CUBA: No. 2’s No. 6

It was eight years before Cubans got sufficiently agitated to chase Tyrant Gerardo Machado off their beautiful island (TIME, Aug. 21, 1933). It was nearly two and a half years more before they calmed down sufficiently to hold a regular Presidential election to replace him (TIME, Jan. 20 et ante). Last week, at the end of a breath-taking series of six Provisional Presidents since the flight of Machado, Cuba inaugurated its sixth legally elected President, Miguel Mariano Gómez, who happened to be the son of its second President, General Jose Miguel Gómez.* Small, young (45), determined President Gómez’ inauguration was the result of a quiet, methodical two-year campaign for the Presidency. Last week, two days before inauguration, Miguel Mariano Gómez reminded Cubans of his illustrious and reliable family background by having three granddaughters unveil a huge Havana monument to Jose Miguel Gómez. Next day President Gómez was sworn in at the Hall of Mirrors of the Presidential Palace by his big-nosed political opponent, Supreme Court Chief Justice Juan Federico Edelman. President and Chief Justice exchanged a big hug. In his speech to Congress, President Gómez put the best possible face on Cuba’s most unpopular fact, its economic dependence on the U. S. “In our friendly commercial relations,” said he, “we must give preference to those nations with whom we have products to exchange in this hemisphere and especially to our great consumer, the North American Union [the U. S.], which merits our gratitude in so many ways for its reiterated historic acts of benefit and help throughout our existence as a rebellious [Spanish] colony and as a republic full of worries and troubles.” The new President promised amnesty to Cuba’s vast, stormy brood of political prisoners and exiles but warned: “It is necessary that the morbid state of cruel insanity of killing each other shall not re-turn.” No contemporary Cuban has taken more lives than Chief of Staff Colonel Fulgencio Batista, whose oversized (14,000) Army gives him the sinister status of an unofficial dictator. President Gómez will find his biggest job to ease Batista out of the saddle. As a starter last week he put an end to Batista’s habitual procedure of stepping out on the Presidential Palace balcony with the incoming chief executive to take the cheers of the crowd, kept Batista far in the background. Hopefully said President Gómez: “Force alone is precarious if it is not animated and authorized by reason and justice. . . . Upright courts . . . shall have sole powers to decide upon the life, the liberty, the honor and properties of persons.”

*Cuba’s Gómez I was a comrade-in-arms, firm friend and great admirer of the U. S’.’s Roosevelt I. Last month Gómez II visited Roosevelt II in Washington, enthusiastically praised the New Deal.