Los Caballeros

The Cuban army, with some 80,000 men, is one of the largest and best-equipped in Latin America, as Premier Fidel Castro noted earlier this year in commemorating the 15th anniversary of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. "Never have our people had such a mass of fighters, such a quantity of cadres as those we now have," he said. What Fidel did not say was that the Russians had told him that the cost of keeping so many in uniform was an unnecessary burden on the economy and also prevented young men from pursuing careers in industry and agriculture.

Since then, Fidel has evidently begun cutting back the army--and coincidentally there has been a strange rash of burglaries of foreign embassies. The feeling in the diplomatic community is that the burglaries are the work of ex-soldiers who resent the loss of their special perks--apartments, clothes and consumer goods--and seek to make up for the loss at the expense of well-stocked foreign embassies.

On one occasion, the French ambassador and his wife chanced upon seven soldiers with an army truck looting the home of the French consul, and were roughed up by the looters. The following morning the Foreign Ministry made apologies and returned the consul's belongings. Burglaries have also occurred at homes of Italian, Canadian, Polish and Bulgarian diplomats. One exception of the caballeros de la noche: the Russian embassy, which also happens to be the most heavily guarded.

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