End of the Capitalists

For years after Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, thousands of small private businessmen continued to eke out a living, operating pushcarts or running groceries, bars, butcher shops and laundries. Up to last month, more than 55,000 such businesses were still struggling along, accounting for 25% of the island's $250 million worth of goods sold annually. Last week, capping a month-long campaign, Castro's government announced that this last, lonely bastion of capitalism has been all but wiped out and the dispossessed businessmen put to work in fields and factories. Cried the official newspaper Granma: "The revolutionary offensive has dealt a decisive blow not only to parasites and domestic exploiters but also to Yankee imperialism, which counted on them for the cultivation of criminal plots."

Daily Bulletins. As a starter, Castro closed down the country's 3,900 privately owned bars, where Cubans tended to gather and grumble. "We have made many investigations into these bars," he said. "How much they sell, how much they earn, who meets there, what they say, and more than they imagine." Among Havana's own 955 bistros, added Castro, with the confident precision of a Caribbean Gallup, "72% maintain an attitude contrary to our revolutionary process, and 66% of their customers are antisocial elements." All other private businesses were ordered either to submit to nationalization or to wind up their affairs and close down. Castro even singled out for condemnation the coleros (line standers), who for a fee take a shopper's place in the queues at every store. For good measure, he also banned state businesses that were "frivolous and foster antisocial attitudes," including the national lottery and cockfighting.

As special enforcers, Castro used his "Committees for the Defense of the Revolution," numbering more than 2,000,000 members. Railing against "parasites, speculators, lumpen and laggards," C.D.R. members closed down private shops and decided which should be reopened under government ownership. To whip up national interest, the Ministry of Commerce issued daily bulletins on the number of businesses "intervened," and newspapers and radio stations played up the wonders found in the possession of Cuba's last capitalists. In Matanzas province, Mechanic Domingo Riosa had the misfortune, for example, to be caught with light bulbs, Champion spark plugs and pistons for a Dodge engine.

No Humor. Despite Castro's best efforts, however, the gripes continued wherever Cubans gathered. "There is no room in our ranks for complainers or weaklings, for sowers of panic, for grumblers," warned the Cuban Labor Confederation. Castro's revolutionary committee went even further. It called on all Cubans to "stem lack of seriousness, counter-revolutionary rumors and jokes"--a laughable attempt to curb even humor in Castro's ever more puritanical Cuba.

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