CUBA: Passive Anarchy

Shark-shaped Cuba sizzled last week from tip to tip. Bushwhacking insurrestos raided scores of towns. Near Banes on the northeast coast insurgent workers seized a sugar mill largely owned by Vincent Astor and Percy A. Rockefeller, shut up mill executives, wives and children in their quarters, cut off electricity and water. Fifteen sugar mills in Oriente province, mostly U. S.-owned, had been seized by rampaging Cuban proletarians. In Santiago de Cuba soldiers, miners and Communist agitators heckled Manager Fred Northcross of Bethlehem Steel’s Daiquiri Mines until he shouted: “We are closing down—permanently!” In Havana harassed U. S. Ambassador Sumner Welles felt obliged to deny rumors that he was hatching a conspiracy to oust President Grau y San Martin in favor of sly, bearded General Mario G. Menocal, onetime President of Cuba (1913-21). General Menocal deceived nobody when he proclaimed: “I probably have less personal ambition than any man in Cuba.”

What Ambassador Welles thought of President Grau’s— government last week was clear enough when Adolf A. Berle Jr., the Roosevelt brain trusty sent to Havana last month, returned to Washington. “It is not a government but a shell,” said Mr. Berle, “and not a promising one. . . . There are no laws, no courts. Nobody pays taxes because he can’t be sure they won’t be collected a second time by a new government. There is order without law because the Cubans are a friendly people. . . . The situation in Cuba is a kind of passive anarchy.” Far from passive last week was General Menocal’s onetime subordinate, Captain Juan Bias Hernandez, veteran of the abortive 1931 Menocal Revolution against Tyrant Machado. With his wide sombrero cocked jauntily, swaggering Captain Bias was fighting Government troops and recruiting fighters of his own in Camaguey province. Last week he captured several towns—one named Moron—and beat his way steadily toward Havana. Terrified President Grau alternately threatened Bushwhacker Bias and parleyed with his son who popped in & out of Havana too often for correspondents to keep track of him. Veteran Tom Pettey of the New York Herald Tribune cabled: “Eventually an army of bearded Cubans will come out of the woods ready to begin a real rebellion.”

Next thing Havana knew Son Bias and President Grau had come to terms. Father Bias abruptly left his rebel army in the field, journeyed to Havana with a “guard of honor” composed of Government troops he had been fighting a few days before. Cheered as he swaggered into the Presidential Palace to embrace President Grau, Captain Bias explained away his insurgence thus: “The trouble is that wherever I go inevitably a crowd gathers about us. About 300 did that last week and with the difficulties of communication added to the fact that none of us seems interested in telling the real truth, wrong news gets out. I want everybody to get behind the Government and help support it for a long time. … I would rise up against anybody of the type of Machado but I believe he was unique and that nobody will ever appear again who is that bad.”

What really kept the “shell” government of President Grau intact was a few thousand silver dollars found in Cuba’s nearly empty Treasury. Surly soldiers of the Havana garrison, muttering that they had been ordered to do “too much work” in recent weeks, lined up in front of the Treasury cashier’s window to receive their pay in clinking silver. Even then they wavered in obedience to strutting “Emperor Batista,” the sergeant who made himself the Army’s Commander-in-Chief (TIME, Sept. 18). Last week “Emperor Batista,” as Havanans have nicknamed him half contemptuously, ordered his men to let through a truckload of food to Cuba’s former Army officers, besieged for the past 16 days in Havana’s ornate National Hotel. The soldiers refused. The officers, whom “Emperor Batista” hoped to win over eventually to himself, grew hungrier. Also last week they were humiliated, outraged to the core of their Cuban honor.

The outrage occurred when officers’ wives came to wave to them from behind the cordon of soldiers. Suddenly a pack of Negresses set upon the wives, tore their clothing, stripped some naked and clawed them fiercely while soldiers guffawed. Raging impotently, the officers watched through field glasses, declared that they recognized among the clawing Negresses female members of deposed Tyrant Machado’s notorious Porra (terror squads).

With U. S. warboats ringed around Cuba the Roosevelt Administration continued to emphasize that they were there to protect U. S. lives rather than U. S. property. First orders were that no U. S. Marines should be landed, even to protect U. S. lives, without authority from Washington in each specific case. Later, realizing that this order was impractical, the President gave U. S. Naval captains discretionary authority to land Marines or blue-jackets, but only if needed to protect lives.

—”My father’s name was Grau and my mother’s San Martin, so my full name in Cuba would be ‘Ramon Grau y San Martin,’ ” said the President last week. “However, I sign almost everything ‘Ramon Grau.’ “