The Cuban primary.

AS THE CAMPAIGNS of Walter Mondale and Gary Hart--one victorious, the other more and more reconciled to defeat--wound their several ways to San Francisco (see "Something Old and Something New," by Richard Brookhiser, p. 24), the very different campaign of Jesse Jackson headed for Panama, El Salvador, Cuba, and Nicaragua.

The itinerary was significant. It was once supposed by many observers that Jackson was running not for the nomination, which was plainly beyond his grasp, but for the symbolic role of Number One Black--the spokesman and broker for blacks within American politics. That was indeed the case. But Jackson, it is clear, also has another goal: to become a transnational Third World Force, with his own private foreign policy. So the campaign that took off with Lieutenant Goodman's return from Syria--a favor to Jackson by pro-Soviet Third World friends--ended with hero's welcomes in Cuba and Nicaragua.

The ostensible purpose of the trip was to launch what Jackson called a "moral offensive." A great believer in personal diplomacy (particularly when conducted by his own person), Jackson warned that a general Central American war loomed in the fall unless tensions could be resolved now, and his trip was intended to lessen those tensions through his mediation.

This, the diplomatic component of the trip, was a failure. None of the leaders with whom Jackson conferred proposed anything different from what they have offered many times before. The foreign ministers of the Contadora countries (Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama), who were originally on the schedule, did not meet him. The political front men for the Salvadoran guerrillas, who have sat out the war in Panama City, used him as an occasion for yet another press conference. El Salvador's President Duarte, in a joint appearance, assured Jackson that he would take his ideas to the Salvadoran people (translation: Nice to see you, Jesse, now we'll do this our own way). Fidel Castro reached into his capacious jails and doled out a few dozen prisoners, much as lesser hosts pass out cigars. Concerning the prisoner maneuver, the New York Times reported a rich detail, half Solzhenitsyn, half Evelyn Waugh. Before Jackson visited the Havana jail, the inmates were instructed to play baseball--an exercise known as the "visitors' game," since a VIP visit is the only circumstance under which it is allowed. But since Jackson showed up his customary hour or two late, the prisoners had to play seventy innings.

That was diplomacy. But there was also talk. Here Jackson, according to his Third World lights, succeeded spectacularly. His rhetoric was strictly out of the General Assembly, or the last meeting of the Non-Aligned. Laying a wreath on the tomb of Omar

Torrijos, he noted that the Panama Canal Zone had been a "burden of shame and pain on the people of Panama," characterized by the "worst dimensions of American segregation and South African apartheid." He visited Cuba's Isle of Youth, an indoctrination center for children from the African countries in which Castro keeps soldiers, and called it "one of the most magnificent expressions of God in the world today." He ended one Cuban speech, at the University of Havana, with the peroration, "Long live Cuba! Long live the United States! Long live President Castro! Long live in Martin Luther King [twice]! Long live Che Guevara! Long live Patrice Lumumba!"; another, at a Methodist church, with the cry, "Hold on, Cuba! Hold on, Castro! Hold on, Nicaragua!" (the recessional was "We Shall Overcome"). He told the Nicaraguan Council of States, a rubber-stamp parliament of Sandinista toadies, that the United States had no grounds for presumption, since, although we had a Declaration of Independence in 1776, we didn't elect a President until 1789: "The gap between General Washington and President Washington was 13 years."

This grotesque blizzard was not some fluke; it has been a long time coming. The nonsense about Washington has been a part of the Jackson spiel for months (hasn't anyone in his entourage heard of the Articles of Confederation?). On the eve of the New York primary, Jackson cited Sekou Toure and Kwame Nkrumah as forerunners. His wife preceded him to Nicaragua, and his Syrian connection goes back to 1979.

It is also possible to see in Jackson's Third Worldism an older strain of thought--one of three responses to the post-Civil War situation of American blacks. Booker T. Washington preached the gospel of hard work, from the bottom up if necessary. W. E. B. Du Bois argued that black advancement could only come after serious social change--a conclusion that ultimately led him into the Communist Party. Marcus Garvey, the most exotic of the three, expounded Pan-Africanism, a kind of crackpot racial romanticism. Jackson's career has been seen mostly as a mixture of Washington and Du Bois--the latter, obviously, in his demands for government action; the former also, in his belief in education and self-help. Perhaps what we are now witnessing is a Garvey gene, with a pro-Communist mutation. Whatever it is, it doesn't have much to do with American politics. Jackson shouldn't give up--Sekou Toure's old job is open, and Castro isn't immortal.