Hot Enemies & Cool Friends

The United Nations suddenly had a brand-new trouble spot on its hands last week--the United Nations. In the U.N. Plaza on Manhattan's East Side, massed pickets brandished placards (INVADE CUBA NOW) and jeered at Communist--bloc delegates. A knife-toting woman tried to claw her way inside. Three demonstrators shinnied up a flag pole and hauled down the Soviet flag.

A backfiring truck threw cops into a panic. At the climax of the demonstration, an explosion--a real one--resounded on the water side of the sleek, glass-skinned building as a 9-lb. shell splashed into the East River just 200 yds. away. In a weed-strewn lot on the opposite bank, 900 yds. away, police later found a 3.5-in. Army bazooka, still aimed at the U.N., with a Cuban flag taped on the barrel.

The show was mounted by Cuban exiles against Che Guevara, Fidel Castro's Minister of Industries. Che, in burnished black boots and fresh green fatigues, had flown in to denounce the U.S. before the General Assembly for everything from "aggression" in South east Asia to Americans' "sexual exhibitionism" at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo. Undeterred by the ruckus outside, Guevara ranted on and on, perhaps in hope of distracting world attention from the troubles back home.

Too Successful. In the past nine months, Castro's regime has been torn by an ugly power struggle between Cuba's old-line, Moscow-oriented Communists and the unorthodox Fidelistas, whom they deride as "adventurers." In recent months, four Moscow wingers have been sacked by Fidelistas from high government posts, while more than 70 army officers have been jailed on charges ranging from treason to conspiring to assassinate Castro.

Early this month, the director of Cuba's failing cattle industry decided to get out while the getting was good, and scheduled a buying trip to Canada, where he defected. (The official insists that Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missiles are still around in Cuba, though Washington denies it.)

Last week Radio Havana flashed the news that Labor Minister Augusto Martinez Sanchez was critically ill with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The communique reported that Martinez had been fired the previous day for "serious administrative errors," added piously that his suicide attempt was "unjustifiable and improper," since a revolutionary must not "deprive his cause of a life that does not belong to him."

Even if Martinez Sanchez had not attempted suicide--or, as rumor had it, been shot during a scuffle in the presidential palace--his summary dismissal from office would have been dramatic enough. A protege of Raul Castro, Fidel's brother, he fought at their side in the Sierra Maestra hills, became Defense Minister in Fidel's first Cabinet, was named Acting Prime Minister when the Maximum Leader came to New York in May 1959. That October, Martinez was named Labor Minister and assigned the task of purging Cuba's strongly anti-Communist union leadership. He succeeded too well. For, though Martinez himself subscribed to Fidel's messianic Communism, he allowed militant, old-line party regulars to take over the labor movement--and he paid the price.

"Enormous Needs." Another problem for Fidel is that some of his best friends are losing patience. Old Chum Nikita Khrushchev was growing cool; Russia's new leaders seem even more coldly disposed. In recent months Che and Cuba's President, Osvaldo Dorticos, have both visited Moscow without extracting a new trade agreement from the Kremlin. Yet another top Cuban official was trying to negotiate a trade pact last week. Castro is worried about selling his sugar crop, which this year is expected to total some 4,200,000 tons, 10% more than Cuba harvested in 1963 but still far below the pre-Castro average of 5,000,000 tons. With world sugar prices at 2.8-c- a pound, Russia is understandably reluctant to buy Castro's crop at the agreed-on price of 6-c-

Castro's speeches are filled with scalding condemnation of "idiot" farm managers, citizens who "demand very much and give very little," the "tremendous lack of initiative and analysis," workers who sabotage equipment. Plaintively, he admits the nation's "enormous need for housing, for more shoes, more meat, more fish, more food, more clothing." According to a current joke in Havana, "it will take 20 years for Communism in Cuba to get us back where we were under capitalism in 1959." On to 1984.

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