National Affairs: To Cuba

The day neared, plans matured, preparations were completed for President Coolidge’s visit to Cuba. ]

Dress. The impression which the trip was calculated to create became evident in a small White House news item of last month. All was being arranged even to the incidental of what the newspapermen should wear. Such of “The Boys” as expected to attach themselves to the President’s official entourage, said Secretary Everett Sanders, had best make ready their cutaway coats and pin-striped morning trousers. Silk toppers, patent leather shoes, spats and a stick would be the correct accessories. Nowhere, the inference was, is a greater premium set upon costume than at a Pan-American Congress and at this Congress, none must outplume the U. S. delegates, official or self-attached.

Delegates. To the official delegates, instructions of deeper import were given last fortnight when they assembled with Secretary of State Kellogg and called in a body on the President. With Charles Evans Hughes as their Chairman, their distinguished names were Morgan Joseph O’Brien, Henry Prather Fletcher (U. S. Ambassador to Italy), Oscar W7. Underwood (until 1927 a U. S. Senator). Secretary James Brown Scott of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Director Leo Stanton Rowe of the Pan-American Union. Three other delegates whom President Coolidge had appointed were not present to receive instructions: Dwight W. Morrow (U. S. Ambassador to Mexico), Noble Brandon Judah (U. S. Ambassador to Cuba), President Ray Lyman Wilbur of Stanford University.

The Congress. Of all the delegates, Dr. Rowe was perhaps more conversant with the nature of the Congress than anyone. The Union of which he is chief is the permanent agency for that “good will,” “co-operation,” “understanding” etc., etc. which the periodic Pan-American Congresses celebrate in top hats and cutaways (see p. 13). If asked to state reasons for the President of the U. S. signalizing the 1928 Congress by a visit and speech, Dr. Rowe might have explained in effect as follows:

“Caesar.” Britannia is said to have ruled the waves of all the oceans. Other powers have been content to rule a sea apiece. Rome was the Mediterranean’s master. The Kaiser ruled the Baltic. Mussolini claims the Adriatic. To every sea its Caesar—to the Caribbean the mighty U. S.

To mitigate such militant expressions of the Monroe Doctrine as the Nicaraguan broil, to justify the dollar sign from U. S. diplomacy south of Key West, in short, to show that though circumstance makes him seem a Caesar, the President of the U. S. is but the tribune of a peacefully potent and ambitious people,—what better gesture than for the President of the U. S. to attend a forum of what must not be thought of as the U. S. provinces; to appear, congratulate, speak and depart as a respectfully interested figure no more dominant—save by chance—than any of the republican Presidents not present?

Around the Caribbean and down the whole continent south of it lies an empire which the U. S. would never want to conquer by shrapnel, but which it never will conquer by checkbooks and sales talk so long as there is any trace of powder in the air. The pertinacity of a Sandino in Nicaragua (see p. 16) is momentarily embarrassing. The alleged economic offensive of European industrialists—British, German, Belgian—is momentarily disturbing. But both of these developments merely serve to emphasize the business wisdom of the President’s trip. Both enhance the opportunity he has created to interpret the U. S. position in what is more and more truly called the Western Hemisphere.

Trip. Thirty years ago, the Western Hemisphere became the U. S. That it might not remain so, even with Spain gone and Britain acquiescent, was perceived by the U. S. statesman who secured the Panama Canal. That the Panama Canal was a business as well as a Naval channel was perceived by the man who founded Florida’s perpetual youth—Henry M. Flagler. On his way to Havana, President Coolidge would not fail to be impressed by the Flagler monuments.

The first of these monuments would become apparent so soon as the Presidential train reached the rails of the Florida East Coast R. R. and started passing through resorts, glistening with opulence, which Henry M. Flagler’s railroad and hotels first started booming.

Florida businessmen privately estimated that the Presidential passage through their realty would nearly equal, in publicity, the cost of the 1926 hurricane. A sumptuous motorcade stood ready to show the President the boulevards, beaches and buildings of Miami and Coral Gables when his train stops there for an hour Saturday. But the President’s attention is likely to be occupied not by realty but by the Flagler genius when, reaching Everglade station south of Miami, the train starts out on a long point to a station called Jewfish. There the railway crosses an inlet to Key Largo and begins a unique run, 100 shimmering miles southwest into the Gulf of Mexico, to “America’s Gibraltar,” “the only frost-free city in the U. S.,” the southernmost U. S. port and by 300 miles the nearest U. S. city to Panama, Key West.

The Keys. Key Largo, Plantation, the Matecumbes, Indian Key, Long Key, Grassy Key, Fat Deer, Key Vaca, Pigeon, Knight’s, Little Duck, Big Pine Key, Cudjoe, the Saddle-bunch Keys, Big Coppitt, Boca Chica—in less than three hours the train clicks off the distance over bridges, causeways and the lowlying limestone reefs which Henry M. Flagler’s engineer, the late Joseph Carroll Meredith, utilized as ties for the Oversea Extension. In places, Gulf currents 30 feet deep swing eastward under the trestles.

Ferry. Spick and span in steel gray, bright brass and Sunday “whites,” the Texas, her captain & crew, will be waiting for the President at Key West to ferry him in six hours to Havana. A squadron of six destroyers led by the cruiser Memphis constitute the guard of honor. Captain Joseph R. Defrees is new aboard the Texas but his crew are well used to having glorified passengers aboard. The Texas is U. S. flagship and on her lives Admiral Henry Ariosto Wiley, commander of all the fleet.* When newsgatherers last week saw bigger & better portholes being built into the most sumptuous suite on the Texas at Brooklyn Navy Yard, they inferred the improvement was in honor of the President. But a deck officer said: “Not at all! We’re putting those in for our Admiral.” Caesar is not greater to his sailors than his chief of steel-plated triremes.

Retinue. With President Coolidge were to go Secretaries Kellogg and Wilbur, the former as an added compliment to Latin-America, the latter to rest from an arduous life, to bolster Navy morale and perhaps to see his brother, Delegate Ray Lyman Wilbur. There would not be room for the President and his two Secretaries on the Texas should they elect to sleep there instead of ashore in Havana. Commanding Admiral null was having to move out for his Commander-in-Chief as it was. Besides, the party was to include Mrs. Coolidge, Mrs. Kellogg, Mrs. Wilbur. It seemed likely that President & Mrs. Coolidge would maintain only a statutory residence on the Texas in Havana; that they would spend two nights (Jan. 15 & 16) as President Gerardo Machado’s guests on the $2,000,000 freshly redecorated third floor of the Cuban Presidential Palace.

As every Texas “gob” knew, however, President Coolidge was “going to hold a reception aboard of us. We’ll be loaded to the gigs with swallow tails.”

Havana. Heralds of President Coolidge’s visit appeared in Havana’s sky last fortnight—Delegate Oscar W. Underwood and Cuba’s Minister to the U. S., Orestes Ferrara, who flew over together from Key West.

From reading and hearsay, President Coolidge could doubtless visualize some of the things he was going to see, such as:

The placid, palm-fretted harbor where the Maine was blown up, guarded by hoary Morro Castle, which was begun in 1587 by Felipe II of Spain as protection against Sir Francis Drake and his marauding ilk. Perhaps someone on the Texas could point out the stone chute in the seaward wall where executed prisoners used to be slid to the sharks.

The heavy, bleached Cuban architecture —single-story houses of limestone blocks; ponderous doors of studded mahogany; immense windows with iron grilles; big, fancy locks, bolts and knockers. There are no front yards.

The famed Prado, boulevard of wealth and fashion, has trees down the middle, colonnaded sidewalks.

On the Malecon, a seawall boulevard, the Army Staff Band plays for the public; in Central Park, the Havana Municipal Band. In the Tropical Gardens, free beer is served to all.

Yachting, swimming, golf, tennis, dancing, horse-racing, roulette are sports familiar to the U. S. Unfamiliar is Havana’s jai-alai (pronounced “high-a-ligh”), or Spanish handball, played in huge public frontones (courts) by native and imported professionals.

Cuban officials would not fail to point out to President Coolidge the 15½-million-dollar pleasure park projected near Havana by the U. S. Biltmore interests (John McEntee Bowman, chief); the 706-mile highway which Cuba is building from Pinar del Rio on the west to Santiago de Cuba on the southeast coast.

They would be disappointed if President Coolidge did not understand why Columbus said: “The most beautiful land that human eyes have ever seen.”

Return. Soon after his third sundown in Havana, President Coolidge will ask the Texas to ferry him back to Key West.

*Since November. The Texas, commissioned in 1914 and modernized last winter, has been U. S. flagship since July. Like all ships, the Texas has her own history, at least one episode in which has never been officially published. One night during the War (so the sailors’ story goes) the Texas was steaming full speed past Long Island. One of the deck officers on watch was a young Naval Reserve officer, in private life a wealthy yachting dilettante. The waters around eastern Long Island were as familiar to him as had been his nursery floor. When he saw Fire Island dead ahead of the Texas he knew what he saw and rushed from one to another of his superiors giving the alarm, asking permission to change the course. One and all, the Texas’ officers pooh-poohed the young busybody, who dashed at last to Rear Admiral Victor Blue, the commandant. Admiral Blue sprang from bed, but too late. The Texas ran aground on Fire Island. In gentlemanly fashion, Admiral Blue took the blame.