Cuba: The Petrified Forest

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All told, rocketing prices and shortages of every kind have cut the value of the Cuban peso by one-third since Castro came to power. "The typical industrial worker," says one observer in Havana, "has thus gained nothing and lost much by the revolution. If he was earning $225 a month before, he was able to look forward to buying a refrigerator, television set or even a car. Now all these things are shut off to him."

Everyone a Loser. U.S. intelligence estimates say that only 20% to 30% of Cuba's population still actively support Fidel Castro. Aside from all the other aggravations, Castro's police state is such that virtually every Cuban has lost a relative or close friend in exile, or locked up among the 50,000 prisoners in Cuban jails, or dead at the hands of Castro's executioners. A distinguished, once-prosperous Havana doctor shrugged his shoulders disconsolately, as he explained that most of his friends are in exile. "I'd go myself," he sighed, "except that I have my mother here, who is 79. I also can't leave because I have two relatives in prison. They couldn't get along without the food we send in every month."

A few Cubans have tried to stay and fight — usually small bands of desperate men operating in the central Escambray Mountains and in Castro's old Sierra Maestra stamping grounds. They face the full might of a 200,000-man army (plus 100,000 militia reserves) equipped with the best of everything Russian, including supersonic MIG-21s based outside of Havana. They also face Raul Castro, who used to be quite a guerrilla fighter himself but now heads the counterinsurgency operations and treats it as rather a sport.

The Castro technique offers an interesting example for anti-guerrilla students everywhere. When a guerrilla band turns up in Cuba, Raul smothers the area with as many as 5,000 troops. All civilians are removed, along with cattle, chickens and other sources of food; homes and barns are destroyed, wells filled in, fences pulled down. Then the troops sweep forward, much as beaters at a rabbit hunt. When the guerrillas are caught, they are shot; if they own land, it is confiscated. Their children become wards of the state, are separated from their mothers and placed in Castro training schools.

Ready for Plucking. From time to time there is talk that Castro's army will one day turn on him. After all, it is a Latin American army. But these troops have always seemed too well-fed, too pleased with their toys to give Cubans much hope. They are also young—members of the Cuban youth that Castro works incessantly to indoctrinate. "Our commitment," says Jorge Enrique Mendoza, national director of the state scholarship program, "is to forge Communists."