Cuba: A Puritan in Havana

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Fidel Castro has never been a swinger. Nightclubs, booze, fancy food, fast crowds-he shunned them all like a capitalist plague, and frowned on any of his lieutenants who failed to do the same. Last week Castro suddenly did more than frown. He announced the arrest of at least 20 "playboy officials" who were giving more of their time to the cocktail circuit than to Communism. Among them: Major Efigenio Al-meijeiras, a member of the party's Central Committee, Castro's vice minister of the armed forces, and the military's second in command-after Fidel's little brother Raul.

Castro accused Almeijeiras of having "close relations with antisocial elements, vagabonds, bums and corrupt people," and more specifically, with Rolando Cubela, another Havana man about town sent up for 25 years this month for plotting Castro's assassination (TIME, March 18). Castro absolved Almeijeiras of any guilt in the plot, but claimed that he demonstrated "the same instability of character and lack of seriousness as Cubela."

For that sin, Castro stripped Almeijeiras of his rank and booted him out of the government, the military and the Central Committee, giving him a chance to correct himself "by beginning his revolutionary life as he did the first time, without any position whatever." That way Almeijeiras may return to the social fold "a simple man and revolutionary" purged of his "illegal and vicious" ways. And the other playboys? "Nothing is going to happen to them," Castro assured. "We will send them to a hospital to be cured, and if they are crazy, to the insane asylum."

One place they would not be sent was to foreign embassies in Havana. The Maximum Leader had nothing good to say about officials who attend diplomatic receptions where "counterrevolutionary jokes" are told. At such gatherings, huffed Fidel, obscene stories are a "common occurrence." With that, the regime announced that henceforth all invitations to diplomatic wingdings must not be sent directly to governmental guests, but instead to the foreign ministry's protocol department for prior screening.