IN FROM THE COLD

President Nixon has indicated that agreement has been reached with Cuba to put an end to the island's use as a sanctuary for hi-jackers.

Secret talks on the question have been under way through Swiss intermediaries since December last year.

The talks began after the spectacular seizure of an Eastern Airways jet over the United States. Like so many previous planes, it was diverted to Havana.

But the hi-jackers were definitely not welcome in the Cuban capital. Fidel Castro personally assured the plane's pilot that they would be jailed for life.

Washington sent a message of thanks to the Cubans for the way they had handled the situation. The talks began shortly afterwards.

No doubt Castro's indignation at the Eastern hi-jack was largely synthetic, designed as a signal to Washington rather than as an expression of his feelings about the particular incident.

Ever since June last year both sides have been looking for a convenient pretext to get together for negotiations and hi-jacking is a better pretext than most.

clear that having reached this agreement, the two sides can now make rapid progress to 'normalization' of commercial and diplomatic Top: Castro. Above: Nixon. Rapid progress to 'normalization'. as an indication of Castro's willingness to talk seriously with Washington.

The first tentative feelers were put out in June last year, shortly after Nixon's visit to Moscow. The White House Press office announced that an official US delegation had visited the island for the first time since the blockade was imposed.

The delegation, consisting of four experts on oceanography, attended a United Nations conference on the ecology of the Caribbean. Harris B. Stewart, the delegation leader, said they had received a VIP reception from the Cubans, who held a special party for them on Varadero beach.

Evidently the visit was a success, because it was not long before the Cuban government's attitude of grudging acceptance of hi-jackers underwent an abrupt change.

The Cuban leader has gone out of his way to reassure the Americans and remove any fears they may have that he still harbours revolutionary' ambitions.

Visiting Chile and Peru last year, he endorsed President Salvador Allende's Fabian 'peaceful road to socialism' and entered into very friendly relations with the Peruvian military junta.

Castro pointedly moderated his rantings against Nixon while on this tour, though his newspapers in Havana--in a burst of outdated ultra-leftism —still insist on printing the US leader's name with a swastika instead of the 'x'.

(Establishing relations with fascism would be nothing new, of course, for Castro, who has excellent relations with General Franco's Spanish dictatorship.)

Castro is well on the way back to respectability. Nixon's report that the anti-hi-jack treaty is almost ready for signing is an indication of the new stage in WashingtonHavana relations.

It is the first diplomatic treaty since relations were ruptured 12 years ago. These years saw the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Cuban missiles crisis and the attempt, notably the Bolivian fiasco under Che Guevara, to promote rural uprisings on the Cuban 'model'.

These things led the leaders of the United States Socialist Workers' Party to revise the basis of Marxism and acclaim Cuba as a workers' state.

In reality Castro is a nationalist leader who was driven by US hostility into the arms of the Soviet Stalininsts. His regime is a bourgeois-nationalist one, closely dependent on the Soviet Union.

Cuba, however, is a major economic burden on the USSR which that country can ill afford. Now that relations with Washington are improved, it cannot be long before the Cuban regime rèveals its true character in an abrupt turn towards imperialism.