The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 14

14 THE OBSERVER, SUNDAY 26 FEBRUARY 1978 "ifitlerpoiisense- Mol Tl After the Comber massacre 01-236 0202 8 St Andrew's Hill, London EC4V 5JA 26 February 1978 Castro's long march to Pretoria Up to 25,000 Cubans are serving in Africa. HUGH O'SHAUGHNESSY, in the most detailed interview on the subject ever given to a Western journalist, talks to Dr Castro's Vice-President (right) about Cuba's foreign military commitments. THE RIGHT TO BAN MARCHES THE marching season has begun early. The temptations of a pre-election year have been too much for the never over-sensitive consciences of the National Front, f-irst the Midlands, yesterday the by-election, and now we are threatened with the most provocative march imaginable a promenade down Ladbroke Grove during the Notting Hill Carnival on August liank Holiday, with the helpful theme of 'stop immigration, start Mr Martin Webster, the Front's National Organiser, makes no secret of his objective in August to force the Home Secretary to ban the carnival it is a scandal to ban us while the muggers have had a free hand for the past two years. We want to demonstrate to the Government, the police and community relations people that this banning exercise is very much a two-way weapon.

We want to make them see the logic of their Regretfully, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, supported by Merlyn Rees, was right to ban yesterday's march in Ilford. This show of force in the middle of a by-election in a racially sensitive area, with substantial immigrant and Jewish populations, was intended to stir up trouble. It is true that the National Front itself would probably not have started the physical violence. Even its chop logic can comprehend the fact that those who kiss the fasces cannot afford to attack policemen. But its aim of provoking a fight between the rowdies of the Socialist Workers' Party and the police is too apparent to be argued about.

The veneer of law-and-order to which the National Front, unlike the SWP, subscribes, ought not to deceive anybody this is an organisation devoted to the subversion of Britain's democratic and liberal order. The need to ban its most provocative demonstrations does create logical problems. For example, while the Front will pay at least lip-service to a police ban, the SWP in similar circumstances probably would not. If the police had to enforce a ban against the SWP, they might find themselves in the kind of damaging confrontation into which the RUC was enticed in the early years of the Ulster crisis. That might suck English police particularly in immigrant areas and the East End of London, where anti-police feeling already exists into the web of arrests, snatch squads, allegations of brutality, imprisonments and mock martyrs that have bedevilled Northern Ireland.

Citizens in fear But this is an argument for using the power to ban or control marches flexibly and subtly, not an excuse for abdicating control of the streets to bully-boys of Right and Left, who put ordinary citizens in fear. In doing this, they can still act with manifest reasonableness not preventing the Front from marching to their heart's content in some isolated place like Hyde Park, for example. But what of the SWP Here, as with the Front, a prudent police officer must always be guided by what is most likely to preserve the peace, rather than by any political consideration. Thus, he ought not allow himself to be cornered, when considering a ban, into the kind of artificial balance that is required, tor example, by the Independent Broadcasting Authority in vetting political programmes. Like most people, The Observer finds the rule of the fist and the boot just as obnoxious when it is exercised by the far Left as when it comes from their kindred spirits on the Right.

The sight of hundreds of young Trotskyists, monotonously chanting Callag-hand, out, out, out' at the dictation of a bull-horn, is not an edifying manifestation of democracy. But it is artificial balance to assume that a demonstration intended to savage the Labour Government's record on unemployment, for example, is as likely to provoke disorder as one in an immigrant area which noisily advocates repatriation. So the power to ban should be exercised sparingly on both sets of political extremists. The over-riding criterion must be Will a ban or a re-routing make disorder more or less likely It is not sensible to impose bans whose enforcement will lead to greater disorder. The police are normally in the best position to judge.

one can doubt that the Cubans will help the African guerrillas, and that Havana will do its best to help the emergence of a Marxist-Leninist Government in Salisbury that will have much in common with those now ruling in Angola and Mozambique. But time and again Dr Rodriguez claimed that Cuban military assistance to Africa could only be secondary to the efforts of the Africans themselves. Revolution can't be exported or imported. It's up to the movements Afterwards I reflected on the impossible task of trying to judge what proportion of Cuba's 9- million people accept and embrace Dr Rodriguez's precise revolutionary logic. On one side there are clearly many convinced supporters of Dr Castro's brand of Marxism-Leninism and Cuban nationalism who believe that there are few more worthy causes than to fight in Angola or Ethiopia against the reactionaries and the imperialists.

Government officials point out that many Cubans, now in their twenties, feel that their country's actions in Africa give them the chance to gain the spurs they were too young to win when Castro was still a guerrilla in the Sierra Maestra. In a country itself half black, many descendants of slaves will feel an instinctive sympathy for the African liberation movements. are seen at the bus stops and in the snack bars as never before. Dr Rodriguez, bearded, bespectacled and outwardly affable, is a man of consummate political gifts. An orthodox Communist long before Fidel Castro's revolution, he was at one time a Minister under the right-wing dictator General Batista when Batista and the Communists were in a tactical alliance and an outspoken critic of the guerrilla exploits of Castro and his But he joined the Castro forces in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra and is now third in hierarchy, after Fidel himself and his brother Raul, Cuba's military boss; he is the foremost international strategist in the Cuban leadership.

Talking to me about Cuban attitudes to Africa, he made it plain that Havana is thinking in terms of a commitment far beyond the present conflicts raging in the Horn of Africa. It all started, he said, in 1959. As soon as Dr Castro came to power, links were forged with African anti-colonialist movements, in the first instance those fighting the Portuguese. Then, after the death of Patrice Lumumba, Cuba became closely involved in newly-independent Congo (now Zaire). The roots go deep.

But he makes a sharp distinction. While anti-colonial forces have certainly been given aid in the form of training of guerrilla forces or of the direct participation of volunteers, he insists that Cuban troops, as such, have been sent only at the express wish of a legally constituted and widely recognised Government in order to help it to defend its territory. There have been Western jibes that Havana's troops are merely Moscow's mercenaries, and when I remarked that in sending forces to Africa, there must surely be some co-ordination with the Soviet Union, Dr Rodriguez showed himself sensitive to the point. Look, it's obvious that we have a close relationship with the Russians. But when we first sent troops to Angola we did not rely on a possible Soviet participation in the operation.

We started it in a risky, almost improbable fashion, with a group of people packed in a ship and in those British Britannia aircraft of ours. Eventually, the operation was co-ordinated with the Russians, who were beginning to send military supplies to help President Agostinho's MPLA Government in Angola. he insisted, the thing started off as a purely Cuban He went further, implicitly reserving Cuba's right to act on her own initiative in Africa in the future. When one talks of help to Zimbabwe, Namibia and the other national liberation movements we are assisting, you can't always say there's perfect co-ordination. Cuba will go on giving the African liberation movements the help they need, with or without co-ordination with other countries.

It will be according to what we So there are Cuban troops in Ethiopia What there are, he says, picking his words carefully, are Cuban specialists who are helping the Ethiopians to use the different types of military equipment, Western and Communist, in what is defensive war against a Somali invasion. Cuban specialists are at the disposal of Colonel Mengistu Haile ON THE DAY after the burning to death of 12 people by the Provisional IRA at La Mon House, Comber, Co. Down, the Irish Prime Minister, Mr Jack Lynch, addressed the annual conference of his parry, Fianna Fail. He condemned the Comber massacre and the terrorism of the Provisional IRA. He went on to repeat his call for unity, that same objective which the IRA claim to be attaining through acts like the bombing at Comber.

Now the political leaders of the two major parties in the Republic claim to be greatly interested in unifying Ireland by free consent. If this claim is true, these leaders ought to be highly sensitive to the feelings of the people whose free consent is required one million Ulster Protestants. These leaders are not at present showing any sensitivity in this regard. Can Mr Lynch not see that while terrorists are massacring innocent people in the pursuit of unity, his own calls for unity cannot possibly attract those whom he is supposed to be trying to attract? On the contrary, they disgust them, anger them and may provoke some of them to equally criminal actions of their own. The vicious cycle is simply being given another spin.

As long as the murder campaign in favour of unity continues, peaceful and democratic politicians should declare a moratorium on pro-unity utterances. If they cannot bring themselves to do that, then they should at least refrain from implying that the continuation of violence in some way proves the necessity for a united Ireland. When that argument is brought in, accompanied by formal condemnation of violence, what is wafted to Northern Ireland is not any brave new message it is the stale stench of settled and habitual hypocrisy. It is extremely difficult to convey a sense of that reality to some politicians in Ireland. Let me try by asking them tf? imagine the matter from the reverse aspect, on the following hypothesis Suppose the Mairead Corrigan Betty Williams British Government were regularly calling on the Republic to come to its abandon its and re-enter the United King dom.

Suppose that, when these calls went unheeded by the Republic, some Unionists then set about to try to make the same point by terrorist action in the Republic, not only shooting soldiers and policemen but engaging in indiscriminate slaughter by planting bombs in publicly frequented places. And suppose, finally, that the BritishPrime Minister Mr James Callaghan, for example speaking at his party conference, formally condemned this violence, reiterated his call for the Republic to re-enter the United Kingdom, and added that without such re-entry the violence which he condemned would be bound to continue. What would the reaction of the people of the Republic be Would it not be one of most intense anger, disgust, indignation and total rejection of the British demand Can we not see that this imaginary model of a British demand is a precise mirror-image of Mr Lynch's speech? Mr Lynch, who certainly does not want blood on his hands, must have been distressed by the comment of Betty Williams, later supported by Mairead Corrigan, that his recent statement on television 'gave the Provisionals the go-ahead for their Coming from these ladies, with their noble and courageous record in the Peace Movement, that comment should cause any honest and concerned politician to examine his conscience and reconsider his position. refer here not to Mr Lynch alone, but to any other politician who may feel that me-too' to the Lynch line is good politics. In the Republic it may be.

It is rotten politics in Ireland. Subsequently, Mrs Lynch rebuked the Peace Women for criticising her husband. They replied by inviting her to come to Northern Ireland and see the situation for herself. She said she and her husband would very much like to come to Northern Ireland. But not now.

Conor Cruise O'Brien CUBAN foot patrols in the streets of Johannesburg, Cuban artillery dug in on Table Mountain the possibility of Cuban troops some day coming to the aid of a beleaguered black Government in South Africa is a distant but by no means fanciful scenario as far as Havana is concerned. It is one the Cuban Government has clearly given careful thought to. If there were a black Government, legally constituted, and if it were recognised by the Africans, and if a white minority were aiming to start a guerrilla war against it, well then, it would be time to discuss Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, Vice-President of Cuba, gently discourages speculation about events on the far horizon. There are six, seven or eight ifs. Like Kipling's poem.

He prefers to talk about the present, his recent talks with leaders of the African National Congress. It's going to be a long and difficult struggle, but the new thing about it is that there is an evident uprising by the black people. And once that starts it's very difficult to Dr Rodriguez receives visitors at his office in the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, a modern building guarded by sentries with bayonets, a few hundred yards from the Plaza de la Revolucion, where Fidel Castro periodically calls together the masses. The lifts are silent, the corridors are hushed, white and gleaming, decorated with discreet lithographs and immaculately manicured palm plants in pots. In the streets, the Cuban Army, 110,000 strong and reputedly the best in Latin America, is more visible than it has ever been since Dr Castro came to power in 1959.

All day long Russian-made trucks and jeeps, white markings picked out on khaki, thread their way through the traffic in the centre of the city. Off-duty soldiers, sometimes with an arm round a khaki-clad girl friend from one of the women's services, A boom SLOWLY but confidently the private hospital sector of British medicine is expanding. But the question of how much hardship this may cause to National Health Service hospitals and patients has yet to be assessed. The growth is not only in the London area, where a few rich Britons and an unending stream of super-rich Arabs and others are able to pay often more than 100 a day for the skills of British medical workers at such luxury establishments as the Harley Street Clinic, or the newer Princess Grace Hospital. Provincial expansion is also proving worthwhile.

The British United Provident Association (BUPA), largest of Britain's private health insurance groups, has 'rescued several languishing hotels and hospitals to add to the Nuffield Nursing Homes' stock of more than 25 charitably run private hospitals throughout the country. In Manchester BUPA also plans to open a 140-bed hospital, up-graded from a smaller Roman Catholic hospital. In Cheam, Surrey, St Anthony's, a private hospital now backed by American money, may handle up to 1,000 Dutch patients a year mostly with heart complaints. The Services Secretary, Mr David Ennals, told Parliament recently that in 1976 40 new private medical establish- Rodriguez We are not Moscow's mercenaries. Mariam, head of Ethiopia's military regime, the Dergue.

Would Col. Mengistu therefore be at liberty to use these specialists later on against the Eritrean rebels No, he replied, Mengistu had no authority to use Cuban aid to put down by force the Eritrean rebellion. 'We helped the Eritreans in their fight for self determination from the time of Haile Selassie onward. We feel that there has to be some political solution to the Eritrean problem and that there have got to be talks between the Eritreans and the Central Government. But Eritrea is an internal problem of the Ethiopian On Rhodesia, Dr Rodriguez said that although he was intensely pessimistic about the possibility of a peaceful transition to majority rule, he did not quite despair.

We will give the Patriotic Front all the help they need, just as we helped the MPLA before it became the Government of Angola. If the revolutionaries still see a possibility, even a distant possibility, of a peaceful solution, we will respect their point of view. But in our inmost hearts it seems to us that the possibility of peace is more and more remote. While Smith is still leading the white minority, the possibility seems virtually If there is no peace for a black-ruled Zimbabwe, no Health 11 acre site in Cheadle, ear Manchester. So far the hearing has aceived little if any publicity, he various local area health uthorities have prepared ibmissions on request from le Health Service Board.

But is doubtful if any local itients' associations, or community health councils have much idea of what is planned. The Board sees no reason to broadcast the hearing widely. There are said to be 300 unemployed nurses in the area. How many of these are tied by families and could work part-time only and not at night Two new private hospitals would absorb both these nurses, and many more from nearby NHS hospitals. How many doctors will carry out fewer sessions for the Health Service in order to pick up proportionately more in fees from the new hospitals It is ironic that in order to SHE is no shrinking violet.

The Prime Minister on Mrs Thatcher. BREAKFAST on British Rail costs more than at Claridge's. Mr Michael McNair-WHson, MP. ANY messages transmitted from outer space are the responsibility of the BBC and the Post Office. It is their responsibility to track down illegal broadcasts.

Defence Department that hurts the But there are families don't know how many who are today mourning their son, husband or brothers who have died in some distant African bush. It is not easy in Cuba to discover whether the militants outnumber the com-plainers and the mourners or vice versa. In the bar of the hotel I met an old acquaintance, a young black government official. The thing about Cuba is that it is not really Latin American country. With our racial heritage, our music, our dance and our old religions, we are, really Service remove pay-beds from the National Health Service which is Labour Government policy it is also in the interests of the Health Services Board to approve the growth of private hospitals.

The onus at this first public hearing is likely to be on the objector to prove that a second big private hospital in Manchester would damage the NHS rather than on the board to explore this possibility strenuously itself. Clearly there has" to be some balance struck between the growth of private medicine and the good of the Health Service. However, control of private hospitals by the board may turn out to be too laissez-faire for the health of the Service and the March hearing may prove a significant turning-point in the battle being conducted with American money for more private bed space in Britain. PERHAPS the Chancellor of the Exchequer will see his way this year to relieve Shaw, Shakespeare, Mozart, Beethoven, etc, of VAT and put it instead on to pornography and glossy sex magazines, which at the moment go tax free. Sir Donald Albery.

I HAVE never seen a white man and would be most alarmed if I turned white myself. Mr A. J. P. Taylor.

Hie day Glenda Jackson helped build an irrigation dam. The money raised in Oxfam shops across Britain goes to create employment opportunities and help Oxfam finance projects in poor countries throughout the world. One recent visitor Glenda Jackson -took along some clothes her son had grown out of. She also bought some place-mats and a doormat produced in one of the 'cooperatives set up with Oxfam's help, to provide employment overseas. The money Glenda spent, and, the proceeds from the clothes she 'will go towards financing one of Oxfam's current projects.

Like the building of avillageirrigation. dam in Northern India which will enable hundreds of people to produce enough to feed themselves. Your local Oxfam shopneeds your support. Whether you come to buy or to bring along something you don't need, you'll be welcome. Please make a visit to yourj- oV, Oxfam shop soon.

OKifllll Wheretheneedisgrealest lana aiuiic Last year's figures are not yet available but the Health Services Board the result of an uneasy compromise in 1976 for: ridding NHS hospitals of pay-beds received 27 notifications last year from people intending to build new private hospitals. Removal of the pay-beds from Health Service hospitals is one reason for more private building. So too may be the increase in private health insurance spending by companies who give this 'perk1 to employees instead of rises. More people also feel driven to pay for their health, despite inflation, when limited NHS resources may result in their having to wait for treatment. But mainly it is the lure of revenue from abroad that is attracting multi-million pound backing for private hospitals.

It is estimated that the Kuwaitis and Libyans between them have spent 6,500,000 on British medical treatment in 1976. Two American-based companies, both owning a hundred or so hospitals in the hospitals in North London. One is after the now-disused Harrow School sanatorium. The other has plans for a building nearby. Many consultants live in the area and the sites are close to the respected Northwick Park and Mount Vernon hospitals.

Inevitably staff would be drawn away from these hospitals. Many of the larger private hospitals recently opened or soon to open were given the go-ahead before the Health Services Board was set up. Now planners of hospitals with more than 74 beds outside the London area must satisfy the Board at a public hearing that the hospital will not cause detriment to nearby Health Service hospitals. The first of these hearings is due to take place next month at the Board's head-quarter's in London under its chairman, Lord Wigoder. The hospital in question is one with 150 beds planned by American Medical International, owners of several luxury London hospitals, on.