"We Are the Victors"

"I surprised you," chuckled the fifth passenger to step from the Russian TU-114 turboprop at the end of its regular Moscow-Havana run. He certainly did. As secretly as he left, Fidel Castro had finally returned from his five-week visit to the Soviet Union. Still grinning, he went to an airport phone, waited as an aide dialed puppet President Osvaldo Dorticos, then stepped up and wrapped a handkerchief around the mouthpiece. "Dorticos!" he shouted. "This is Fidel speaking from Tbilisi." Then he gave up the game: "I am at the airport. I just arrived on the TU." With that, El Maximo Lider hailed a taxicab and rattled into town.

Formidable! To hear Castro tell it on TV next night, he had just seen the promised land. "A formidable people! Enthusiasm, organization, discipline, order!" Nothing could compare with Russia's resources and standard of living. To see capitalist lands, he said, "is crushing-crushing because it is to cross from the frontier of abundance to the frontier of hunger." For Cuba's own frontier of hunger he promised vast improvements-particularly in the sugar crop that has tumbled from 6,000,000 tons to 3,000,000 tons in two years. Comrade Khrushchev, said Castro, worked on this problem "a whole day, then told me he had not the slightest doubt that within two years the question would be completely resolved."

For four hours Castro rambled on, eventually getting to the point of his message. Since Cuba was protected by Russian rockets, "it can be said that the general situation at the moment is one of security. Imperialism has elements of judgment so as not to harbor the least doubt as to what a military invasion of Cuba would mean." Such being the case, Castro expressed "our disposition to normalize relations."- He was willing to talk about payment for seized U.S. property, and about selling sugar to the U.S. again. But not on condition that Cuba break away from the Soviet Union. "We are the victors. We can wait indefinitely."

What Coexistence. Castro's talk of coexistence was nothing new. He has been hinting at it ever since Khrushchev left him high and dry during the October missile crisis. Yet while he talks peace, and while the joint Russian-Cuban communique in Moscow flatly regarded "any export of revolution as contradicting Marxism-Leninism," Castro cynically continues to work for the violent overthrow of governments in Latin America. The report last week of an Organization of American States committee on Communist subversion left no question about it. "The emphasis that the Castro regime puts on the use of violence to overthrow constituted governments," said the report, "together with the recent outbreaks of terror ism, sabotage and other kinds of subversive activity in various American republics, requires that the governments and the OAS intensify their vigilance."

There was little need to look beyond the news for confirmation. Items:

> In Venezuela, a dozen members of a Castroite outfit called the Armed Forces of National Liberation raided U.S. Army mission headquarters in Caracas, stripped six staff members down to their underwear, painted slogans all over the walls and set the place on fire.

> In Ecuador, a member of the local Communist Party and a fellow traveler were arrested as they re-entered the country, one coming from Red China via London with $25,000 earmarked (according to Ecuador's Treasury Minister) for subversion, the other carrying tightly folded plans of terrorist tactics in a toothpaste tube.

> In Bolivia, border guards arrested ten Castroite guerrillas as they tried to cross over from Peru.

* In Peru itself, after a year's pursuit, army troops finally captured Hugo Blanco, 29, a home-grown Communist who vowed to ignite a Castroite revolt among peasants in the Andes. Said Blanco: "They have taken me and a few others, but many are still at large. They will continue the Peruvian revolution." Though the U.S. swiftly rejected the feeler, it did take one small step in that direction when the State Department announced last week it would allow commercial U.S. airliners to resume routes over Cuban territory for the first time in seven months.

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