Black hole of Havana

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The Israeli invasion of South Lebanon on 9 April and the various murderous attacks on refugee camps and elsewhere are part and parcel of the efforts of the desperately weak Begin regime to expand the power of the Zionist state in the negotiations with the Egyptians and the US.

Jerusalem

Returning from his latest visit to the US on the same day the murder of the Irish soldiers, Begin made it quite clear that he intends to hold onto the city of Jerusalem, grabbed in the war of 1967, and to all the other so-called occupied territories taken at that time.

Iraqi hangman Hussein "Good riddance to the loafers, the layabouts, the lumpen and the scum.", Havana in the last two weeks has echoed to that apolitical and hysterical cry from crowds which have been bureaucratically mobilised and demagogically aroused by Fidel Castro and the Cuban Stalinist leadership.

Another abusive epithet has frequently been added-'queer' -though, as one or two of the less uncivilised bureaucrats have conceded when challenged, "there are good homosexuals as well as bad' The recipients of all this abuse are the 10,000 Cubans who for two weeks have picked themselves into a tiny area-the Peruvian embassy and • its grounds-under reportedly barbaric hygenic conditions seeking the possibility of a way out of Cuba to the USA or any capitalist country in Latin America.

Bizarre

It is easier to explain why the 10,000 have sought to-use the Latin American tradition of exile through another country's embassy than to explain why the Cuban leadership has allowed the bizarre event to develop.

The 10,000 are self evicently enemies of the Castro regirne.

Some are dispossessed petty-bourgeois layers, others workers tired of material shortages; 400 are reportedly ex-political prisoners recently released; and others are certainly sections of Cuban society persecuted by the authorities, a few no doubt wanted for criminal activities by the police.

Repression

They are reacting to a worsening economic situation and an intensification of police repression under a new minister, of the interior, Ramiro Valdez.

The Castro bureaucracy has used them as a pretext for a series of hysterical mass mobilisations in which hatred is a substitute for politics.

The 'scum' and 'queers' in the embassy may in this way have their uses for Castro's hard-pressed bureaucracy.

• But they nonetheless, whatever their potitical views, bear obvious witness to the failure of that bureaucracy over 20 years to eliminate widespread discontent-in spite of the fact that hundreds of thousands of people in a similar position have been allowed to leave since the revolution of 1959.

Remove guards

This explains why ..the bureaucracy continues to insist that there are only 3,000 in the embassy as opposed to the 10,000 on which other observers agree.

But it does not explain the surprising decision to remove the embassy guards in the first place which. allowed the refugees to enter.

The situation suggests that seize what they saw as a chance to leave.

Castro

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SOCIALIST PRESS, t'ednesdoy April 23 1980

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Castro was surprised by the number of those who rushed to