Cuba on the Defensive

Homecomings of all sorts for Castro's legions

The first man off the plane walked with a severe limp; the second hobbled down the stairs on crutches; the third had to be helped out the door. One by one, 43 more walking wounded emerged, looking grimy and bedraggled; some were shirtless but most wore torn blue jeans or other work clothes that they had pulled on hastily when the fighting began eight days earlier. The last eleven of the 57 Cubans injured in the U.S. invasion of Grenada and sent home to Havana last week had to be carried off the plane on stretchers.

They descended to a "heroes' welcome" that was everything public ceremonies in Cuba usually are not: brief, somber and quiet. An artillery corps band belted out a few revolutionary hymns, and women militia members goose-stepped across the tarmac of Jose Marti Airport. But President Fidel Castro, attired in tailored green fatigues, his beard noticeably gray, said not a word in public. He simply shook hands with the wounded, who apparently had been told to say nothing; several seemed too dazed to speak in any case, and one barely conscious man on a stretcher failed to recognize the Cuban leader. After the handshakes, the wounded were silently escorted into waiting ambulances.

The subdued mood was appropriate to the occasion in more ways than one. The U.S. invasion of Grenada and the execution of Marxist Prime Minister Maurice Bishop that preceded and helped trigger the U.S. move have dealt Castro's influence in Central America and the Caribbean Basin a greater blow than any events since the missile crisis of 1962.

Only four years ago, when Cuban-allied governments came to power almost simultaneously in Nicaragua and Grenada, Castro's clout seemed to be on the rise. But an erosion began the next year when voters in Jamaica elected conservative Edward Seaga to succeed leftist Michael Manley, a Castro ally, as Prime Minister. Jamaica has now swung so strongly against Cuba that Seaga sent troops to assist in the invasion of Grenada and last week expelled the last semiofficial Cuban on the island, a correspondent for the Cuban news service Prensa Latina. Seaga charged that the correspondent had participated with four Soviet diplomats in a plot to assassinate a Jamaican Foreign Ministry official. The Soviets were also thrown out. Even Manley was less than vehement in opposing the invasion of Grenada. He expressed "profound sharing of concern about the brutality of what has been happening," an apparent reference to Bishop's murder.