CUBA: Blushing Skies

A bogey man flickered until last week through the shuttered bordellos of Havana, the rich red valleys of inland Cuba, the old Spanish fortresses of the coast. He had guns and money and followers, among them a plump, blonde, temperish Cuban-Irish trollop named Ziomara O’Halloran. He was wanted badly by Army Chief of Staff Batista, with whom he had a deadly personal feud. For the record, however, Batista wanted him for three crimes: 1) the shooting of a treacherous colleague, 2) the kidnapping of a rich Cuban idler for the fabulous ransom of $300,000, and 3) engineering the unsuccessful general strike of two months ago.

This romantic figure was Antonio Guiteras, a little 28-year-old pharmacist with cross-eyes and freckles and his hair parted in the middle, with a childish, open smile and a vocabulary of violent radicalism. Tony’s mother was U. S. born and he was born in Philadelphia where his father was a professor of Spanish at Girard College, but Tony was Cuba’s most violently anti-U. S., anti-imperialist, a focus for the most personal and violent emotions in the highly personal politics of Cuba. When Cuba swung Left after the 1933 revolution, it swung toward Tony and he became Secretary Guiteras of the Army, Navy and Interior. He was a great one for issuing decrees and had a reputation for being death on terrorists. When Cuba swung Right and into the hands of President Carlos Mendieta and General Batista, Tony was the terrorist, a hunted man under the “state of war” by which Mendieta & Batista currently keep the peace.

Last week Batista’s mulatto soldiers picked up Tony’s hot trail. They found him at night in an old Spanish sea fort in the palm-spired valley of Matanzas, within sight of a yacht waiting to ferry him to Mexico. At dawn Tony knew that he was finished, began shooting as soon as the light came. Two companies of soldiers, sailors and marines took up safe positions and blazed interminably back. Toward nine Tony decided to make a break for shore and yacht. Covered by the machine gun fire of Senora O’Halloran, he took one companion, an oldtime Venezuelan adventurer, and ran firing toward Batista’s men. The two fell battered with bullets almost at once. As he died, Tony’s face stiffened into a strange choirboy grimace of joy. The soldiers arrested Senora O’Halloran and ten other friends of Tony’s.

President Carlos Mendieta broke the threat of such terrorists as Tony Guiteras two months ago when the general strike called by the radicals failed to spark the mass of Cuban workers (TIME, March 18). Until then, in all the 33 years of Cuba’s terror-pocked history as a republic, no Cuban civilian had ever faced a firing squad. First to do so was one Jaime Greinstein, a Polish ne’er-do-well, who rhapsodied before he died one sunrise last month, “The skies of Cuba blush.” Last week one Jose Costiello Fuentes, an ordinary bandit who had killed a lieutenant from ambush, faced in manful silence four rifle barrels, died without a word. To frivolous murder Cubans are accustomed, but the legal and methodical execution of a criminal was last week profoundly shocking and disconcerting to all Cuba. Announced the Secretary of the Interior last week, “Senora O’Halloran fought bravely. She should be brave enough to face a firing squad.”