Long After Cuba

President Kennedy's success in the Cuban crisis has had an extremely odd aftermath. One of its less happy results has been to swell Mr. Kennedy's head to the point where he feels that he may treat his allies exactly as he pleases, and have them take it. Likely enough the outcome of the Nassau meeting with Prime Minister Macmillan would have been the same with or without Cuba, but the consummate tactlessness of the U.S. offer of Polaris almost certainly would not. On the other side of the same coin, however, the President's new confidence--even bonhomie, if one may judge from his Christmas chat, has allowed him to brush away British hesitations and French hostility toward the U.N. Congo expedition. For once America has enticed African nationalist sympathy openly, and without fear of allied reproach.

The crisis has also brought about an indistinct but significant change in the Administration's policy toward Cuba itself, and toward Cuba in relation to the rest of Latin America. Some of the fervid Congressional cries for Castro's blood have lately become more muffled. True, there was the strange incident of the President's speech last month to the released Cuban prisoners, which through unfortunate overtones of "liberation" elicited shouts of war from the exiles. Were the overtones deliberate? Nobody knows, but it remains fairly clear Washington really has stopped depending on an invasion.

Luckily the State Department has also stopped muddling up the Alliance for Progress with any further requests that the Organization of American States take a hand in harrassing the island. Previously, Mr. Rusk had attempted to stifle the Cuban economy to show that Communist economics could not possibly work, a policy that shot reviving juice into South America's demagogues of the left. His present program appears far more sensible: Show the Latin that an extremely leftist government invites Soviet control. Those leftists whose ideology comes not from indoctrination but from a heart-felt resentment of the vast part American industry plays in their lives have been somewhat taken aback by the missiles; their governments, for a while at any rate, have been somewhat sobered by them.

The U.S. has gained a small advantage in Latin America. If the Administration wants to keep it, it would be immensely foolish not to realize that simple anti-Cuban propaganda fries no Latin pancakes. The Information Agency has evidently learned to prefer education to proselytizing that merely aggravates South American prejudices; the State Department and visiting Congressmen should follow its example.