CUBA: Hash

One of Cuba’s favorite dishes is ajiaco criollo, a peppery hash of vegetables, jerked beef and bananas. Alert Correspondent Tom Pettey of the New York Herald

Tribune spotted ajiaco criollo, amid the babble of political chatter that filled Havana, as the word most descriptive of the island’s whole situation. Havana simmered with several hundred master statesmen, scarcely two alike after eight years of pulverizing tyranny. Into the simmering pot, in front of the Presidential Palace, peered Cuba’s hungry but critical citizens. They looked in vain for a master cook. Only one ingredient in the pot suited every taste and that was proud resistance to U. S. intervention. The Sergeants. There were the Army’s non-commissioned officers, on a spree. They had seen last month how neatly their superior officers led by Col. Horacio Ferrer had pushed over the Machado government. For three weeks they had whispered out of the corners of their mouths to the enlisted men that many of the officers were still loyal to Machado, that Provisional President de Cespedes planned to cut the Army’s numbers and pay. Last week a little band of sergeants walked into the Camp Columbia barracks of the very officers who had overthrown Machado. Firmly and none too politely the sergeants told their superiors they were through. Word traveled fast how easy it was—to the other barracks, to the police, to the rural guard, to the Navy. This was the bloodless “revolt of the sergeants.” They held the forts, ships, men, artillery. If it came to a showdown, they held the balance of power. Their leader was straightway made Chief of Staff and Revolutionary Leader of the Armed Forces. He was Top Sergeant Fulgencio Batista, who as a sharp-eyed court stenographer had listened for eight years to the Machado trials of revolutionary suspects. Surrounded by bully boys from the barracks, he was as tough as any. Despite his promise not to promote himself, he soon took the title of Colonel. Up with him went two others: lanky Sergeant Angel Gonzalez as Chief of Staff of the Navy and blocky Angel Hernandez as his assistant.

It was the little fellows’ day. Leaning out the windows of the Presidential Palace and joking with the crowd, Batista & friends had the time of their lives. Batista shouted so much that he developed a sore throat. The crowd liked their show. But they peered again into Cuba’s pot and saw something else:

The Commissioned Officers had gone home readily enough. A few re-enlisted in the ranks. But most of them were furiously outraged by the Revolt of the Sergeants. They knew they could never return to their commands without loss of face. When Top Sergeant Batista called back “officers whose records were not stained by participation in the misdeeds of the Machado regime,” 300 of the Cuban Army’s proudest officers boiled over. Figuring it was their last chance to tell Batista what they thought of him, they went in a body to see him, led by Col. Horacio Ferrer who had been President de Cespedes’ Secretary of War. Sergeant Fulgencio Batista left that meeting in a towering rage, his face dark with blood, surrounded by 24 bodyguards armed with machine-guns. The officers retired to Havana’s National Hotel, strategically isolated on a cliff-walled hill. Even more strategic, the National Hotel housed U. S. Ambassador Sumner Welles and Cuba’s Financial Adviser Adolf Augustus Berle Jr.

Batista’s men soon surrounded the National Hotel, off & on training machine-guns at it. The officers coldly refused to return to their commands or to disperse. Wives and friends brought them sidearms. Once Batista’s men, come to smoke them out, met Ambassador Welles in the lobby and had to back out. They vaguely understood that where the U. S. Ambassador lives is U. S. territory. Some of the officers wanted to rally the enlisted men, of whom each felt he could count on perhaps a score, and march on the Palace. Most were willing to compromise if the revolutionary government would consent to appoint a President and Cabinet. The officers sent out Col. Ferrer to treat with

The Junta. Jostled by the shouting, jigging mob in the Palace were five men trying to think calmly: two professors, an editor, a banker and a lawyer. As a sort of “brain trust” to the Sergeants, they were the commissioners of the “governmental executive commission.” Unable to agree on a head man, these were collectively the Government.

Two of them elbowed for the leadership. One was Dr. Ramon Grau San Martin y Madrid, 49, able Havana surgeon, professor of anatomy at Havana University. A bachelor, he has the calm of a surgeon, the detached idealism of a professor. The other was Sergio Carbo, tall, black-haired, volatile editor of the radical weekly La Semana, which Machado once suppressed “for pornography.” The crowd liked Carbo’s strong, graceful speaking manner, liked to recall that he had helped lead the unsuccessful Gibara revolt against Machado in 1931. The other three commissioners were a retired banker and ABC member, spectacled Porfirio Franco; Lawyer Jose Miguel Irizarri, and the professor of penal law at Havana University, Guillermo Portela. The five partitioned the posts of government, each to his own talent: the doctor for Secretary of Public Instruction & Sanitation; the law professor for Secretary of State and Justice; the editor for Secretary of the Interior, War and Navy; the banker for Secretary of Finance; the lawyer whose hobby was land division for Secretary of Public Works & Agriculture.

The Junta went to work as best it could. To placate the hotheads they declared all Machado properties confiscated. They named a revolutionary tribunal to hear charges against Machado suspects. They promised “immediate removal and punishment of all delinquents of the former [Machado] regime.” To placate the U. S., which had recognized the de Cespedes government, they promised “strict respect of the debts and obligations of the Republic.” They declared all the laws on the books still in force until voided by their Junta’s unanimous decree. To placate everybody, they promised to turn over the government to “the Constituent Assembly, which is to be called.” But Commissioner Grau San Martin (pronounced “Grou Sahn Marteen”) explained quietly that, before an election could be held, a new census would be needed to clean up the election rolls. To the sugar-workers of the interior, he added that the Junta “has no anti-agrarian tendencies.” From the Palace balcony, Commissioner Carbo roared to the crowd, “For the first time in history the Cuban people will rule their own destinies.”

Their show was good enough to get the nominal support of some of the other political groups. But the important ones turned their backs. Some of the ABC men admitted their support of the de Cespedes government had been a mistake and threw in with the Junta. Other ABC men drove through Havana in automobiles bristling with machine-guns. One thousand joined the commissioned officers in the National Hotel. The strongest one-man organization in Cuba, the followers of bearded ex-President Mario G. Menocal, joined with the officers in demanding that the Junta appoint a President and Cabinet, someone who could be either supported or thrown out.

On Saturday night the Junta reluctantly met to elect a Provisional President. Soon after midnight it settled on Commissioner Grau San Martin. At noon next day, all in white, he stepped out on the second floor balcony of the Palace. With him was his only important non-Junta supporter, Miguel Mariano Gomez, head of the Marianista faction. Absent was the entire diplomatic corps. President Grau San Martin swore a simple oath “to comply with all parts of the revolutionary program already decided upon and to respect all interests already established.” But this show was no great success. Only 3,000 of Havana’s critical crowd gathered in the square before the Palace to see the latest inauguration. Other thousands came up, took one look and went on. One of President Grau San Martin’s first callers was Col. Ferrer with the word that the officers would support no President who had not received U. S. recognition. Barricaded in the National Hotel the officers issued a statement: “The public al ready has forgotten the patriotic work we did in getting rid of the Dictator Machado when the enlisted personnel had not the nerve to do this alone. We are willing to return to our commands as soon as all the enlisted men announce their willingness to return to their ranks.” Out in his Vedado suburban home which resembled an armed camp, ex-President Menocal received correspondents. “The present government,” said he, “can last only a short time. It is composed of men who broke their solemn promise to set up a government representative of the entire island, made when the various factions conferred on Saturday. The promise was broken before they had officially entered office.

“The student element [ABC] once had the sympathy of the Cuban people, when they were denied by Machado the education to which they were entitled. Now they have forgotten all this and are irresponsible children who have assumed the prerogatives of men. Children cannot dictate the Government of Cuba.”

Against the officers the new President had the one potent weapon to hold all Cubans together: Cuban fear of U. S. intervention. Early in the week Commissioner Carbo had declared that “the presence of U. S. battleships in Cuban waters does not mean a threat to Cuban sovereignty.” But when the U. S. S. Indianapolis carried U. S. Secretary of the Navy Swanson into Havana Harbor, an unknown Cuban fired a pistol at it. And last week the great, grey battleship Mississippi was steaming slowly back & forth off Morro Castle. President Grau San Martin changed the new government’s tune. The streets suddenly blossomed with banners: “Down With Yanqui Imperialism!” Col. Batista said: “I will say only that we are now under the Cuban flag.”

A somewhat lonely lump in Cuba’s pot of ajiaco criollo, President Grau San Martin began to pick a Cabinet. He put in a customs house man, Jose Barquin, as Secretary of the Treasury; an obscure doctor, Antonio Guiteras, as Secretary of the Interior; the son of the famed discoverer of the yellow fever mosquito, Dr. Carlos J. Finlay as Secretary of Sanitation and Public Instruction; a rich architect and engineer, Eduardo J. Chibas, who was a de Cespedes man, as Secretary of Public Works. Meanwhile last week the rest of the hash was still boiling.

Havana had had the quietest week in many years. Its police blotter was almost blank. The ABC murders of Machadist suspects had ceased entirely under the radical Junta. Business went on as usual, in sight of battleships, machine-guns, counter marching soldiers.

The Interior was different. New provincial governments had barely got going under de Cespedes when the sergeants’ coup discouraged the countrymen’s last hope of having any local governments at all. The same strikes that had brought on Machado’s exile were still going on. Looters were raiding Sinclair and Standard Oil Co. stations; rioters in Cienfuegos broke into stores. In Oriente and Santa Clara Provinces the sugar-workers seized the mills, managers fled for their lives. Other workers presented “impossible” agreements to the managers with the choice of handing the mills over to the workers. If Cuba had a real Red menace last week it was in the back hills.

Carlos Manuel de Cespedes stayed at home. There were no automobiles outside his house. Asked whether he intended to confer with the officers in the National Hotel, he said, “I am not disposed to lend myself to participation in a musical comedy whose only music would be clatter of machine-guns.”