Falling Over Backward in Havana

...Yet this "investigative reporter" goes on talking about the "Cubans' enthusiasm for work...

...The "objectivity" that future reporters are taught to practice, and that the average American newspaper reader is taught to expect from them, is, at best, distorted by time and space limitations, and editing that is necessarily subjective...

...In summary, the man offered the following details: "We used to work 12-16 hours a day...

...blockade "has helped Castro endure without resorting to the lash of police state tactics," he says on page 14: "Castro rules Cuba today with as much authority as any Latin strongman...

...Because David Caute has written a remarkably well-informed study of Communism and the French Intellectuals, I expected more from his Cuba, Yes...

...This policy led to dismissals as well as resignations, including the oustings of important leaders of the anti-Batista resistance like Manolo Ray and Faustino Perez...

...Camilo flew there to put down the uprising...

...The authors, though they come from quite different backgrounds, have three things in common: All of them try to be objective...

...7.95...

...Nicholson shows human indignation, for instance, only when he discusses the barbarous treatment inflicted on homosexuals, and he even entitles a chapter of his book "Homosexuals as the New Niggers.' "While it has improved life for most Cubans," he starts with his typical, if not very investigative, kind of objectivity, "the Revolution has created a new class of outcasts, the homosexuals...

...By David Caute McGraw-Hill...

...As long as necessary...

...Caute says the rupture occurred in May, as a result of the land reform that expropriated U.S.-owned cattle ranches in Camaguey province...

...Cardenal's version-although he may try to justify himself now by explaining that he was only repeating what he was told by a former Havana Airport bootblack also named Ernesto-is false from beginning to end...

...Ernesto Cardenal, the poet who became a priest under the influence of Thomas Merton and now tries to combine a rather unorthodox Catholicism with some not quite orthodox Marxism, was confronted with a number of very unpleasant realities...

...But while he reports them to us word for word and blow by blow, he finally gives up trying to be objective, concluding with religious fervor that what he saw in Cuba proved "socialism made it possible to live the Gospels in society...

...On Sundays we had to work only 12 hours...

...A Cuban poet-friend told Cardenal, "It is terrible to think what could have happened to a Whitman or a Lorca in Cuba...

...he does not even spell Matos' name correctly: "Commander Hebert Mattos had revolted in Camaguey...

...But whereas Castro was released after 22 months, Matos remains in prison after 14 years...

...will forgive me when I say they are instructing their inexperienced students to strive for something that does not exist...

...Caute writes: "Matos and 34 of his officers were brought before a court in which Castro himself virtually played the roles of prosecutor, witness, and judge...

...He might have recalled, in addition, how Soviet workers displayed their "enthusiasm for work'' to interviewers not so many years ago, and might have started wondering whether this welder in Castro's refrigerator factory was more representative of "the new Cuban man" than Stalin's Stakhanovists were of what would not now be called "the new Russian man...

...and that on October 21 Matos passed his 15th year in prison...

...Elsewhere, Nicholson was told mat "voluntary work isn't really voluntary because those who don't do it get demerits and get sent to worse jobs...

...And when we are informed that "the port of Cienfuegos is named after the popular guerrilla leader Camillo [sic-Camilo] Cienfuegos, a comrade of Fidel and Che Guevara," one wonders whether Caute can be taken seriously at all...

...In fact, the resignations took place in late fall, and were hardly, as Caute not only falsely but insultingly suggests, a gesture of "prompt" obedience to any note from Washington...

...Nicholson does not remember, does not recall, does not start wondering...

...The port of Cienfuegos existed under that name long before Camilo Cienfuegos was born...

...Both Cardenal and Nicholson confirm the existence of forced-labor and concentration camps, but often neglect to ask a critical question that would reveal their full impact and sometimes introduce irrelevant issues that make things look better than they are...

...A week after the Reform Law was promulgated," he asserts, "the United States government dispatched a formal note of protest and five members of the Cuban Cabinet promptly resigned...

...all of them believe they are...

...but I certainly would have more respect for him if he had conceived In Cuba differently...

...Nicholson is very impressed because Rojas says he is for the Revolution and thinks everything is "a thousand times better than before...

...Afterward, he could have attempted to explain, as convincingly as possible, why he continued to be a devoted-and ordained-admirer of Fidel Castro...

...I hope the former distinguished journalists who are now directing leading schools of journalism in the U.S...

...As for the liberal writer from London, his main preoccupation was to show that he could handle the positive and the negative without ceasing to be a liberal writer...

...The revolutionary poet and priest also learned from the revolutionary former inmate that "the Jehovah's Witnesses were treated worst of all," having been assigned to digging latrines in "water up to the waist...

...Unfortunately, he comes out rather trite and contrived...

...The New York reporter was careful to emphasize whatever, with some stretch of the imagination, could be interpreted as positive...

...The decisive issue was the arrest, trial and condemnation of Huber Matos, which Caute, at least, does not ignore-or falsify, as Cardenal does...

...also contains some other astonishingly uninformed and misleading statements, like the remarks on the big 1959 split in Castro's Cabinet...

...Reviewed by Leo Sauvage New York correspondent for "Le Figaro...

...Here is how he sums up, as a kind of last word on the subject, what Raymundo Rojas, 40, a welder in a refrigerator factory and father of four, said about his job: "Hours worked daily...

...The American observes that this is "a strong statement from a Cuban who reads a steady newspaper diet about the exploiting, beating and killing of blacks in the U.S...

...Matos was sentenced to 20 years in prison, five more than Castro himself had received after his abortive attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953...

...One of Castro's lieutenants in the Sierra Maestra and the liberator of Santiago de Cuba, later Castro's provisional capital, Commander Matos, a former schoolteacher, wrote a letter expressing his misgivings about the officially supported Communist penetration everywhere, and asking his chief to relieve him of his post as military commander of Camaguey province...

...He cites the case of one who "was rejected by the Revolution that he loved so much" and then "left Cuba and committed suicide in Rome...

...All this is listened to by the poet-priest without comment...

...Eleven hours daily, and half days on Saturday and Sunday...

...Instead of playing fake "objective reporter" and then promoting one-sided propaganda as though it were the logical conclusion of what he had seen and heard, he might have given us his personal interpretation of everything he observed...

...He reached the barracks with only his escort...

...The word preached should be "honesty," not "objectivity...

...One of them informed Nicholson that "what America does to its blacks, Cuba does to its homosexuals...

...Ernesto Cardenal's book is dedicated "To the Cuban People and to Fidel" (my italics-L.S...

...Probably Matos was innocent of the main charges brought against him...

...207 pp...

...And on page 224, he adds: "Under Cuba's highly centralized system, government officials have so much control they can effectively punish without resorting to imprisonment...

...true or not, he is the victim of an autocrat's implacable spirit of vengeance...

...Each apparently thought being objective, in the case of Cuba, meant leaning over backward to balance what might be construed as merely reinforcing preconceived notions...

...All I have to add is that nobody has ever seen the "main charges" against Matos...

...After just a preliminary glance, though, I was tempted simply to throw it away, saying Caute, no...

...Joe Nicholson Jr., a New York Post reporter, tries harder (portions of his book, first published in Harper's, received "the Overseas Press Club's 1973 Citation for Excellence in foreign reporting...

...The position makes it far more easy to see the sky than to perceive clearly what is going on right in front of you...

...author, "Che Guevara: The Failure of a Revolutionary" I have in front of me three recent books about life in Cuba-one by a Nicaraguan revolutionary poet and Catholic priest, one by an American "investigative reporter," one by a British novelist and liberal commentator...

...We were surrounded by a barbed wire fence two and a half yards high...

...Cardenal had tried without success to visit a concentration camp on the Isle of Pines...

...Another reporter might have remembered how in times past workers everywhere fought for the eight-hour day...

...Yet there is a problem with leaning over backward...

...Yet there is imprisonment, too, and he knows it as well as Ernesto Cardenal...

...the soldiers who were guarding the entrance, on recognizing Camilo Cienfuegos, made way for him in fear and trembling...

...He went to Mattos' office, pointed his pistol at him, and took him to prison...

...Average daily hours worked...

...The book is conceived as a sort of travelogue, with the author making a strenuous effort to sound witty and stylish...

...and others of us were just Catholic militants, and four were seminarists.' Like Nicholson, Cardenal is displeased by the treatment of homosexuals...

...Thus the leader of the Solentiname (Nicaragua) religious community, celebrated today as one of the most important contemporary Latin-American poets, was anxious not to omit anything presented to him as negative, particularly since he was the official guest of the Cuban government...

...The disagreement in Castro's Cabinet was over the forced introduction of Communist bureaucrats into administrative and trade-union positions...

...Another former inmate, however, a Catholic who came out a Revolutionary, told Cardenal that the homosexuals "were quite happy in the concentration camps, because a place where they would be concentrated must be like a paradise for them.' Still, Cardenal's informant said he saw "a homosexual who had hanged himself" in the place that must have been "like a paradise" for him...

...Yet he, too, cannot keep from editorializing: "The Revolution, if it's done nothing else, has given the Cuban masses hope, a fervent belief that hard work can construct a better life...

...Perhaps that would not be "objective.' Nonetheless, what should be embarrassing to him is that while he writes on page 13 that the U.S...

...Later he met a young man who had been in that very camp, and who reported that the inmates were there "because they were homosexuals, others for smoking marijuana, others for theft or because they refused to work...

...but none of them is...