CASTRO EATS HUMBLE PIE

After visiting a number of African states, Fidel Castro has moved on to Eastern Europe and will end a tour lasting over ten months in the Soviet Union.

The ailing Cuban economy, still overwhelmingly dependent on the sugar crop, receives technical and economic assistance from the East European countries as well as from the Soviet Union. Castro is no doubt hoping that this aid will be extended in the future. In return he is making full use of his prestige and popularity to bolster up the bureaucracy wherever he goes. homegrown bureaucracy.

Castro has shown that he shares its tastes and its outlook. In Bulgaria he attacked the youth in the capitalist countries who presented, he said 'a sorry spéctacle' and where 'they led an aimless life deprived of participation in the solving of present or future problems Further, he added, 'sometimes it was practically impossible to tell the boys from the girls' Fidel is apparently leaving no doubts about his own virility. Not only has he sought to outdo Kadar as a devoted ping-pong player, but he spent one evening until midnight with a basketball team.

In fact the main sensation of the tour followed the aspersions cast on Castro's heart by an Associated Press reporter. A posse of Cuban journalists presented themselves at his office and a free-for-all took place which ended in the rout of the AP team.

Castro responded to the report that he had had a heart attack by claiming, jokingly, that he had a heart of iron. The Latin America press agency 'Prensa Latina' laconically observed: 'The AP man, marked spiritually and physically by the experience, may now be considering a story on his own bodily ailments. The parts of the body affected will keep him from engaging in loose talk ... and in sitting down long enough to write more news that never was.' These niceties apart, it is clear that Castro's tour is assisting the bureaucracy. He has endorsed their rule, supported the call for a European security conference and, while loud in his denunci. ation of American imperialism, has not ruled out altogether the prospect of reaching an understanding.