306 The Presidential Years
with whom he had also quarreled, should be punished. The three escaped by
the skin of their teeth, mostly thanks to the peaceful intervention of Ranković,
although they were banished, for a certain period, from the court. Mates lost
his secretarial assignment, and even Ranković did not come out unscathed.
Tito and Jovanka did not forgive him for having sided against them with the
three “reprobates” and arguing against the punitive measures they had wanted
to impose.^216 For Tito, the experience on board the Galeb was so traumatic that
he began thinking about his retirement from public life. In fact, when the sec-
retary of the Socialist Alliance came to Brioni for consultations, he mentioned
the possibility of a collective presidency, which would take his place at the head
of the federation.^217
The First Non-Aligned ConferenceThe idea of a Non-Aligned Conference, aimed to “heal the UN,” took root in
spite of incidents and dissent. To what extent it was urgent to transform the
movement of the countries that existed beyond the American and Soviet blocs
into an efficient peace instrument was confirmed the very day Tito arrived in
Egypt. On 17 April news came that a group of Cuban émigrés, organized by the
CIA, had disembarked in the Bay of Pigs and tried without success to over-
throw Fidel Castro’s regime. Nehru decided to join the conference, hoping to
prevent it from growing too radical. On 21 April in Alexandria, Tito and Nasser
signed a letter inviting the heads of twelve countries to take part in a “summit”
that would convene before the autumn plenary session of the UN General
Assembly. From 5–13 June, a preliminary conference was held in Cairo, where
the diplomats of twenty-one African and Asian states, plus Yugoslavia, prepared
the agenda of the meeting. It was not without discussion and disagreement,
since it was not easy to define such concepts as “neutrality,” “non-alignment,”
and “independence.”^218 The easiest decision was the one made to convene the
conference on 1 September 1961 in Belgrade. This was a great success for Tito,
since Yugoslavia, the only European country present (except Cyprus), found
itself at the head of a movement that encompassed more than a third of human-
ity, a quarter of the seats at the UN General Assembly, and claimed to be the
“conscience of the world.” However, in comparison with the Western or East-
ern bloc, this movement did not have much political or military weight. This is
the probable reason why neither Washington nor Moscow objected to the con-
ference; they were in agreement on at least on one point, satisfied as they were
that Mao’s China was not invited. Only France objected to the conference,
since the Algerian Liberation Front was included among the eighteen par-
ticipating anticolonialist movements, as an official representative of Algeria,