Cuba on the Defensive

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Homecomings of all sorts for Castro's legions

The first man off the plane walked with a severe limp; the second hobbled down the stairs on crutches; the third had to be helped out the door. One by one, 43 more walking wounded emerged, looking grimy and bedraggled; some were shirtless but most wore torn blue jeans or other work clothes that they had pulled on hastily when the fighting began eight days earlier. The last eleven of the 57 Cubans injured in the U.S. invasion of Grenada and sent home to Havana last week had to be carried off the plane on stretchers.

They descended to a "heroes' welcome" that was everything public ceremonies in Cuba usually are not: brief, somber and quiet. An artillery corps band belted out a few revolutionary hymns, and women militia members goose-stepped across the tarmac of Jose Marti Airport. But President Fidel Castro, attired in tailored green fatigues, his beard noticeably gray, said not a word in public. He simply shook hands with the wounded, who apparently had been told to say nothing; several seemed too dazed to speak in any case, and one barely conscious man on a stretcher failed to recognize the Cuban leader. After the handshakes, the wounded were silently escorted into waiting ambulances.

The subdued mood was appropriate to the occasion in more ways than one. The U.S. invasion of Grenada and the execution of Marxist Prime Minister Maurice Bishop that preceded and helped trigger the U.S. move have dealt Castro's influence in Central America and the Caribbean Basin a greater blow than any events since the missile crisis of 1962.

Only four years ago, when Cuban-allied governments came to power almost simultaneously in Nicaragua and Grenada, Castro's clout seemed to be on the rise. But an erosion began the next year when voters in Jamaica elected conservative Edward Seaga to succeed leftist Michael Manley, a Castro ally, as Prime Minister. Jamaica has now swung so strongly against Cuba that Seaga sent troops to assist in the invasion of Grenada and last week expelled the last semiofficial Cuban on the island, a correspondent for the Cuban news service Prensa Latina. Seaga charged that the correspondent had participated with four Soviet diplomats in a plot to assassinate a Jamaican Foreign Ministry official. The Soviets were also thrown out. Even Manley was less than vehement in opposing the invasion of Grenada. He expressed "profound sharing of concern about the brutality of what has been happening," an apparent reference to Bishop's murder.

Bishop's fate also seems to have weighed heavily with Desi Bouterse, the self-proclaimed pro-Cuban Marxist dictator of Suriname, on the northern coast of South America. Bouterse ordered Havana's ambassador to leave the country, explaining simply that he did not want a repetition of "developments in Grenada." His defection left only two nations in the Caribbean Basin openly allied with Cuba: Nicaragua and Guyana. But Nicaragua's Sandinista regime could take no comfort from Castro's admission, in response to a reporter's question, that U.S. air and naval superiority would prevent him from sending any reinforcements to Nicaragua if that country too should be invaded. One Latin American diplomat in Havana predicts that the Sandinistas, while remaining vehemently anti-U.S., will nonetheless try to put some distance between themselves and Cuba. For the time being, whether by coincidence or design, the Sandinistas were venting their frustrations at home. Government-inspired mobs attacked a dozen Roman Catholic churches because of opposition from some priests to Sandinista attempts to force all male Nicaraguans from 17 to 22 to register for military service.

Anti-Cuban feeling runs strong in others of the Latin American countries that have assailed the U.S. action in Grenada. In Panama, one of only two Central American countries where Cuba maintains an embassy, Alvin Weeden, general secretary of the leftist Popular Action Party, asserted: "Even if any intervention is to be condemned, and we did condemn the U.S. invasion of Grenada, there is no doubt that Cuban military adventurism in Central America and other places will have a terrible consequence for the Third World." Colombia, a major Latin nation that joined in the castigation of the U.S., suspects Cuba of supporting a revolutionary movement against its government. It suspended diplomatic relations with Castro in 1981 for that reason.

In the coldest practical terms, says a Western ambassador in Havana, "Cuba lost a big economic and political investment in Grenada." For example, Grenada was a magnet for leftists throughout the Caribbean, who frequently visited either to hold meetings or to consult with Cuban Communist Party officials and draw less attention than they would have if they had gone directly to Havana.

Trying to pick up the pieces, Castro resorted to a propaganda offensive. Beginning shortly after the invasion of Grenada, the Cuban government has been ferrying reporters and TV crews in from Miami by chartered plane for an unprecedented round of press conferences, communiques and briefings. The primary message at the moment is that Sir Paul Scoon, the Grenadian Governor General who represents Queen Elizabeth II, is a U.S. stooge, and any Grenadian government that might be set up with his help would be a puppet of Washington. Thus Cuban Vice Foreign Minister Ricardo Alarcdn last week sneered that "some U.S. Army memorandum" probably gave Scoon the only authority he had, and added that the next Grenadian government would be "supported by the bayonets of the Yankees." Alarcon also simultaneously portrayed the U.S. as a menacing villain and a bumbling giant. Said he: "Now millions of people who did not believe before that the U.S. Government was capable of doing such things, that it would dare to attack a small country, are convinced that it is possible." But, he added, "look at the trouble the heavyweight had in defeating the featherweight."

Havana in addition is preparing Cuban and world opinion for the possibility that some Cuban prisoners in Grenada might defect to the U.S. That has not happened yet, but Castro evidently fears it will and is seeking to soften the blow by dismissing any defections in advance as the result of U.S. psychological coercion. A government communique charges that American interrogators are "using every possible means to undermine the morale" of the prisoners, telling them that Cuba does not want them back and offering them political asylum in the U.S.

Washington was uncertain how seriously to take a tip from a friendly intelligence service that Cuba had asked South American terrorist groups to attack U.S. targets, presumably citizens and embassies. Nonetheless, the U.S. twice warned Havana that it would hold Cuba responsible for any such attacks. Alarcon said Cuba had asked only for "expressions of solidarity of a political nature."

Internally, as the airport ceremony for the wounded demonstrated, Castro is appealing to patriotic fervor rather than revolutionary enthusiasm to maintain his hold on the populace. There is, in fact, little of the old guerrilla spirit left in Cuba: like Castro, the revolution has gone middle-aged and gray. Visitors to Havana are struck by the similarity to most Communist countries: a rigid bureaucracy, a once lively press that is now dismissed even by sympathetic leftists as boring, buildings that are shabbily maintained.

Another factor that dismays even some leftists visiting Cuba is the extent to which Castro has militarized the nation. The official force of 127,500 is one of the largest in the Western Hemisphere, but that is only the beginning. Estimates of the number of Cuban troops (usually called "military advisers") stationed in Nicaragua, Angola, Ethiopia and South Yemen range from 33,000 to 61,000; almost 7,000 Cuban civilians are believed to be in those countries too. At home, Castro plans to double the size of the territorial militia from the 1981 count of 500,000 to a million by next year, or more than 10% of Cuba's total population of 9.9 million. Some 70% of the new recruits will be women. The Pioneers, a Soviet-inspired youth organization, is encouraged to play war games. Cuban TV admiringly shows Pioneers as young as eleven practicing loading and firing surface-to-air missiles and driving tanks.

Ostensibly the mobilization is designed to deter the U.S. invasion that Castro regularly warns against in time of crisis. Its real motive is probably to instill enough patriotic feeling to draw the people closer to Castro. If so, it has worked. Says a Latin American diplomat in Havana: "As long as Fidel is around, support for the government will be strong. The people adore him. When they are unhappy with the government, they say, 'Many things happen that the commandante en jefe [commander in chief] doesn't know about.'"

Officials in Washington are quick to warn that Castro's potential for international troublemaking should not be discounted. They expect future Cuban ventures to be more cautious than the attempt to take over Grenada, which apparently went further and faster than Castro intended; American officials doubt Castro wanted Bishop killed. The Cubans, says a State Department official, "always try hard to keep below the threshold of our tolerance, and they were in Grenada until their threshold fell out from under them." But U.S. diplomats fully expect the Cubans to continue striving for regional influence. Says one: "They lost something of value on Grenada, but they're not about to turn into Boy Scouts as a result. They're still a powerful and dangerous adversary, and they're persistent as hell." --By George J. Church. Reported by Timothy Loughran/Managua and Ross H. Munro/Havana

With reporting by Timothy Loughran, Ross H. Munro This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.