The Skaters & the Fish

Delegates to the Alliance for Progress conference in Punta del Este fell silent as bearded Che Guevara, the Kremlin's best friend in Cuba, stood up to deliver his final pitch. "Cuba's delegation has asked again and again and never has received an answer whether Cuba has the right to participate in the Alliance for Progress," said Che smoothly. "Cuba's socioeconomic system may be different from the rest of the nations of this continent, but Cuba nevertheless is part of the whole. The first mark of coexistence is the peaceful recognition of the system, as the U.S. has granted."

Hunched over the blue-clothed table, U.S. Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon scrawled his answer on a pad as Guevara talked. He kept on writing even after Guevara finished and slumped into his chair amidst eloquent silence. Then Dillon waved his Estados Unidos name plate at the chairman, and stood up to reply. Castro would get no U.S. aid, no U.S. recognition, said Dillon. "Unfortunately, the delegate of Cuba has tried to give the implication that the U.S. somehow recognizes the permanence of the present regime in Cuba. This we do not do and never will do, because to do so would be to betray the thousands of patriotic Cubans who are still waiting and struggling for the freedom of their country. We await the day when the people of Cuba have once more regained their freedom."

Misunderstood Cousin. For 13 days, Che had been wheeling, dealing, and stealing the scene at Punta del Este without provoking a U.S. reply. Only too well aware that support is being organized throughout the hemisphere to ostracize Castro's Communist dictatorship, Che set out to show that Cuba is still a member of the hemispheric family. He proved himself an able tactician, here offering a "helpful" resolution, there playing the misunderstood cousin, everywhere extending well-mannered coexistence. Nuzzling up to Brazilian Delegate Clemente Mariani, Che was well rewarded by a Mariani public statement gushing over "how encouraging it is to see how many of the other delegations' proposals have been approved by Cuba."

When Che heard that Peruvian Prime Minister Pedro Beltran was trying to put through a clause in the Declaration of Punta del Este that would clearly exclude the Cuban dictatorship from the alliance, Che dropped around uninvited to the meeting room, stirred up quite a commotion trying to get in, then withdrew looking hurt. In the end, at Brazil's insistence, Beltran's proposals were watered down to a mere stated preference for representative democracy. It was Che himself who then placed Cuba squarely outside the hemisphere alliance of the other 20 nations by refusing to sign the Declaration of Punta del Este.

No Dramatics. Che's adroit politicking provided the drama of the conference, but as the U.S. Treasury's Dillon clearly saw, the real business was not dramatics, and the real success was not yet to be measured. The present task was merely to get under way. The U.S. objective at Punta del Este was to offer Latin America, tormented by its hunger for food, learning, health and work, a working alternative to Castro's "socialism," and it hoped to encourage Latin Americans themselves to prove that democracy can provide swift enough economic and political progress.

The words of the Declaration of Punta del Este were certainly a start. Taking it as axiomatic that "this alliance is founded on the principle that free men working through the institutions of representative democracy can best satisfy man's desires.'' the declaration listed as its goal basic economic and social advancement. Setting the declaration apart from the serried folios of similarly pious proposals in the past was a flat commitment that "the U.S. wall provide a major part of the minimum of $20 billion, principally in public funds, which Latin America will require over the next ten years."

No Marshall Plan. The Alliance for Progress, the Kennedy phrase that now became a mutual declaration of 20 nations, is something less than a Marshall Plan in Latin tempo. It is left up to the Latin American nations, one by one, to produce definite reforms. The U.S. feels itself still too resented in Latin America to try to dictate solutions, and can only hope that the alliance grows its own responsibility.

At the end of the conference, one observer compared the illiterate, hungry people of Latin America to fish caught beneath the ice, and the Punta del Este delegates to skaters above. To the fish, the skaters and their complicated figures mean nothing; the only thing that counts to them is the act of cutting through the ice and sending down food. Dillon put the same message in his own dogged way: "Although we have charted the way to progress, plans alone will not feed the people, cure the sick or educate our children. We must now undertake the hard and steady work of making a reality out of our dreams."

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