Foreign Policy

The "trial" of the 1,179 prisoners taken in the Bay of Pigs invasion was over, and Fidel Castro himself was expected to announce swift sentences in a televised speech before his Union of Communist Youth. But Cuba's Prime Minister decided to let the prisoners--and the world--wait awhile. He did not mention the men in Havana's Principe Fortress. Instead he turned his attention to foreign affairs and, in his own peculiar brand of insult, discoursed on the character of two fellow Latin American chiefs of state.

Castro's main target was Ecuador's Carlos Julio Arosemena, who, under pressure of his own military, had just made Ecuador the 15th hemisphere nation to break relations with Cuba.-- Of all Latin America's Presidents, Arosemena has been probably the most sympathetic to Castro, and when the Ecuadorian took power last November, Fidel chortled that "it must have hit Washington like a 65-megaton bomb." But now Castro fired his own damp squib: "Arosemena was on some occasions completely intoxicated from Monday to Sunday. The reactionaries took photographs of this senor in the midst of feast and drunken carousals. Any day, in one of these carousals the military will grab him and take him to an embassy [where] he will wake up. He has been more cowardly than Frondizi." Then Castro shifted his glare to an old foe, Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt, who recently sharply criticized Argentina's military for overthrowing President Arturo Frondizi. Cried Castro: "Who is Senor Betancourt but a murderer of workers and students? And how does he react in the face of the Argentine case? Like a blushing prostitute."

Finally, four days after the star-chamber trial, Castro rendered his verdict on the Bay of Pigs prisoners. The men were to be offered to the U.S. at ransom: $25,000 for an ordinary soldier, $500,000 for each of the three invasion leaders, for a total of $62 million. Otherwise, they faced 30 years at hard labor. The ransom sum ("Indemnity," the Cubans called it) was more than three times the amount Castro originally demanded in his infamous Tractors-for-Prisoners offer last year, and it provided eloquent testimony to Cuba's Communist-caused economic chaos.

-- Those who still maintain relations with Castro: Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay.

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