Cuba: The Petrified Forest

(10 of 10)

Where does the U.S. stand today? Says a State Department official: "The U.S. has tried everything, and now we're trying nothing." The pillars of Cuban Communism appear firmly in place, decaying but hardening into some weird sort of petrified forest. The regime might even survive Castro's death. Yet for the moment at least, .Cuban Communism and subversion seem more or less neutralized. The guerrilla situation in the Hemisphere is troublesome but hardly desperate. Politically, Castro and Cuba have been discredited, both by what they have become and by the force of stronger ideas. The Alliance for Progress is slowly beginning to live up to its name. In half a dozen countries, impressive new leaders are pushing hard for a peaceful social and economic evolution; in most of the others, the realization is dawning on those in power—the military, the landowners, the Roman Catholic Church—that they will have to work for their salvation.

In Abeyance. The U.S. obviously has the power to crush Castro's military machine any time it chooses. But that would risk a confrontation with the Kremlin, and for the time being the U.S. would rather see the Russians focusing their hostility on Red China. "This extreme approach is in abeyance, in the absence of a major provocation by Castro," says a U.S. expert. Neither, despite occasional Cuban feelers, will the U.S. consider negotiating a live-and-let-live deal with Castro so long as he remains totally committed to the Soviet bloc and continues his subversion around Latin America. President Johnson's policy is isolation and containment, while doing everything possible to deny Castro the free-world trade he so gravely needs.

The headline-grabbing but woefully futile anti-Castro exile raids have been discouraged to the point where most of the exiles have given up the game. Obviously, the CIA still sends in agents on information-gathering missions and to explore the possibilities of a genuinely effective underground inside Cuba. When Castro boasts that he has captured and executed CIA men, he is often telling the truth. Other than that, the U.S. is content to watch Cuba with high-flying U-2s and an occasional supersonic treetop dash by Air Force RF-101 or Navy RA-5C reconnaissance jets. Should Castro shoot down one of the jets with his Soviet-supplied SAM II missiles, the U.S. contingency plan is to "take out" —meaning obliterate—the specific SAM site involved. The plan, as of now, does not call for invasion.

"If Castro is going to be overthrown," a U.S. official told a reporter in Washington recently, "it will have to come from within." A few days later, the reporter was talking with a proud young Castroite functionary at the Cuban Foreign Office in Havana. "You see," he said, "we have achieved a stalemate."

That afternoon, an anti-Castro Havana lawyer put it somewhat differently: "I think the U.S. is letting us stew in our own juice for a while."