The Long Way Around

There was a shift in U.S. policy toward Latin America last week. The old hard line of Latin America Task Force Chief Adolf Berle, 66, that the American re publics must agree to help bring down Castro as the first order of business, was disappearing, and so. presumably, was Berle. In came the soft padded sell of U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, just back from South America, that the struggle against Communism must be waged the long way around, building good will through development cash and the Alliance for Progress. A corollary of this policy: no direct U.S. action against Castro unless he does more to provoke it.

Task Force End. At his press conference. President Kennedy announced that Berle "is completing the work of his task force"--a clear sign that the tough old liberal leftover of New Deal days was being phased out. Kennedy also received Puerto Rico's development-minded Governor Luis Munoz Marin. As he left. Munoz told the press that "the best way to solve the Cuban problem is to implement as firmly and as quickly as possible the Alliance for Progress." He added, "We are not against social revolution. We're only against Communism."

The Cuban exiles were also feeling the effects of the shift. The Revolutionary Council of Jose Miro Cardona, which figureheaded the U.S.-managed Bay of Pigs invasion, was fragmenting in despair. U.S. Government agents disbanded rebel groups clustered around Miami, started sending exiles chafing in idleness off to jobs in distant states. The Justice Department turned an unsympathetic eye on a 100-man band of international "commandos" melodramatically titled "the Intercontinental Penetration Force.'' Led by a hulking (6 ft. 7 in.), bearded American ex-marine who calls himself Jerry Patrick, the force practices parachute jumping, calls itself the nucleus of armed support for a Cuban liberal named Aureliano Sanchez Arango. Most significant, the U.S. was pointedly withholding promised support of Manuel Ray, the young reform-minded Cuban exile with the strongest claim to organizable underground strength inside Cuba.

More Time. Instead, the U.S. concentrated its activity on trying to increase the economic health of the rest of Latin America. It agreed to a postponement (until Aug. 5) of the Uruguay meeting of OAS economic ministers to hammer the Alliance for Progress into shape. Curiously enough, the delay was a sign of progress. Several Latin American nations requested more time to prepare their requests for U.S. aid. Reporting on his trip to Washington's National Press Club, Envoy Stevenson presented the plight of Latin America's single-product nations, vulnerable to commodity price wobbles, by emphasizing the situation of the 14 countries whose economies depend primarily on coffee. "The change in the price of coffee by half a cent per pound can wipe out all of the economic assistance that we could hope to give them for a long time," Stevenson said. Almost as he was talking, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Werner Blumenthal announced at a coffee meeting in Rio that the U.S. was "actively considering" direct participation in coffee-price propping.

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