Accuses China

of By MICHAEL BANDA THE same week thal China's leaders were charging that Moscow was colluding with America in the military encirclement of China, Dr. Castro, in a two-page article in 'Granma' (paper of the Cuban Communist Party), made a similar attack on China accusing her of 'the worst methods of piracy and oppression of Yankee imperialism'.

This is the most serious and explicit attack made by the Cuban Premier so far against the Chinese. The immediate cause of all this is the revision of Sino-Cuban trade pact and the unilateral decision of the Chinese government to reduce the value of its trade from 250 million dollars to 170 million dollars.

Under the terms of a one-year barter agreement China supplied Cuba with 285,000 tons of rice in exchange for 800,000 tons of sugar. Under the new agreement China will supply 135,000 tons (165,000 tons less than Cuba needed) in return for 600,000 tons of Cuban sugar.

Food crisis

In a speech delivered on the seventh anniversary of the Cuban Revolution on January 2, Castro announced that he had assumed the 1965 trade deal to be a longterm one but the Chinese had limited it to a year.

'We now find, he continued, 'that we have only one halt the rice we had in . 1964. We did not grow more rice ourselves because we were concentrating on other agricultural production.' As The Newsletter pointed out in November, 1965, the collapse of Castro's grandiose plan for industry and the consequent fall in the sugar crop forced him to concentrate on sugar to the exclusion of everything else-even food cropse Sugar is the main export-and the principal foreign exchange-earner.

According to Castro the Chinese have also stipulated that trade between the two countries be balanced. This means that the volume of trade will be cut back to the 1961 level-because of lack of credit.

At first Castro suggested that the cut in the Cuban sugar quota was a blessing in disguise because Cuban sugar production this year had fallen from 6.5 million tons to 6 million and the Chinese reduction would release 200,000 tons for sale on the world market.

'Blackmail '

Now, however, Castro has suddenly and dramatically changed key and asserts that 'this is not a matter of a few tons of rice but of something far more important —whether in the world of tomorrow ... the world powers will keep to themselves the right to blackmail, submit to pressures comrade, wing.

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