An Annoying Week

Thursday night a brief cable arrived at the U.S. embassy in Paris. The cable, an innocuous statement, said the Immigration and Naturalization Service grants the Chilean singing group Quilapayun permission to enter the U.S. on a cultural exchange visa.

And last night Quilapayun landed in New York, ready to start its tour.

There was only one hitch--the whole transaction, from the time Immigration said yes to the time Quilapayun touched down, was supposed to take place one week ago.

Why Quilapayun had to cancel its original tour because a visa that had been promised did not come through will be ancient history by the time the group performs here next Tuesday.

But organizers of the concert are still seething at the U.S. embassy in Paris for declaring shortly before the group was to leave France last week that its members are Communists.

That declaration forced the group to apply for a special waiver from the U.S. government before being allowed to enter the country.

The eleventh-hour decision, at 4 p.m. Washington time, effectively eliminated any chance for Quilapayun to make its weekend date in New York.

With all the offices closing, the best the concert's organizers here could do was to try to apply last-minute pressure to senstors and congressmen who they felt would be friendly to the cause.

Staff members in the office of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54 (D-Mass.) expressed interest in helping but suggested that all that could be done was to wait until Monday to go to work on the Washington bureaucracies--the State and Justice Departments--that threatened so cancel the whole tour.

But as Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday went by the only word out of the State Department, the bureau that would have to clear the group, was that the waiver is under review and that it takes the bureaucracy a long time to act on visa matters.

Finally, on late Thursday afternoon, an side from Kennedy's office called a concert organizer in New York, telling the person that the State Department had cleared the group as a cultural later the exchange.

A few hours later the Immigration office issued its perfunctory cable and the work of the Paris embassy was finally undone--but a week too late, as far as the musicians and the concert organizers were concerned.