered with .practical help--La $75,000 Catholic Latin Center staffed with four priests and four nuns, and with a nursery, clinic, chapel, adult education school to teach English. Last October a permanent Citizens Committee was organized and now there is a Cuban Refugee Emergency Employment Center with six bilingual interviewers. The Rockefeller Foundation donated $10,000 to the Catholic Latin Center for immediate aid, and the International Rescue Committee, veteran of the Hungarian refugee effort, was preparing a nationwide call for $1,000,000.

Last week the U.S. Government itself stepped in. After a six-weeks, on-the-spot investigation by former Assistant Defense Secretary Tracy Voorhees, President Eisenhower set aside $1,000,000 from his $150 million special contingencies' fund for Miami refugee aid, mostly to resettle the unemployed exiles in areas offering jobs. In making available the money, Ike invoked a Mutual Security Act clause authorizing assistance to refugees from Communism, and thus for the first time the U.S. officially labeled Cuba as Red.

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