MODERN Living Writer Ben Hall claims to have developed "one of the first cases of World's Fair Feet of 1962--before the thing even opened" as he knocked around the Seattle Fair last weekend, wandering between packing cases, wet plaster walls and flying paintbrushes. He found the pre-opening atmosphere exhilarating, and concluded that Seattleites "love the idea of the fair, but hate the thought of strangers' finding what a nice neck of the woods they live in. They hope people won't come out and take them over." Hall is a world's fair buff who has never seen one before. He has been longing to ever since his parents in Jackson, Miss., would not let him hitchhike to the New York World's Fair in 1939. He has collected a stack of material--postcards, folders and samples--on world's fairs dating back to the first one in London's Crystal Palace in 1851. Another of his packrat collections of oddities inspired his recent book, The Best Remaining Seats (TIME, Dec. 8, 1961). a recall of the gilded movie palaces of the 1920s.

Along with Hall's story appear four pages of color on the Seattle Fair, taken at the last possible moment before the opening.

HAVANA, a city that used to provide a saucy, expensive and sunny welcome to tourists, is a haunted place now. The planes are full on leaving, not entering. And among the least welcome guests are journalists; Caribbean Bureau Chief Sam Halper got into Cuba last winter, and tried to get in again recently to gather material for this week's cover story on Cuban Communist Bias Roca. But he could get no answer to his repeated requests for a visa. Instead. Halper had to confine himself to hopping around between Florida. Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, interviewing some of the 200,000 Cubans who have fled since Castro took over. He got a great deal of material, but we were still eager to get our own man into Havana. The solution was easy. Castro is doing his best to keep on good terms with Canada, and lets Canadian journalists in freely. As a result, Gavin Scott of our Ottawa bureau, traveling on his Canadian passport, spent two weeks in Havana, seeing a lot of the city, talking to government officials, housewives in shopping queues, workers. Putting together the material from Halper, Scott and others, Latin American Specialist Peter Bird Martin wrote the story. This is his seventh cover story on Latin American figures; the last one, just a month ago, told of Arturo Frondizi's collapsing regime in Argentina.

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