CUBA

Cuba's slow-motion rebellion begins its third year next week, a study in inertia but nonetheless a tense and tragic struggle that must end in a crashing showdown.

Rebel Chieftain Fidel Castro, pushing out foot by foot from the Sierra Maestra, near which he landed Dec. 2, 1956, now dominates a third of the island's land area. His strength in guerrillas and arms is rising, but exactly how much is a secret veiled by the downed wires and cut roads that go into the wild country he lurks in. Dictator Fulgencio Batista keeps a hold on Havana, where a fifth of all Cubans live, and all other sizable cities, and still controls the labor unions most of the press, an army estimated at 46,000, an air force that includes bombers and pursuit planes. But he cannot keep order and apparently lacks the capacity or will to try a major offensive.

Scars of War. In the deadlock Cuba increasingly shows the scars of civil war: food shortages, shots in the night, silent factories. Havana's flashy hotels echo emptily. Trains that used to go to Santiago now stop short at Santa Clara, in mid-island. Planes fly from heavily guarded terminals, the passengers frisked before they board.

In blockaded Santiago (pop. 200,000), the rebels dare not take on the 3,000-man garrison commanded by Major General Eulogio Cantillo, the army's best tactician. They also fall back before the Staghound armored cars that rumble out of Santiago--but close in again like wraiths when the Staghounds rumble back.

Business in rebel country is nearly dead. The Esso distributor in Santiago, who used to sell 2,000,000 gal. of gas monthly, now sells 250,000; the Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola and Canada Dry plants operate only two or three days a month. Bacardi Rum's main plant, which used to produce 144,000 bottles a day, last week closed for the first time since 1862. Eggs that once cost 4¢ apiece are now 10¢; most food prices are up at least 40%. Holguín (pop. 82,000) has had no electricity for more than a fortnight. In Guantánamo and Bayamo, townsmen use horse-drawn wagons because there is no gasoline.

Popular Opinion. The north coast Nicaro mines, source of 11% of the free world's nickel, are out of production; last week government bombers, aiming for the rebels, instead hit Nicaro warehouses containing $500,000 worth of machinery. The sugar crop, Cuba's economic lifeblood, 75% of which comes from rebel-saturated Oriente, Camagüey and Las Villas provinces, is largely in Castro's hands, as the January harvest approaches.

Castro's Cuba includes ten airfields and at least two captured DC-3s (as well as some light planes). From secret bases, probably in Central America and Florida, planes ferry in arms. Castro now has some heavy machine guns, bazookas, 20-mm. and 75-mm. recoilless rifles. He has a network of two dozen radio transmitters.

Batista has almost no enthusiastic support among Cubans outside the government; Castro, by contrast, gets ardent backing from students, professional classes who chafe at the indignities and corruption of dictatorship, and the political left. But the Cuban masses refuse the danger and cost of active support for Castro and by abstaining, line up for Batista. The eventual solution for divided Cuba is no more foreseeable than that of another violence-torn island--far-off Cyprus.