Word: cuba
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Most dictators find a certain cruel pleasure in the judicious balance of bread and circuses necessary to keep their people in hand. In Cuba, where nearly everything is rationed, Castro has only half the fun. But when circus time arrives, Fidel makes the most of it, as he did last week on a double occasion for revelry-the seventh anniversary of his rise to power and the convening of the first "anti-imperialist" conference of Latin American, African and Asian nations...
...Government has ended its 75-day war against all imports from France containing nickel. Washington banned the imports last October (and promptly impounded more than a dozen shipments) because France's giant Le Nickel had been buying large amounts of nickel oxide from Castro's Cuba. Shipments could resume, said the U.S., if the French would guarantee that they contained no Cuban nickel...
...French government, according to the U.S. announcement, has now agreed to do just that; it has promised to refuse export licenses to the U.S. to any French company using nickel from Cuba. The U.S. will simply accept the French government guarantee, has already released all the impounded shipments. Le Nickel plans to use the Cuban metal for non-U.S. customers, will supply U.S. buyers from its main mines in New Caledonia. For that purpose, it has signed preliminary agreements with Kaiser Aluminum to form two joint companies, one in New Caledonia to step up nickel production and another...
Black Markets. There are no rich left in Cuba, and hardly any middle class. The refugees were almost all poor: spouses and parents, brothers and sisters of those already in exile, and thus marked as gusanos (or worms), with all the hardship that brings in Cuba. They were fishermen, seamstresses, stevedores, carpenters...
Their stories of Communist repression were no more or less chilling than all the others coming out of Cuba. What was interesting was the talk of growing shortages, as Castro's grey little island sinks deeper into economic chaos. "Anything that breaks remains broken," said a Havana clinic worker. "Anything that becomes useless remains useless." Supplies of clothing, shoes, medicine, meat are diminishing. Even coffee is declining; production this year will be only 25,000 tons, nearly 40% less than the pre-Castro average. What there is fetches a handsome price on a black market that is growing...