Fidel's Youth Jamboree

Flogging the CIA at a socialist show trial

The Czech girls sported distinctive red and white jumpers; the Poles, whose national colors the Czechs had appropriated, came decked out in red and khaki. There was color (and congestion) aplenty in Havana last week, as some 18,500 young leftists from 140 countries, attended by 1,500 journalists and 13,000 other visitors, crammed into the Cuban capital for the eleventh World Festival of Youth and Students. The eight-day, $60 million propaganda orgy is socialism's ideological equivalent of a global Scout jamboree. This year, as the festival was held for the first time in the Western Hemisphere, Cuban President Fidel Castro used the occasion to denounce, once more, the multifarious evils of U.S. "imperialism."

Castro had spent two years planning the event, one of the few socialist spectaculars that offer the younger generation a good time. He also saw the festival as a good place to justify his country's interventions in Africa. His policy needed a bit of bolstering, to be sure: at a nonaligned Foreign Ministers summit in Belgrade last week, some delegates attacked Moscow and Havana--rather than Western imperialism--as the current threat to Third World neutrality.

As Angolans, Russians, Mexicans, Britons, Vietnamese and even a 400-member U.S. delegation trooped into Havana for singing, dancing, stadium pageantry, rap sessions and some frolicking on Cuba's beaches, they faced an additional event: the Youth Accuses Imperialism International Tribunal. A panel of eight "judges," headed by Uruguayan Physician Hugo Villar, heard scores of witnesses reel off accusations--some old, some true, many distorted or false--against the CIA. One star witness was Philip Agee, a former CIA agent now turned professional anti-agency muckraker. Other witnesses related details of a 1962 CIA poisoning scheme (during a time, admittedly, when the agency was indeed plotting to assassinate Castro), and of anti-Castro execution plots fomented as recently as 1976 in Mexico City. (The CIA calls the allegations of a Mexico City plot "absolutely untrue.") The main impact of these exposes on spectators was widespread narcolepsy; they were occasionally awakened by brisk applause from the army of Communist and Third World reporters covering the pseudo event.

At times, socialist solidarity wore a little thin. Castro himself delivered an early tongue-lashing of the Communist Chinese, who had boycotted the festival. He castigated Peking for "insane political conduct," "repugnant betrayal of the cause of internationalism," and "perfidious, base arguments" against Cuba. The last, presumably, was a reference to Peking's sharp denunciations of the Cuban military presence in Africa.

Other issues also threatened the mood of solidarity. Some British delegates wanted to question the 1,000 Russians attending the festival about Soviet human rights infringements; rather than cause an embarrassing fuss, they refrained. West German delegates split on the issue of how to deal with East Germany's imprisonment of Author Rudolf Behro.

Apart from the hot air, both political and real (Havana broiled under daily 90DEG F. temperatures), festival delegates seemed to get what they most wanted: some sightseeing and some fun. Reported TIME Correspondent Richard Woodbury from the Cuban capital: "Flags and Christmas lights adorned the streets, and at night the broad Malecon, Havana's ocean-front drive, was festive with dancing. There were cultural and sporting events scheduled at almost every hour, from aquatic festivals to theatrical exhibitions to a Soviet-Cuban boxing match (the Cubans won). Restaurants were so crowded that they occasionally ran out of food, and there were a few other problems. Some members of the U.S. delegation, for example, naively assumed that Cuban restaurateurs accepted credit cards and traveler's checks. Not so; the American visitors were told to keep their capitalistic devices to themselves, that in Communist Cuba the policy was cash only." -

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