Word: fidelity
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Says Vice President Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, 65: "Compared to what my generation and Fidel's knew, life nowadays is easy, and this easiness may bring about a certain weakness." Then, getting in a dig at Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communists, Rodriguez adds: "We don't believe in solving this problem with a cultural revolution, parading people around with dunce caps on their heads. We believe that internationalist tasks help the revolution because they are important in the political character-building and moral mobilization of our youth." Cuban propaganda on posters and radio broadcasts stresses youth...
Cuban officials insist that both the civilian and military personnel in Africa are volunteers. Maybe so, but a young Cuban faces a formidable battery of social and governmental pressures to answer the call "Comrade Fidel wants you." A Havana resident described how authorities picked volunteers in the small town where a relative lives: "They lined up the young men and asked those who were willing to go to Africa to raise their hands. Anyone who didn't raise his hand was then told to explain why-and he better have a pretty good excuse, like illness or hardship...
...financial cost of that involvement is underwritten almost entirely by the Soviet Union (see box). And not just young men apply for African duty. Says Vilma Espin, 46, head of the Federation of Cuban Women and wife of Fidel's brother, Defense Minister Raul Castro: "At the height of the war in Angola, we had thousands of letters from women of all ages, including ones in their 70s, asking to go as cooks. One of the most important changes in Cuba since the revolution is that women who were afraid to go out of their houses 20 years...
...While Fidel Castro has his own reasons for sending Cubans to Africa, he could not do so without huge and constant transfusions of Soviet aid. Western experts estimate that Russia now pumps the equivalent of about $6 million a day into Cuba. That figure includes outright grants, subsidies and technical aid. The U.S.S.R. sells Cuba 190,000 bbl. of oil per day at about half the world price and buys 3.5 million tons per year of Cuban sugar at four times the world price (currently 7? per lb.), paying partly with what Cuba needs most: hard currency...
...dean of the diplomatic corps, but he is certainly no high commissioner. He is generally regarded by Cuban and foreign contacts alike as a mostly ornamental, rather ineffectual apparatchik and errand boy. In fact, Tolubeyev has complained to his home office that he has difficulty getting access to Fidel. One reason may be that after more than seven years in Havana, Tolubeyev has yet to learn more than a smattering of Spanish. When Fidel wants to coordinate his signals with the Kremlin, he does so by dispatching to Moscow his brother, Defense Minister Raul, or Vice President Carlos Rafael Rodriguez...