Four On the Road

Monday, Nov. 08, 1971
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In Cuba, the mood changed to one of confusion. Kosygin's trip coincided with a sudden series of unusual developments. There was Fidel's planned trip to Santiago this week to help Salvador Allende celebrate his first anniversary as Chile's President. Parked barely a quarter-mile from where Kosygin's Ilyushin-62 set down was a far larger American Airlines 747 commercial jet that had been hijacked to Cuba with 229 passengers during a New York-to-Puerto Rico flight; passengers and hijacker alike were booked into the Havana Libre Hotel (the former Havana Hilton). The passengers, after a two-night stay, flew on to San Juan, and the 747 was also released. Then, too, the Cuban government was watching with deep interest the exploits of 19 Cuban sugar technicians who flew into New Orleans with 20 minutes' notice to the air controllers and without visas to attend an international sugar conference; it seems they had been invited by the conference's officers, but nonplused U.S. immigration officials first penned them up in an airport motel, then moved them to a naval base and started deportation proceedings.

In the midst of all this came Kosygin. Along the route from Havana airport to the capital, as many as 500,000 people trucked in from farms and outlying villages cheered him and waved flags. Foreign diplomats in Havana could not remember the last time that Castro had ridden in an open convertible as he did with Kosygin (in a green Chaika, a gift from the Soviet Union); these days he usually travels in a closed car with two escort vehicles, all bristling with machine guns. "We passed a huge mural of Che Guevara," reported Correspondent Stevens of the motorcade from the airport. "A year ago there had been a companion mural of Ho Chi Minh. Cubans would only say it had been taken down. They did not know why."

Nyet to Da. Kosygin's four-day itinerary included a visit with Cuban workers during which he was presented with a hard hat to go with his Indian headdress. Two days were spent in discussions at the Palace of the Revolution, followed by a 460-mile flight to Santiago de Cuba. The plane arrived two hours late in a driving rainstorm. Nothing more momentous happened. Then had Kosygin come only to bolster Fidel's feelings? The best guess was that the Soviet Premier, who keeps watch over Moscow's foreign economic arrangements while Leonid Brezhnev supervises its broader foreign relations, had stopped by to see how Cuba's economy is holding up in the wake of disappointing sugar harvests. Soviet aid to Cuba now totals half a billion dollars annually, and during Kosygin's visit a dozen Soviet freighters and tankers in old Havana harbor were unloading the oil and cargo without which Castro's regime can scarcely survive.