CUBA: The New Diplomacy

In his ornate office Argentine Foreign Minister Diogenes Taboada, a stern old diplomat of the striped-pants school, ran his eye over a copy of a television speech by Castro's Foreign Minister Raul Roa, and stiffened with horror. Argentina's President Frondizi, as Roa expressed it, was not only "a viscous concretion of all human excrescences"; he was also "the villain of a badly composed tango."

At the same time Brazil's Foreign Minister Horacio Lafer read Roa's speech and also stiffened. Roa had called him "the run-see-and-tell" of the U.S. State Department. That night, Brazil's President Kubitschek phoned Argentina's Frondizi. Next day envoys from both nations marched stiffly into the Cuban Foreign Office with protests. Said Brazil's ambassador: "My government rejects this offense against national dignity." Said the Argentine note: "The insulting phrases set an imprudent precedent."

A Rejected Rejection. Roa did not even bat an eye. He told the Brazilian envoy that his televised remarks were "correct judgments based on concrete facts." He called Argentina's protest "malicious," sneered that the "dignity of Argentina was defended at San Jose by the delegation from Cuba and not by the delegation from Argentina." In a cold rage Argentina rejected Roa's rejection and recalled its ambassador. These were episodes in what Cubans call "the new diplomacy." The chief characteristic is supposed to be plain statements to peoples over the heads of their governments.

Raul Roa, the director of the new diplomacy, is a nasty-tempered college professor on leave from Havana University, where he taught sociology and headed the faculty of social sciences. An oldtime leftist who organized fellow Havana University students against the dictatorships of Gerardo Machado and Fulgencio Batista, Raul -Roa once had a reputation as a freedom fighter as well as a free thinker and writer (17 books, mostly on politics). He suffered imprisonment and exile, during part of which he studied in two Manhattan graduate schools (Columbia University, the New School for Social Research) and took a U.S. fellowship (a Guggenheim, to study the New Deal).

Rewarded Lackey. Early in 1959, the Castro revolution, which he helped as a relatively minor member of the resistance, rewarded Roa with the ambassadorship to the Organization of American States. When the revolution's first for eign minister was fired for anti-Communist views a few months later, Roa took his place and got the hemisphere for his lecture room. Now he is the face of Cuba at international gatherings.