No Man Is An Island

The logistic success of Mr. Kennedy's Cuban blockade can no longer justify its diplomatic impotence. By steadily ignoring the Castro government the U.S. failed to take advantage of the very real, very important disagreements rising within the Socialist camp.

When Fidel Castro publicly admitted "a well-founded reason for discontent" developing between Cuba and the Soviet Union, Mr. Mikoyan raced for Havana. By its lack of interest in this discontent, however, the Administration suggests that its ultimate aim is not to undermine Soviet control but simply to crush socialism, autonomous or not, in the Caribbean. It is hard to believe that the government, cherishing an image of monolithic Communism, is actually insensitive to the distinction.

Faced with humiliating disregard by the Soviet Union before the entire world, and a Communist apparatus of ambiguous loyalties at home, Dr. Castro has decided to condemn and dismiss from government service leaders of the Popular Socialist Party. Last week in the New York Times, Tad Szulc cited a report that "Dr. Castro has almost virtually eliminated most of the 'old line' Communists, responsive to Moscow, from positions of influence in the Cuban government, and has moved in his own trusted aides."

Szulc's article also noted that Blas Roca, the Communist party leader, has been out of the country during the crisis, that a "Cuba first" tone has characterized recent public speeches in Havana, and that "the predominant impression (in Washington) is that Premier Castro has adopted an intransigent 'hard line' in his dealings with the Soviet Union as well as in his attitude toward the United States."

If the State Department looked askance when Castro replaced the defunct Batista bureaucracy with a Communist machine, why does it not draw some hope from this reversal?

In announcing the blockade October 22, Mr. Kennedy reviewed Cuba's drift to the left as a betrayal of an essentially nationalistic revolution. But he did not comment on the real paradox of fidelismo: the achievement of Castro's concrete national objectives rests on external economic support. Political independence and social progress can come only through a balanced dependence so the great powers. But to the power that once held away, this balance represents a defeat: to the newly influential, it represents a victory. Minimal U.S. influence in Cuba came to mean humiliation, just as similar influence implied some sort of triumph in Yugoslavia.

Perhaps the hangover from the days of control prevents the Government from seeing the real parallels here. Both Cuba and Yugoslavia approached Communism via nationalism. Like Tito, Castro's leadership extended beyond the organized left, directly to the peasants who comprised the revolutionary movement. And at the common core of the Cuban left and the Yugoslavian left is not a long-standing devotion to Marxist-Leninist principles, but an intense nationalism.

If any nation in Eastern Europe freed itself without Red Army help, that nation was Yugoslavia. And if any other country came to Socialism owing the Soviet Union no military debt, that country is Cuba. The Soviet distrust of Castro and his colleagues, today so easily forgotten, parallele the Stalinist distrust of the independently victorious Josip Broz Tito. Just as Tito did in the late '40s, Castro has found it necessary to dismiss those politicians who regard the USSR as their patria. Finally, it was a dispute over military autonomy that catalyzed the Yugoslav-Soviet conflict. The same could hold true in Cuba.

No attempt has been made, however, to re-create in Cuba the conditions that enabled Tito to assert his independence. It is worth recalling that American businessmen and diplomats were sufficiently active in Belgrade for Pravda to cite the presence of "Washington agents" as steady proof of Tito's unreliability. That silly slogan about Communism not being negotiable in this hemisphere was, fortunately, not applied to the northern half of the globe.

Fidel Castro has now been burdened and disgraced by the Soviet Union. His speeches have shown the strain of a man who senses the incompatibility of Cuban and Soviet objectives. But the U.S. has not allowed him to say, as Tito could eventually, "We do not want to pay other people's bills.... Never again will we be dependent on anybody."

It seems unlikely that given some diplomatic autonomv, Cuba would oppose Moscow from the Chinese rather than the Yugoslav direction. The ceaseless efforts of Castro's representatives to win the favor of neutral nations despised by the Chinese, and, most recently, the Cuban suggestion that ambassadors of neutral nations in Havana be granted vague inspection assignments, smacks more of Belgrade than Peiping.

If diplomacy and intelligence can serve Washington's ends elsewhere in the world, they can apply in this hemisphere as well. The U.S. has nothing to lose by initiating negotiations with the Castro government, and reconsidering its self-fulfilling prophecy that socialism cannot survive in Cuba without Soviet domination. Events of the past month have shown world Communism as an organic system, directed by men of varying, and sometimes conflicting, commitments. The United States may well be the only country in the world that hesitates to capitalize on its enemies' conflicts.

As long as he has no alternative to Soviet support, Fidel Castro's course is determined. We will never know, to use George Kennan's metaphor, whether Castro will go through an open door until we stop trying to push him through a closed one.

At issue is not a minor choice of technique: it is the choice between war and diplomacy.