Alliance for What?

Unfortunately, the sermons preached at this country recently about "learning the lessons of Cuba," consider the wrong lesson, then draw the wrong moral, and finally conclude that the only area where our new knowledge should be applied is ninety miles south of the border.

The lesson takes for its text a speech of Castro's falsely translated in Miami by a Cuban refugee working for the United Press. Castro, according to this version admitted being a Marxist-Leninist all along and confessed to playing a great trick on the people of Cuba. It wasn't until another source monitoring the speech (and the printed version, which finally reached these shores) indicated that he said just the opposite, i.e. that he was not a Marxist-Leninist while a student, but his experience during the full course of the Revolution had led to his present conviction, that UPI apologized and sent out an amended version two days later.

Having mastered the lesson that Castro was a Communist from way back, the moral was drawn: Communism is congenital. It is not a political response to certain conditions, but a pathological state, overt in those who espouse it, latent in those who but show the symptoms (Agrarian reform, trade with the East, a vocabulary that includes "imperialism" ...). It is worth noting that the triumph of the congenital theory has invalidated the hypothesis that Communism is a contagious disease, spread by certain strong carriers like Che Guevara in countries with weak Constitutions. This development makes the solution of the problem surgical, rather than diplomatic. Nothing remains but for the U.S. to insist upon, not merely advocate, hemispheric support of a blocked or another invasion. By its very existence, the Alliance for Progress suggests a convenient instrument with which to pry hesitant neighbors into compliance.

The lessons being drawn from Cuba's march to the left would be amusing if they represented only the grumblings of the know-nothings. But they are being incorporated into United States Latin-American policy at a time when significant departure is called for. And they may well transform the Alliance for Progress into an attempt to buy an untenable status quo.

Haiti exemplifies the dilemma of the Alliance, and illustrates the real applicability of the Cuban example. If it is too late to heed the advice of Earl E. T. Smith and Arthur Gardner, two former Ambassadors to Cuba who urged that his country help its "good friend" Batista, restitution is being made in Haiti. There, U.S. support of Duvalier props up a hated dictatorship, suppressing five million people by secret-police terror and open violence. Duvalier has ignored the Constitution and dispensed with free elections. Still, one-third of his budget comes from the United States, and his personal army was trained by the Marine Corps in the name of anti-Communism.

The Alliance for Progress could merely help Duvalier to help himself, or could do tremendous good for the country, where the densest population in Latin America starves on unarable soil. Technical aid in conservation could halt the erosion that has left only one-third of the country cultivable, but the Point Four program has failed here because it has substituted symbolic gestures for real aid. Unfortunately, a birth control program, although one of the most effective kinds of aid must, temporarily, be left to the Roman Catholic Church in Port-au-Prince, and the Voodoo leaders of the interior.

Finally, should the Alliance recognize rapid, full industrialization as the logical solution to Haiti's land and population problems, they will have no means of initiating it. Constituted to work through existing governments, the Alliance must align itself with Duvalier's intentions, which, as he says, do not include industrial development, and more than half the country is idle more than half the year. The Cuban experience has already begun to prove that immediate industrial development in the Caribbean is neither utopian nor impossible when a major power fully commits itself to the effort.

There are accusations (and indications) that a Haitian Revolutionary Force may be training in Cuba. Whether this is so or not, those who line up on the side of change in Haiti will have five million good reasons to feel confident. Those who oppose it by upholding Duvalier in the name of progress have misread the lessons of Cuba. Duvalier is every bit as good a friend as Fulgencio Batista. And he will leave us with enemies as resentful and recalcitrant as Fidel Castro.