Tropical Red Square

The weather was balmier, and in Russia no one would be wearing U.S. Army-style combat fatigues. But otherwise, Cuba's third anniversary celebration of Fidel Castro's rise to power might have taken place in Moscow's Red Square. Mounting his own version of Lenin's tomb--the Jose Marti monument in Havana's Plaza de la Revolucion--Castro and his Cuban commissars proudly reviewed the crack units of a Communist-trained, Communist-supplied military machine that is bigger than that of any Western Hemisphere country except the U.S.

As a crowd of 500,000 Cubans looked on, 1 8 Soviet-built MIG-17s plus three supersonic MIG-19s thundered over the reviewing stand. One MIG cracked the sound barrier with a thunderclapping boom. Below, past 100-ft.-high pictures of Castro. Lenin and Picasso's peace dove, the ground forces paraded to the strains of the Communist Internationale--artillery with radar-aiming devices, multiple rocket launchers, double-barrelled antiaircraft guns and Soviet 51-ton tanks.

The military parade took 80 minutes to pass, and then it was time for the speech.

Raising his voice to his high oratorical pitch, Castro cried again that he was a Communist ("We reaffirm that we are Marxist-Leninists"), bitterly attacked the U.S. ("repugnantly shameful, criminal, odious") and Colombia's Lleras Camargo ("that bilious character") for leading the diplomatic moves against him. But his real message seemed to be to those Latin American nations who might be wondering about his own intentions. Castro swore that his new arms were not for export, and in the favorite nobody-here-but-us-chickens rhetoric of Communism added: "We know that only the peoples themselves can carry out revolutions. We know that this is an hour of great decisions in America."

One great decision evidently much on Castro's mind was the decision to be taken Jan. 22 by the OAS: whether to invoke sanctions against him. To counter the conference, Castro decreed that "on Jan. 22 we are going to convoke the second national general assembly of the people of Cuba. It will be the most gigantic act of the revolution and of the people." Castro apparently intends to demonstrate to Latin America that so long as he can assemble great crowds to shout slogans in unison, why in the world would anyone want free elections?

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.