The Week

■ Samuel Stebbins Bowles, Son of Bowles, is just back from two months in Cuba, which he finds both hunky and dory. Back at Harvard, a suburb of Havana where he teaches assistant economics, young Bowles described Cuba as “a very optimistic experiment. It may provide the solution to the problems of impoverishment facing so many other Latin American countries.” You see Cuba, which had the third highest standard of living in Latin America before Castro, suffers no impoverishment now because there’s “a ready market for their sugar in the Soviet bloc countries” which sometimes pay as much as half what Uncle Sugar used to in the bad days, and so what if there’s rationing it doesn’t mean impoverishment which is what faces other Latin countries that trade with the U.S. because they don’t have the “transportation limitations” to interfere with industrialization that Cuba does, and they shouldn’t industrialize anyway but should emulate Castro who “decided to build on what Cuba already had, specifically a base in agriculture,” and then they could all sell their agricultural produce to the Soviet Union which seems to be having some trouble growing its own, and everybody should take a course in assistant economics.

■ Raymond Johnson, a Black Panther lieutenant who got to Cuba by hijacking an airplane rather than with a Harvard grant for economic research, does not share Bowles’ enthusiasm. The Panthers, he says, “have not been received in a revolutionary fashion. We have been condemned to life in Cuba.” The small black community has been harassed, imprisoned, banned from Havana, forbidden to organize politically. “They have been shipped to isolated sections of the island and forced to work in labor camps.” When Panthers became disenchanted, Johnson said, and protested conditions or asked to leave, they were subject to arbitrary arrest and jailing, sometimes charged with the serious crime of “counterrevolution.” “We think there’s racial discrimination in Cuba,” Johnson told a reporter heading back to the States, warning other Black Panthers to stay away. Without naming names—“an exceedingly high-ranking Black Panther officer”—Johnson indicated that the authority for his charges came from Eldridge Cleaver himself.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

■ Samuel Stebbins Bowles, Son of Bowles, is just back from two months in Cuba, which he finds both hunky and dory. Back at Harvard, a suburb of Havana where he teaches assistant economics, young Bowles described Cuba as “a very optimistic experiment. It may provide the solution to the problems of impoverishment facing so many other Latin American countries.” You see Cuba, which had the third highest standard of living in Latin America before Castro, suffers no impoverishment now because there’s “a ready market for their sugar in the Soviet bloc countries” which sometimes pay as much as half what Uncle Sugar used to in the bad days, and so what if there’s rationing it doesn’t mean impoverishment which is what faces other Latin countries that trade with the U.S. because they don’t have the “transportation limitations” to interfere with industrialization that Cuba does, and they shouldn’t industrialize anyway but should emulate Castro who “decided to build on what Cuba already had, specifically a base in agriculture,” and then they could all sell their agricultural produce to the Soviet Union which seems to be having some trouble growing its own, and everybody should take a course in assistant economics.

■ Raymond Johnson, a Black Panther lieutenant who got to Cuba by hijacking an airplane rather than with a Harvard grant for economic research, does not share Bowles’ enthusiasm. The Panthers, he says, “have not been received in a revolutionary fashion. We have been condemned to life in Cuba.” The small black community has been harassed, imprisoned, banned from Havana, forbidden to organize politically. “They have been shipped to isolated sections of the island and forced to work in labor camps.” When Panthers became disenchanted, Johnson said, and protested conditions or asked to leave, they were subject to arbitrary arrest and jailing, sometimes charged with the serious crime of “counterrevolution.” “We think there’s racial discrimination in Cuba,” Johnson told a reporter heading back to the States, warning other Black Panthers to stay away. Without naming names—“an exceedingly high-ranking Black Panther officer”—Johnson indicated that the authority for his charges came from Eldridge Cleaver himself.