In Cuba, political prisoners wear yellow uniforms,"the wife of one prisoner told me in Havana. Originally, the color was meant, to be punitive—the same color worn by the army of defeated dictator Fulgencio Batista, with obvious implications. In the late 1960's," said another political prisoner's relative, "when my father was with Huber Matos and others in Cinco Y Medio prison, located five-and-a-half miles from Pinar Del Rio, a prison director tried to require political prisoners to change to the blue uniforms worn by common criminals. Led by Matos and his cell mates, political prisoners protested being lumped with common criminals, and refused to wear the blue uniforms. They were severely beaten." Some political prisoners then accepted the new color, but Matos and his followers never relented. "They were forced to go without any clothes at all for four months. The guards said that if they refused the blue uniforms they must go naked.

Despite the accelerated decline of America's position in the world in the intervening years, the United States remains the world's most powerful and influential nation. (Even those who measure power in terms of military strength appear more concerned about an upward trend in-Soviet military strength and a relative decline in America's strength and its willingness to use it than about current U.S. inferiority.) The position of the United States has eroded because of its own follies and the growing strength of other countries; the latter development would have occurred irrespective of U.S. actions.

A specter is haunting Europe again, the specter of a revived German menace. To an ever increasing extent commentators on me European political scene are conjuring the horrible vision of a Europe under the yoke of West Germany's rule. West Germany has come through the worldwide recession better than anyone else. It ranks fifth in the world in per capita income, second lowest with regard to both inflation and unemployment, and second lowest in work days lost through strikes. What is more, the deutsche mark is one of the hardest currencies of the world, and Bonn's foreign currency reserves are the greatest in the world.

With the possible exception of Chile no other country in 1976 received as much critical American public and press attention as did Korea. Almost to the exclusion of other issues, the criticism has been directed to the denial of human rights. Press stories, editorials, letters to the editor, Congressional hearings and legislative restrictions, TV documentaries, church newsletters—all have deplored the erosion of civil liberties in South Korea. And as the criticisms mounted, more and more voices, including those from among the ranks of Korea's traditional friends, began calling for a reduction of United States military and economic support to this country, the rebirth of whose independence was gained, at a tremendous cost in American blood and treasure.

The American electorate has acquired an ingrained prejudice against foreign aid. The public suspects that foreign aid is something the government takes from the poor in a rich country and gives to the wealthy in a poor country. This suspicion— like many of America's populist wisdoms—is the tragic truth in one of the world's poorest nations, Bangladesh.

Only a pittance of international food aid to Bangladesh feeds the starving or destitute. Even in this bumper crop year an estimated 368,000 babies and young children will die due to malnutrition or related diseases. Food aid generally does not reach the poor; 90 per cent of the 1.6 million tons of foreign food aid shipped to Bangladesh this year was used to subsidize a ration system for the middle class.

Human rights is at present a.much discussed issue in American foreign policy. What has not been discussed is the extent to which this represents a major change in American foreign policy. Consider: In 1974 the Secretary of State devoted exactly one sentence to human rights in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly. In 1975 there were four paragraphs of fairly standard rhetoric, apart from the proposal to establish a U.N. study to determine how widely torture was used as an officially sanctioned instrument of government. In addition there was an intimation of change in this sentence: "There is no longer any dispute that international human rights are on the agenda of international diplomacy." Yet there was then no evidence that Secretary Kissinger had changed the approach characterizing his tenure in office; nameiy, that American foreign policy cannot concern itself with the domestic policies of the governments with which it deals, even if they entail gross violations of human rights. We can, he insisted, only use private methods of persuasion and pressure. Foreign policy deals with the foreign policies of governments.