A Letter From The Publisher, Oct. 14, 1974

As a former TIME Moscow bureau chief and a veteran of Richard Nixon's trips to Russia and China in 1972, Diplomatic Editor Jerrold Schecter is as familiar with the Marxist way of life as anyone on our staff. He added a tropical socialist stamp to his passport recently as one of 29 journalists traveling to Cuba with Senators Jacob Javits and Claiborne Pell and remained on the island after the Senators' departure to report this week's World story on the status of Fidel Castro's revolutionary experiment.

"What struck me most about Cuban socialism," says Schecter, "is that it seems informal compared with China and the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Despite strong totalitarian control, the presence of police and armed forces in the streets is not as apparent as in other socialist countries." Cuban authorities went out of their way to smooth the visit of Schecter and his colleagues, allowing the newsmen to fly in directly from Miami despite the absence of U.S.-Cuban diplomatic relations and providing them with special telex facilities. The citizen on the street proved equally genial. "On a walking tour of Havana I stopped for a beer at an open-air café, and two carpenters insisted on treating me. When I asked a housewife buying her husband's weekly ration of two cigars how much it cost, she offered me one."

To reciprocate, Schecter presented Castro with a copy of Khrushchev Remembers, the Soviet leader's memoirs in which the Cuban Premier figures prominently, but failed—not for lack of trying —to lure Sports Buff Castro into a basketball game. "I had the feeling," concluded Schecter on returning home, "not so much of the heavy hand of socialism as of meeting a family member who had rebelled and wanted to rejoin the clan with respect and not be reminded of his or our mistakes."

Also back — quite literally — on an old stomping ground last week was Chicago Correspondent Richard Woodbury, who reported to the Nation section on Round-the-World Walker David Kunst. Following on the heels of an earlier crack at peripatetic journalism — a glide-along with Cross-Country Roller Skater Clint Shaw last June —Woodbury logged ten huffing-and-puffing miles of legwork with the quick Kunst against a stiff head wind on a northern Iowa road.

"The world of the road is clearly another level of consciousness for Kunst," says Woodbury, "and it's easy to see why. After zipping along at a steady 4 m.p.h. clip, I came away bushed but pleasantly high."