Huber Matos, Cuba's best-known political prisoner, was released on October 21, 1979, after completing "every minute" of a twenty-year prison sentence. Matos had helped make Fidel Castro's revolution, not only as a military commander in the rebel army, but by persuading the then president of Costa Rica, Jose Figueres, to send arms to Castro. When Matos asked to resign from Castro's government because he disapproved of its increasingly Marxist direction, he was charged with "slandering the Revolution," an accusation later changed to "treason."

You may remember the event. In October, 1977, German commandos rescuing hijacked hostages in Mogadishu. I watched the televised reports of the venture in somewhat idyllic circumstances: in the local tavern of a small Spanish village whose name means, in the regional dialect, "a forgotten nook away from the world," an atmosphere so innocent that one has to remind oneself, sometimes, that some of the most serious matters are really serious.

While the eyes of the West rivet upon Soviet expansionism in Southwest Asia, another drama moves to center stage in the Balkans.

There is considerable wishful thinking, particularly in Western Europe, about the Soviets' inability to engage their forces in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, maintain their defenses against China, and still cause difficulty in Eastern Europe after the death of Yugoslavia's president, Josip Tito. This is the same kind of rationalization that for two decades lulled the West into letting its defenses erode to a scandalous level.

Since the fall of Saigon in April, 1975, the United States has been attempting to define a new security role for itself in Southeast Asia. Our ejection from the Indochina peninsula terminated a quarter-century of confused and distorted perceptions of American priorities and interests in the region, so it is natural that it is followed by a period of reevaluation and adjustment. Nevertheless, there has been a clear lack of urgency in defining a new role for ourselves in the area, and the reasons for the delay are not hard to find

If you spend enough time in Israel and talk with enough people from enough different communities, you becdme aware that each "new immigrant" group feels it is being discriminated against in favor of another. Oriental Jews complain about bias in favor of Western Jews, and both groups complain that much more is being done for the universally disliked Georgians. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the smallest and most controversial group of new immigrants— the Falashas, the Ethiopian Jews who now number about 28,000, of whom 300 are in Israel—is their lack of complaint, indeed their joy of having finally arrived in Zion.