The Americas: Split on Castro

Words, bombs and bullets were the way Fidel Castro's Communist Cuba's presence in Latin America echoed through the hemisphere last week. The words ranged from mildly disapproving to outraged at the OAS gathering of 21 nations at Punta del Este, Uruguay. Many of the assembled diplomats were forcibly reminded of Castro's disorganizing power back in their home territories. In Venezuela, pro-Castro violence left 32 dead, and for a time made things warm for the government of militantly anti-Castro President Rómulo Betancourt. Riots or demonstrations erupted in Brazil. Peru, Chile. Mexico and El Salvador. In La Paz. Bolivia, 33 were injured, one fatally. Said a Bolivian delegate: "If I vote for sanctions, I had better not return to La Paz, or I'll be hung from a lamppost on arrival."

Laughter on the Left. Heading the U.S. delegation to Punta del Este, Secretary of State Dean Rusk tried to avoid appearing the Yankee colossus by recalling his own Georgia boyhood in "what people would now call underdeveloped circumstances . . . typhoid, pellagra, hookworm and malaria were a part of the environment in which Providence had placed us." But within a framework of democratic consent, said Rusk, an "alliance for progress" had been carried out within the U.S. And he eloquently pleaded: "Let us take action now to guard our own continent and our programs of democratic reforms against those who seek to replace democracy by dictatorship—those who would transform our fellowship of free states into the bondage of satellites." The Cubans, led by Castro's puppet President Osvaldo Dorticós, laughed out loud. The other 19 delegations gave Rusk a standing ovation. But though the delegates stood together to applaud in the resort's converted gambling hall where Rusk spoke, they split into widely divergent groups in the negotiations that followed.

The U.S. had gone to Punta del Este hoping to form a solid front with the twelve other nations* that had voted to hold the conference in the first place, and that were presumably prepared to vote for the same sort of judgment handed down against the Dominican Republic of Dictator Rafael Trujillo: joint diplomatic and economic sanctions. Only one vote was necessary for the two-thirds majority of 14 needed for approval. Six† were opposed to sanctions but apparently agreeable to less drastic action. Uruguay decided to wait and see.

Violence & Votes. All faced a difficult decision. Castro no longer cuts a wide swath through Latin America, but local discontents can oft be fanned by Fidelism. Ten nations (Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Peru, Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic) hold national elections this year, and this weighed in their deliberations.