Focuses on separatism in Canada. Threat of Quebec separatism; Political strategy of Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Focuses on general elections scheduled to be held in Canada in May 1979 while discussing chief executive officer of Quebec René Lévesque's promise to his province for a referendum on separation after the elections. Confusion among Canadians regarding Lévesque's promise; Possibility of victory of Lévesque in the elections; Discussion on a sovereignty-association proposed by Lévesque.

Nothing has embarrassed the self-proclaimed Spanish democracy of King Juan Carlos and Premier Adolfo Suarez more than the case of Els Joglars, a Catalan mime troupe convicted of insulting the army. Protests have come from the best-known writers and artists of Europe. Paloma Picasso has warned that the Picasso family will never agree to the transfer of her father’s “Guernica” from New York’s Museum of Modern Art to Spain until the four imprisoned actors are released. The case is so ludicrous, anachronistic and unjust that many outsiders are convinced the King will find a way soon to free the actors and end the embarrassment. But whether or not the actors leave their prisons in Barcelona before the end of their two-year sentences, the case has revealed some of the flaws in Spain’s remarkable but fragile attempt at transition from the dictatorship of the late Francisco Franco to a parliamentary government. A latent, unhealthy fear of the army still ties the tongues of critics. And, after almost four decades of Francoism, people here feel that injustice to an individual or defilement of a principle are not worth fretting about so long as the outer forms of democracy are intact...

Americans, when they think of Mexico, see it as a pleasant place for midwinter holidays, a rich source of (perhaps authentic) pre-Columbian treasures, an accommodating provider of divorces, or a more or less permanent refuge from the demands of 20th-century industrial life. However, Mexico presents no problems, and therefore Americans do not think about it very much. But for Mexicans, the United States is the big problem and they think about it all the time. They have been doing so with renewed intensity during the current administration of President Luis Echeverria, a proud, ambitious man in a proud, small country. Mexican relations with the United States have long been founded on humiliation and dependence. Mexicans know that the United States is usually strong enough to work its will - whether conquering all the land from Texas to California or invading in pursuit of bandits or closing the border to punish Mexico for lax drug enforcement. All this is seen by Mexicans as a reflection of their weakness as much as American strength. It is not an easy assessment for them to accept. No matter how urbane he may seem, a Mexican official has trouble keeping resentment out of his feelings when he deals with the United States...

Reports on Mexican President Luis Echeverria Alvarez's reaction to Spain's Generalisimo Francisco Franco's execution of five revolutionaries in Spain in September 1975. Echeverria's description of the Spanish dictatorship; Call to the United Nations Security Council to expel Spain from the U.N.; Destruction of Echeverria's campaign to succeed Kurt Waldheim as Secretary General in 1976.

Focuses on relations between the U.S. and Haiti as of October 1974. Reasons for the stoppage of foreign aid to Haiti by the U.S. Agency for International Development in 1963; Factors that contributed to industrial establishments by U.S. businessmen in Haiti; State of agricultural production in the country in the 1970s.

The difficult negotiations now in process between the United States and Panama over a new Panama Canal treaty are almost certain to ignore the rights of one people: the descendants of the blacks who dug the canal in the first place. “We are just hoping,” said a black who lives in the U.S. Canal Zone, “that whatever happens between the two countries, our position doesn’t become worse.” It probably will. Although Americans look on the Panama Canal as one of their great engineering achievements, it was dug mainly by foreign workers, mostly blacks from the West Indies. Few of these blacks left when the job was finished in 1914. They stayed on to help run the canal or to work in Panama. Their children did the same. As a result, Panama’s two main ports, Panama City and Colón, have urban ghettos of English-speaking blacks in the slums near the U.S. Canal Zone, and the Canal Zone itself has embarrassing communities of virtually segregated blacks. They are a people without power. Although many are America-oriented, they are not American. Although they are now citizens of Panama, they are a distant cultural minority. Their descendants will probably be assimilated, some day into the racially mixed Panamanian culture, but that does not help the present generations...

Focuses on Jehovah's Witnesses, a social movement against Nazis, as of July 16, 1973. Number of members of Jehovah's Witnesses in Africa; Founder of Jehovah's Witnesses; Factors that led to the establishment of Jehovah's Witnesses.

The article discusses the genocide in Sudan. For more than a decade, an obscure civil war has ravaged Sudan. Largely ignored by the rest of the world, it is Africa's longest war, paralyzing the Sudan's three southern provinces intermittently from 1955 and continuously from 1963. The war has led to perhaps a half-million deaths and has forced 200,000 southerners to flee for refuge in neighboring countries. All the terror and turmoil have come from cultural hatred. The Sudan is the largest country in Africa, about a third the size of the United States, with a north of scrublands and sandy, arid hills, and a south of forests and grasslands. Swamps separate the two regions.

This article discusses about the Asians settled in Nairobi, Kenya. Most of the shops of downtown Nairobi are in the hands of Indians and Pakistanis. Living in a land run by African blacks, are the most visible evidence of the gravest minority problem in East Africa today. There are 350,000 Asians, as the Indians and Pakistanis are called here, among East Africa's 29 million people. About half of them live in Kenya, a quarter in Tanzania, a quarter in Uganda. They are the shopkeepers, clerks, artisans and foreman of East Africa. The Asians fill just those jobs and places that Africans believe they now have enough experience and training to take. Although they are called Asians, many either were born in East Africa or have spent most of their lives there. They consider East Africa as their home.

The aftermath of the murder of Kenyan political leader Tom Mboya has mocked what he stood for. Mboya, who seemed to represent all that was modern in Africa to the rest of the world, always shunned the appeals to tribal allegiance that have crumbled political stability elsewhere in Africa. His constituents were mainly the urban workers groping for a modern way of life. Yet his assassination on the first Saturday in July, 1969 unleashed intense tribal hatreds. Kenya faces a long and dangerous period of instability unless the government can somehow placate his grieving Luo people.

Images play as important a roIe as guns in the Nigerian civil war. The Biafran secessionists, among Africa’s most sophisticated peoples, have known from the beginning that their chances for success depended as much on evoking world sympathy as on holding back the federal army. Now, after twenty months of war, it is clear that the Biafrans have been far more adept at propaganda than soldiering. If they survive in some sovereign form, they will owe it to their skill with images. Part of the Biafran success in public relations stems from the federal Nigerian Government’s failure at it. At the beginning, the Nigerians made absolutely no intelligent effort to get their point of view across. In fact, the government’s publicists often hurt the Nigerian case as much as they helped it. Many officials of the Ministry of Information were new at their job. Before the troubles, the top information officers had been Ibos, but they fled to their tribal home in eastern Nigeria soon after thousands of Ibos were massacred in northern Nigeria in September, 1966. When the eastern region seceded and called itself Biafra in May, 1967, these civil servants remained there. Besides lacking experience, the new Nigerian information officers also had the disadvantage of working for a military government...

Reviews the book "Agents of Change: A Close Look at the Peace Corps," by David Hapgood and Meridan Bennett.

The article discusses various aspects of the U.S. foreign policy in Africa. For years, the American Federation of Labor & Congress of Industrial Organization (AFL-CIO) has pursued its own foreign policy in Latin America and now it is turning to Africa. In January 1968 Vice President H. Humphrey visited Kenya with a large party that included executive director Irving Brown. Despite unpopularity Brown's African American Labor Center was set up in 1965 in Kenya. The Center often gives office equipment and cars to African unions or creates vocational training schools. But the Center also tries to fulfill the traditional AFL-CIO role of helping non-Communist unions fight alleged Communist union.

Little can be done to save the lives of those bloat-bellied children of Biafra until the civil war in Nigeria is over. That is the heart of the matter; all else is peripheral. The pitiable pictures in the London press, the stricken conscience of the British people, the rush of volunteers to feed and nurse Biafran babies, the American powdered milk piling high on the docks of Lagos, the mad scrambling of relief workers to crack Nigerian inefficiency and push the supplies somewhere, somehow — all mean little as long as the war goes on. Some idealists believe that the world’s indignation, outcry and shamed anger over the thousands dying in Biafra will force the two sides to end their war, in the name of decency and humanity, but that is doubtful. “No group can stop a war because people are dying,” said Alison Ayida, an influential Nigerian civil servant, in a meeting with foreign newsmen in Lagos recently. “It’s never been done in a war before, and it won’t be done in Nigeria — unless you stop the cause of the war. That’s what war is all about.” The federal government feels that it is about to crush the rebellion in Biafra, and it is in no mood to be cheated of this victory by pictures of starving children...

Complete apartheid reigns at the winery of fictional Jock Silberstein: white wine is bottled by colored girls in white uniforms while red wine is bottled by white girls in brown uniforms. Jock Silberstein is a creation of Etienne Leroux, an Afrikaner novelist who explores sex, evil and decadence, and sometimes treats Afrikaners and apartheid with mocking irony. By doing so, Leroux and André P. Brink, another Afrikaner novelist who is like him, desert the traditional way of the pastoral, patriotic and puritanical Afrikaans novel. The Afrikaner literary set in South Africa likes to describe the new novels of Leroux and Brink as "the renaissance in Afrikaans prose.” That’s overblowing it, but the novels do have significance, for politics as well as art. Afrikaner nationalists have long looked on their language, which comes from 17th-century Dutch, as more than a means of expression; to them, it is an end in itself. Using Afrikaans glorifies nationalism. Extreme nationalist Afrikaners, convinced that Leroux and Brink use it in a way that soils Afrikaner nationalism, now condemn the two writers as traitors to their culture. After the Boer War, Afrikaners, descendants of the early Dutch settlers, tried to avenge the humiliation and indignities of their defeat by intensifying their belief in the worth of their own culture...

The white mercenaries of the Congo, now in rebellion, have humiliated black men everywhere in Africa, and by doing so shattered some of the self-confidence that Africans need to run their affairs well. Moreover, some Africans have struck out at whites to assuage this humiliation, and the beatings and killings have torn relations between white men and black men over the continent. These are terrible consequences. Yet it is pointless to condemn these confused, aimless and distorted men. Their role in the Congo was created by others. The rebellion of the mercenaries was the legacy of an attempt by the United States Government to stage-manage the unmanageable Congo. Using them worked for a while; then they flew out of hand. Why blame them?...

Two simple posters explain the civil war in Nigeria. The first, a thin strip, was glued to the walls and windows of most public buildings in Enugu, the capital of Eastern Nigeria, a few weeks before the region seceded on May 30 to become the Republic of Biafra. The poster shows four men. Three look alike, obviously Ibos, the dominant tribe of the east. The fourth man is a Hausa from Northern Nigeria. “This Is Your Region,” the poster says, “Report Any Strange Face to the Police.” The second poster, a little larger and more colorful, was slapped all over Lagos, the federal capital of Nigeria, a few weeks before federal troops invaded Biafra on July 6, the beginning of the civil war. This poster shows a monstrous drawing of the severed head of Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu, the ruler of Biafra, lying under the heavy combat boot of a Nigerian soldier. “Crush Rebellion,” the poster says...

Reviews the book "Africa from Independence to Tomorrow," by David Hapgood.

In 1963, during a Security Council debate on apartheid, politician Adlai Stevenson announced dramatically that the U.S. had banned all sale of arms to the Republic of South Africa. The step had been taken, he said, to show U.S. government's deep concern that South Africa refused to abandon its racist policies. In March 1963, a reactor went critical at a research center near Pretoria, and South Africa joined the nuclear age. The feat was made possible by the firm that designed and built the equipment: Allis-Chalmers of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Reviews the book "Haile Selassie: The Conquering Lion," by Leonard Mosley.

This article focuses on the Medicare bill that has been proposed in the U.S. Congress. Medicare - as passed by the House - would discourage hospitals from making arrangements that would draw specialists into a comprehensive medical center. Every hospital under Medicare would have to follow the lead of the most progressive hospitals, and appoint a committee to review cases periodically, to see that no doctor was keeping his patient in the hospital too long. Another provision on the bill allows federal pressure on medical practices.

Lie Detectors - The Industry, the Technology and the Victims. The first lie detector, employed centuries ago, was a handful of rice dropped into the mouth of a suspect. If the rice stayed dry while he answered questions, he clearly was a liar — exposed under the questionable theory that a liar's salivary glands would dry up when gripped by fear. The lie detector used most commonly today is far more sophisticated. Developed by the psychologist and criminologist Leonard Keeler almost forty years ago, it comprises a pneumatic tube that fits across a subject's chest to measure breathing, an inflatable rubber cuff that wraps around the arm to measure blood pressure and a pair of electrodes that touch the fingers and, by the flow of current, measure the dampness of the palm. These instruments activate pens that draw wiggles and waves on a rolling sheet of paper — a process that gives the lie detector its modern name, polygraph, Greek for "many writings." In theory, an examiner can look at the chart, note any unusual wiggles and waves, and nab his man. This polygraph, obviously more complicated than a few grains of rice, is also touted as more accurate. In truth, it is not...

This article focuses on the possibility that the assassination of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy might harm the U.S. Army's civilian marksmanship program due to public revulsion to the weapon which was used in the murder. The Army oversees civilian marksmanship through its National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice, which is headed by Colonel John K. Lee. The board sets up instruction programs, organizes the annual National Rifle and Pistol Matches, and markets used guns to the public. It does all this through the National Rifle Association (NRA). The Army sells rifles at cost to civilians only if they are members of the NRA, and it gives instruction to gun clubs only if they are affiliated with the NRA.

A peculiar disease has been isolated by medical scientists in the United States. The disease was first discovered by physician J.V. Brown in the "Western Journal of Surgery." Commerce houses are now marketing products designed to cope with it. Statistics on incidence and morbidity are scanty and the name of the disease is hazy. Some doctors call it "the fast draw syndrome"; others, "the Dodge City syndrome." It is most prevalent, of course, among the numerous special gun clubs that have sprouted across the land in recent years. Members, taking a leaf out of days of yore and some scripts of today, draw guns from their holster, quick as lightning and fire away. Unlike their legendary heroes they don't shoot at one another but aim at balloons. Sometimes though they miss the balloon and hit themselves in the right foot. Brown observed sixteen cases of the syndrome before writing his article "Gunshot Wounds of Lower Extremity: Fast Draw Syndrome." The typical case of the fast draw syndrome according to Browne is a young man in his late teens or early twenties who presents with a small calibre gunshot wound of the lower extremity, accidentally self-inflicted, while practicing a fast 'draw.'

According to the executive council of AFL-CIO, the so-called trade unions of Soviet Union are nothing but agencies of communist dictatorship. This implies that the unions in The U.S. are anything but agencies of government and big business. British Guiana is a good place to begin. The situation in British Guiana is far more complicated than that and its generous aid has involved the AFL-CIO in racial and political strife. In addition, not all the aid given by the AFL-CIO has come from the labor treasury. In British Guiana, as elsewhere in Latin America, the AFL-CIO has operated with money supplied by the United States Government and big business.

The article presents information about U.S. politics. The Republican candidate Barry Goldwater presented his precise views on the problem of civil rights. First, he made it clear that he considered States' rights the cornerstone of the republic. He did not see any conflict between States' rights and civil rights. On any particular issue, either one or the other counted, never both. Voting, for example, was clearly a civil right, and no state had the right to take this away from an individual. Goldwater stayed with these views as late as the University of Mississippi crisis last year.

This article reports the National Draft Goldwater Independence Day Rally, staged by the National Draft Goldwater Committee, held on July 4, 1963, in Washington, D.C. This Republican national convention was held for convincing every participants, specially politicians and reporters, to nominate Republican Barry Goldwater. The arranging Committee was headed by Texas Republican Chairman Peter O'Donnell, Jr. The main focus during the convention was on youths. The young people much preferred to think of their so-called hero, Goldwater. The rally was much dominated by youth and Dixie.

Reviews two books about Africa. "The Human Factor in Changing Africa," by Melville J. Herskovits; "Copper Town: Changing Africa. The Human Situation on the Rhodesian Copperbelt," by Hortense Powdermaker.

This article presents information on the public relations set-up of U.S. armed forces. One of the most significant works involving the public relations group of the U.S. armed forces is to capture mass media's attention to military propaganda's. In this context, the U.S. Dept. of Defense cooperates with various Hollywood producers in their endeavor of producing movies or television shows that shows U.S. armed forces in good light. The audio-visual division of the department scrutinizes scripts thoroughly before extending any sort of cooperation. A fixed set of guidelines is present to this effect which needs to be followed while approving scripts. The cooperation extended by the department helps producers save a lot of money.

This article discusses various issues related to the U.S. military forces. Public relations is among the newest of U.S. military weapons. Although military commanders and the War Department issue battle reports that were printed or elaborated by the press during the Civil War and the Spanish-American War, the U.S. military service did not issue its first formal press release until 1904. U.S. spends 59 per cent of its more than $80 billion budget on national security every year. However, the U.S. President says that they should guard against unwarranted influence by the military-industrial complex.

This article discusses about the plans of the U.S. government regarding the biggest public works project. The federal government has decided to spend billions of dollars for 41, 000 miles of superhighways criss-crossing the nation. Taxpayers are supporting the program because it promises to satisfy their hunger for cars and roads. A driver will be able to travel from coast to coast at sixty to seventy miles an hour without encountering a single stop sign, traffic light or railroad crossing. In the main, these highways with entry only at selected places, will have four lanes, swelling to six and eight lanes near metropolitan areas.

Luis Muñoz Marín, Puerto Rico's first elected Governor, remains in La Fortaleza, Puerto Rico. Despite his victory, a threat lingers, perhaps not to his power, but to the political stability of Puerto Rico. And, while the threat evolves primarily from clericalism, part of the threat also stems from Muñoz Marín himself. During the campaign, the flare-up over the tactics of the bishops, who issued two pastoral letters forbidding Catholics to vote for Muñoz Marín obscured some of the political problems of Puerto Rico. The Governor's rout of the new Christian Action Party, a creature of the bishops, tended to fill his supporters, particularly abroad, with a heady optimism, blinding them to the dangers still enveloping democracy on the island.

This article focuses on possibilities of the future political scenario after the fall of the regime of Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina in Dominican Republic which is tottering. The chaos and anger that will follow the fall, there will be no embrace. The sudden anti-Trujillo policy of the U.S. and the dramatic condemnation of the Dominican Republic by the Organization of American States (OAS) at San Jose have come too late to avert what State Department planners fear most an anti-American, Fidel Castro-leaning successor to Trujillo. There are degrees of bitterness and contempt, and the exact character of tile post-Trujillo regime will depend on the forces used to overthrow the Generalissimo.

ONCE A YEAR America dances in a comic ballet against the backdrop of a world of terror. The dance masters call their creation, Operation Alert, fitting it snugly into a continuous show entitled, Civil Defense. This year’s show took place May 3. In New York, Civil Defense authorities qualified the Men’s Bar at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel as a shelter area, and 100 men continued to sip their highballs as three mythical nuclear bombs hurtled toward the city. At Yankee Stadium, bleacherites cowered under the stands while more affluent customers remained in their comfortable grandstand seats. Several Manhattan firms stopped work, but one company declared its 400 employees “automatically dead” and kept them on the job. In Washington, Congress ignored the drill, and President Eisenhower spent the day elsewhere. Only one top government official scurried from the city to his secret command post in Virginia — Leo A. Hoegh, Director of the Office of Civil Defense and Mobilization. The State Department set a new record as 4,000 employees tucked their secret papers into safes and rushed from the building in eight minutes (previous record: twelve minutes)...

THE BRUISED cultural feelings of Washington received a fillip of sorts during the week of April 17, when twenty-eight writers and artists from eleven countries assembled for an annual congress sponsored by the capital’s Institute of Contemporary Arts and financed by the Ford Foundation. The roster included Italian Nobel-Prize poet Salvatore Quasimodo, American poets Richard Eberhart, Stanley Kunitz and Allen Tate, England’s critic-poet Sir Herbert Read and potter Bernard Leach, French poet Yves Bonnefoy and Brazilian novelist Erico Verissimo. Keeping close to a prepared schedule, they ate, drank and partied together, delivered lectures, plunged into panel discussions, declaimed poetry and exchanged views on the theme of the congress — the status of the artist. Leach even potted. While these activities did not tear headlines from the other major events of the week (the convening of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the opening of the Washington Senators’ annual drive to soar higher than eighth place), enough occurred to make Washington cultural buffs puff out their chests and, for at least a week, forget Howard Taubman...

ON MARCH 4, the 4,309-ton French freighter La Coubre, carting seventy-six tons of Belgian grenades and ammunition to the army of Fidel Castro, exploded in Havana harbor, killing more than seventy-five seamen, dock workers and firefighters. The series of deadly blasts triggered a series of sensational questions that hit headlines in both the United States and Cuba. Had an American agent or anti-Castro Cuban slipped aboard and left a time bomb in the hold? Had a careless dock worker dropped a match into the munitions? Had a cargo net snapped, unleashing crates of grenades against the deck? Had a plane sneaked low across the harbor and tossed bombs into the freighter? Other questions, tinged with less excitement, were also evoked. But, too theoretical, old and uncomfortable, they made few headlines. They are questions which have arisen time after time, applied to incident after incident, in the last decade. Their most cogent expression came from Colombian liberal Eduardo Santos in 1955. “Against whom are we Latin Americans arming ourselves?”...

In the world of U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics H J Anslinger, the drug addict is an “immoral, vicious, social leper,” who cannot escape responsibility for his actions, who must feel the force of swift, impartial punishment. This world of Anslinger does not belong to him alone. Bequeathed to all of us, it vibrates with the consciousness of twentieth-century America. Anslinger, however, has been its guardian. As America’s first and only Commissioner of Narcotics, he has spent much of his lifetime insuring that society stamp its retribution in to the soul of the addict. In his thirty years as Commissioner (Anslinger is now sixty-seven), he has listened to a chorus of steady praise. Admirers have described him as “the greatest living authority on the world narcotics traffic,” a man who “deserves a medal of honor for his advanced thought,” “one of the greatest men that ever lived,” a public servant whose work “will insure his place in history with men such as Jenner, Pasteur, Semmelweiss, Walter Reed, Paul Ehrlich, and the host of other conquerors of scourges that have plagued the human race.” But some discordant notes, especially in recent years, have broken through this chorus...

MEXICO CITY’S Palace of Fine Arts assigns one of its salons to modern art and another to Mexican art, but both, like all the others, exhibit the same kind of paintings. In tiers of galleries, this huge museum offers little but work by twentieth-century Mexicans. A first look is far from a dull experience. Eager for more, I marched from room to room, excited by a mural still in progress, by the stark perspective of Siqueiros, by the cluttered symbols of Rivera, by the bright colors and stunted figures of young artists, by the mystery of a powerful art spawned in a political revolution. Only later did doubt creep in. Where do young Mexicans go, I wondered, to find out about Botticelli or El Greco or Rembrandt or Degas or Picasso or de Kooning...?

IT IS fashionable in literary circles to snicker at Arthur E. Summerfield, the former Chevrolet dealer who may have produced one of the most publicized cases of poor judgment in the history of criticism. But the Postmaster General merely carried the logic of traditional Post Office procedures to their proper conclusion. Through the years, these procedures have led to the seizure of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Caldwell’s Tobacco Road as obscene literature, and Sholom Aleichem’s Bewitched Tailor, abolitionist pamphlets, discussions of the French Revolution, the Economist (London), and a Russian chess book as political propaganda. Vested with these traditional powers of censorship, Summerfield, a man who admits to reading little fiction, decided that D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover “taken as a whole, is an obscene and filthy work”; literary critics and at least one federal judge decided otherwise. Snickering at this difference in judgment seems like misplaced energy. Rather than examine the critical faculties of Summerfield, it would make more sense to examine the censorship powers of the Post Office...

MEXICO CITY’S Concordia, a restaurant doubling as a playhouse, introduced me to Mexican theatre. As I approached the place, several young people were milling about on the street in front, including a huge ruffian with a black eye. Spotting him, I thought that excursions to the Mexican stage were perhaps not for me. But, suddenly, he pushed open the door and jumped into the restaurant, the others rushing after him. My ruffian and his friends were actors waiting for their cues during the evening’s first performance of Las cosas simples (The Simple Things), a play by a twenty-seven-year-old Mexican, Hector Mendoza. Inside, watching the second performance, I discovered that mistaking actors for spectators was part of the production’s charm. The play was about life in a diner near a college, and the Concordia looked just like that. The actors performed around a luncheon counter and five tables in front, while the audience munched their supper and followed the play from the other twenty-five tables. At times the actors moved into the audience to borrow a napkin or ask for a match — on one occasion, to kiss a bald patron on the head. The Concordia and Las cosas simples, which evoked a Saroyanesque atmosphere, are not entirely typical of Mexican theatre, but they offered a promise that the Mexican stage bristled with vitality. Several weeks of theatre-going have fulfilled that promise...

A potful of hot water gurgled down on us as we waited, caught in a giggling, shoving crowd, outside Washington’s Coffee ‘n Confusion Club, a beatnik haven marking its first Saturday night of business in the nation’s capital. An irate neighbor in an upstairs apartment had tossed out the hot but not boiling water. The sprinkles from above alighting on the sprinkle of beards in the crowd symbolized one of the oddest clashes in the history of this clash-ridden federal town. For several months now, the prudery of Washington has been at war with the rebellion of its youth. The war started when a 24-year-old self-styled poet, William A. Walker, decided to open his club. Following the style of shops in San Francisco’s North Beach, it would sell coffee, pastries, biscuits, cream cheese, bagels and poetry...

For many years Howard Fast the Communist obscured our view of Howard Fast the writer. Flaunting contempt at Congress, issuing tracts against "bourgeois, decadent" authors, rallying sympathy for the Soviet Union, he stood between us and his books and kept us from a special insight into the intellect of an American Communist. Fast, who has left the party, may have represented, in some ways, the essence of America's own brand of communism. The clues to understanding him as a Communist lie in understanding him as a writer. Fast's novels had tremendous circulation in the Communist world after World War II and, in fact, enjoyed much popularity here until the press advertised his link with the Communist Party in the late 1940s. His Soviet popularity ended when he left the party in 1957. Although his resignation helped reopen doors to American publishers and movie producers, most of the fiction of his Communist period has remained unread here. We have slipped Fast into our stereotype of the ex-Communist and perfunctorily welcomed him as one more defector who finally has seen the light...

THE FIRST Inter-American Music Festival opens April 18 in Washington. The festival originally had been scheduled for April of last year, and New Orleans, which aspires to be the modern hub of the Americas, was the site chosen. The selection aimed to blend the old musical tradition of the city with the more recent Latin American hue that has covered the port commercially. But several months before the scheduled opening, with almost all commissioned music completed, officials mysteriously called everything off. And the music has marked time for a year. In calling off the event, the authorities concerned mumbled an odd excuse: the postponement was due to a delay in construction of an outdoor concert stage near the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. This was the first inkling most New Orleanians had that anyone ever contemplated building such a stage, and since then there has not been another scrap of information about it. Last December 8, The New York Times, while discussing the upcoming event in Washington, offered a more logical excuse: the festival was postponed last year so that it would not conflict with the program of the Institucion Jose Angel Lamas in Caracas and the Casals Festival in Puerto Rico. But this, while justifying a change of time, does not explain the change of place. Both the initial announcement and the Times interpretation were too polite to hit the mark. New Orleans did not have a music festival last year because its businessmen, who have spent quantities of money and energy in the last fifteen years to attract Latin American trade, did not feel like wasting either to attract Latin American culture. The roots of the difficulty stretch to the nineteenth century, when New Orleans was the center of French Opera in the United States...

“NOBODY outside of New Orleans gives a hoot about Ewing Poteet,” claims Ewing Poteet, a smiling, rumpled ex-fiddler, as he goes about his business of trying to whirl the excitement of theatre into the heart of New Orleans. He plies one of the odd American trades. About 1,500 miles from Broadway, Poteet, drama critic for the New Orleans Item, covers the waterfront of theatre — the amateur clubs, the touring companies, the college shows. He covers the stuff few give a hoot about. No one seems to care if Poteet dulls or excites taste for theatre. No one cares if he is foolish or brilliant, if he upholds theatre or sneers at it, if he knows how to write. Yet most Americans turn to writers like Poteet when they want news and comment about theatre. At least 140,000,000 Americans do not read Brooks Atkinson every morning. The words of the New York Times drama critic or his Broadway colleagues make no impression on millions who, by harsh chance, live outside metropolitan New York. The forty-four-year-old Poteet, in his seventh year as Item critic, is more than just his newspaper’s theatre man. Most non-New York critics are the drama-music-movie-radio-television-nightclub-book-phonograph-art editors of their outfits. While Poteet does not dabble in all these beats, he does have an added chore: he spends half his journalistic hours covering the civil courts of New Orleans...