LATIN AMERICA: Sawing Away at Bars

In his spacious marble and granite palace on Lima's Plaza de Armas, Peru's leftist soldier-President, General Juan Velasco Alvarado, last week smilingly accepted the credentials of a tall, bearded diplomat named Antonio Núñez Jiménez. The new ambassador was a Cuban, the first from his country to take up residence in Lima since Peru broke off relations in 1960. The arrival of Núñez in Peru, which struggled with Cuban-supported, revolutionaries through much of the 1960s, was another sign of the increasing acceptance that Fidel Castro's regime is finding throughout Latin America these days.

Not long ago, Cuba had diplomatic relations with only two of the 23 members of the Organization of American States. One was Mexico, the only country that did not go along with the economic and diplomatic sanctions imposed on Castro, at U.S. urging, by the OAS in 1964. The other was Jamaica, which did not join the OAS until 1969. But the OAS policy of isolation has been broken not only by Peru but also by Chile, where the Marxist government re-established relations with Havana in November 1970. Panama and Ecuador are expected to follow before very long.

So may prosperous Venezuela's middle-of-the-road Christian Democratic government. A rapprochement between Havana and Caracas, which was the victim of a particularly vicious Cuban-sponsored terrorist campaign in the early 1960s, would be a major coup for Cuba. It achieved a minor one last week, when Dudley Thompson, a Jamaican Minister of State, turned up in Havana to discuss trade and, possibly, resumption of airline service between Kingston and Havana.

Policy Changes. The diplomatic acceptability of Cuba is the result not so much of any effort by Castro—who has not given up trying to export his revolution to his neighbors—as of the change in U.S. policy toward Peking and Moscow. If the U.S. can make new approaches to its old cold war antagonists, the argument seems to run, why then should Latin American states not show their independence by doing the same with Cuba? As a result, says one top State Department officer, "You can see the Latinos every day sawing away at the bars around Fidel."

Publicly at least, Washington clings to its policy of isolation. There is almost no chance that President Nixon, who remembers John Kennedy's 1960 taunts about Republicans permitting a Communist victory "90 miles from our shores," will make any gestures toward Havana before November, at the very earliest. But there are some straws in the wind that suggest that the Administration is not so intransigent in its attitude toward Cuba as it used to be. Washington has long been concerned about the increasingly permanent Soviet presence in Cuba. U.S. diplomats have been discussing the possibility of sending a respected Latin American statesman—Ecuador's Galo Plaza, Secretary-General of the OAS, is an eager candidate—to Havana to open a dialogue. An opening of sorts occurred in June, when three American scientists traveled—with Administration approval—to the Cuban capital for an eleven-nation conference on oceanography. The scientists had applied to go to a similar conference in Havana last year, but Washington had said nothing doing.