A number of citizens publicly proclaimed a provocative sentiment – 'Castro sí, Khrushchev no'
A cloud no bigger than a priest's hat appeared on the Cuban revolutionary horizon yesterday. This is a city of slogans – patriotic slogans, inspirational slogans, anti-American slogans, slogans that would be, were it not for the fervour of the time, almost unintelligible; but after mass in the cathedral yesterday a number of citizens emerged into the sunshine publicly proclaiming a provocative and unfashionable sentiment – anti-communism. "Castro Si," they said in effect, "Khrushchev No" – or as less sympathetic reports have it, "Yanquis Si, Russia No."
Few Cubans yet believe that Fidel Castro's regime is covertly Communist. They see the Russian tankers in port, the messages of encouragement from Moscow, the pro-Russian press, the Chinese trade delegations, the missions to Prague and East Berlin – they see all these merely as the fruits of independence, which enable this small republic to deal as freely with one great cause as it does with another. Russia needs a longer spoon, perhaps, but it is no more menacing a devil. Eight citizens scoffed at the very idea of a Soviet satellite in Cuba. Trust our Fidel, they say. He is a Christian and a humanist. This will never be a Communist State.
Reservations are perhaps strongest, though, among the Catholic priests, who may well emerge, as they have in Poland, as the prime opponents of Communist rule – if indeed (and I have my doubts myself) Castro and his men are aiming at anything more extreme than neutrality on the Egyptian pattern. To many of these churchmen, even milk and water socialism is the yeast of communism. They observe with distaste Cuba's new ties with Eastern Europe, and some of them do not hesitate to say so.
While a ferocious tropical rainstorm hammered down upon Havana, I stood with one such cleric in an eighteenth century cloister in the clattered old part part of the city. The air was steaming, sticky, and oppressive. The rain tipped down the shining banana leaves and sometimes popped through the Italianate frescoes of the church ceiling. The conversation ranged widely through the more familiar concepts of popular philosophy, from the meaning of truth to the mystery of the Trinity, but in the middle of it there lay an immovable kernel of absolutism. Like nearly everybody else in Cuba, this priest saw things in jet black and snowy white, inalienable right and inexcusable wrong; either Fidel Castro was anti-Communist or he was anti-Christ.
My companion was not a supporter of the old Batista regime (though his political thinking, I suspect, ran close to that of General Franco). It had been, he said, corrupt and often cruel and it was in unhealthy league with American monopolies. But every day now he thought he saw signs of incipient communism in Cuba. People were afraid to talk freely, informers abounded, there were Russians (snow on their sandals, perhaps) in every waterfront café. For himself, he did not hesitate to tell his congregation so. To survive in right, you must honour only one truth – and just look, he added to prove his point, at the condition of the Church of England.
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