As another American and I walked down La Rampa, a street in Havana, three little schoolgirls dressed in blue uniforms called out to us. “Tovarich, ” they said, using the Russian word for “comrade.” I approached one of the Cuban girls, a dark-skinned child of about ten. “Do you think we are Russian?” I asked her in Spanish. She nodded, grinning, her eyes shining in good fun. “But we’re not Russian," I told her. “We’re Americans.” The grin vanished. Her head pulled back. She frowned and tightened her eyes in fright. She was sorry that she had ever called out “tovarich.” It is not a pleasant feeling to frighten a child, but it is a feeling that an American ought to experience, or at least understand, before trying to analyze Cuba and the future of its relations with the United States. Relations will probably get better. Fidel Castro has sent out clear signals that he wants some kind of accommodation. In fact. I was in Cuba only because the Cubans need new channels for those signals...

A News Analysis - Is the present furor over Cuba based on fluff or substance? The real answer may lie in the secret correspondence of Soviet Premier Khrushchev and President Kennedy. In the last few weeks of controversy and confusion, an odd drama has been played In Washington. Critics first railed at the administration, crying that Soviet missiles and missile sites still remain in Cuba. The storm drove the administration into an unprecedented picture-show defense of its intelligence operations. But, in the defense, the administration revealed a concern and an uneasiness not about missile and missile sites but about the removal of Soviet troops. None of the published correspondence between Khrushchev and Kennedy contains any promise to remove Russian troops from Cuba. But the secret correspondence reportedly does. In short, the critics, still may have helped draw attention to a raw nerve of the administration on Cuba policy...

Exact Cost To US Hard To Determine IRS Official Says - The United States government, through loss of tax revenue, will share substantially in the cost of paying the ransom that brought the 1113 Bay of Pigs prisoners back from Cuba. The exact cost to the treasury and thus to the taxpayers may be impossible to determine. But one official, Mitchell Rogovin of the Internal Revenue Service, estimated today that the tax loss, at the highest, could reach $20,000,000 spread over three years. Rogovin added in an interview that the loss could be less. And he stressed he considered it a loss only in the sense that every time there is a disaster relief or community chest drive, the government loses tax revenue through income tax deductions...

President Kennedy has promised no more than sympathy to those bargaining for the release of 1113 Bay of Pigs prisoners. But the evidence is clear that he has given more. Official statements in Washington maintain that the committee now negotiating with Fidel Castro in Cuba for the release of the prisoners is a private one, supported by private funds. But the prisoners, if they are released, will owe their freedom in large measure to the U.S. government. It is doubtful that the private committee could complete a deal of such magnitude without active support of the Kennedy Administration

IN ARTES PLASTICAS, one of the government cultural magazines spawned by the Castro revolution, Manuel Diaz Martinez writes that “the artist must learn to help purify the revolutionary conscience of our Latin American brothers without ceasing to be an artist, without submerging his art in politics.” These words — surely contradictory — bare the dilemma of culture in Cuba today. Like all other revolutions, the Cuban upheaval of social and political institutions has stimulated a companion effort to uproot cultural institutions and nourish new and vital theatre, music, art, movies and writing. But this new culture can also wither under the upheaval’s propaganda demands. In Castro’s Cuba, no one doubts that cultural life today is busy, almost frenzied, but no one can be sure it is vital. Havana offers abundant evidence of activity: commercial and government playhouses show a varied theatrical fare. Foreign ballet and musical troupes, some of the world’s best, visit the city often; seats are available for the government admission price of 25c...

TO AT LEAST one Congressman, a sugar bill posed no problem. The issue was simple, Representative William E. Miller of New York, chairman of the Republican Congressional Committee, told his colleagues: You are either for Castro or against him. Since few praises for Castro have sounded through the chambers of Congress recently, Miller’s analysis, if accurate, meant that a sugar bill could be legislated with ease, speed and clarity. But the analysis was far from accurate, and when Congress, after a twenty-three-hour session during the Fourth of July weekend, finally did bring forth a sugar bill, its haggard members looked neither easy nor speedy nor clear. Their decisions had been shaped and pounded by unceasing and sometimes contradictory pressures — pressures so varied, fascinating and obvious that even a hurried survey of them can reveal some of the realities within our legislative process. The story of the 1960 Sugar Act is a case history in American politics. Despite Miller, the issues turned on much more than an attitude toward the Cuban Premier...

The underdeveloped nations of the world can't terrorize each other in a nuclear arms race. Instead, they pant through a small arms sprint. While the great nations thunder missiles into space, the weak nations gobble up the rifles left behind. There are recent - sometimes dramatic - examples. Last March 4, the French freighter La Coubre exploded in Havana harbor, killing more than 75 seamen, dock workers and firefighters. It was carting 76 tons of Belgian grenades and ammunition to the army of Fidel Castro. Last year, the new African nation of Guinea asked the United States to sell arms to her 2,000-man army. When the United States refused, Guinea bought three shipments of rifles from Communist Czechoslovakia. Conditions are perfect for this dash for little arms: 1. A glut of small arms on the world market. 2. A host of military governments and revolutionaries hungrier for guns than bread. 3. Help from major powers in satisfying that hunger. There is no official estimate of the amount of small arms available on the world market during a year. But some light on the market's vitality is shed by news dispatches and government reports of transactions...

ON MARCH 4, the 4,309-ton French freighter La Coubre, carting seventy-six tons of Belgian grenades and ammunition to the army of Fidel Castro, exploded in Havana harbor, killing more than seventy-five seamen, dock workers and firefighters. The series of deadly blasts triggered a series of sensational questions that hit headlines in both the United States and Cuba. Had an American agent or anti-Castro Cuban slipped aboard and left a time bomb in the hold? Had a careless dock worker dropped a match into the munitions? Had a cargo net snapped, unleashing crates of grenades against the deck? Had a plane sneaked low across the harbor and tossed bombs into the freighter? Other questions, tinged with less excitement, were also evoked. But, too theoretical, old and uncomfortable, they made few headlines. They are questions which have arisen time after time, applied to incident after incident, in the last decade. Their most cogent expression came from Colombian liberal Eduardo Santos in 1955. “Against whom are we Latin Americans arming ourselves?” he cried out before a Columbia University forum...