National Affairs: Cuba

The State Department, with its chief away, remained silent while the crisis over Cuba’s lottery and her railroad bill (TiME, Aug. 13, Aug. 27, Sept. 3) developed or died out (it is too early yet to say which).

Colonel Tarafa, the Cuban railway magnate who wants to tax American sugar companies on their private Cuban railroads and ports, went to New York to confer with the sugar interests. He conferred and issued several statements that a compromise was being reached. Others cast doubt on this prospect. If a satisfactory solution is not reached the State Department will be called upon to decide whether the Tarafa railroad bill,* now in the Cuban Congress, is detrimental to the rights of Americans who have capital invested in the Cuban sugar industry.

*Last week it was stated in TIME, in connection with the Tarafa railroad bill, that “in Cuba it is sometimes said that . . . the Rockefeller-Morgan interests run the railroads.” The firm of J.P. Morgan & Co. now states that it has “no interest, direct or indirect, in the Tarafa railroad bill and has not supported it.”