CUBA: Good Neighbor Smothers

Glad-handing Senator William Howell Smathers of New Jersey popped up in the U. S. Senate last week to introduce a resolution reminiscent of the long-dead concept of Manifest Destiny.* The resolution: to admit Cuba as a State into the Union. The Senator’s pop-up was unfortunate for Good Neighborism. In Havana a gang of youths hurled bottles through the plate-glass windows of a Woolworth 5-&-10¢ store with notes in the bottles saying: “Down with the American Senate!” “This reply to the American Senator!” In Madrid the Falangist newspaper Arriba seized upon the resolution as an indication of U. S. imperialism, observed that “neither Cuba nor the other Latin-American countries have any connection with the British and Protestant civilization of the United States.” In Washington, Secretary of State Cordell Hull had to make the wholly unnecessary explanation that the resolution, although introduced by a member of the Democratic Party, was “completely contrary to the policy of the Administration.”

At week’s end Cuba’s Secretary of State Jose Manuel Cortina issued an unflustered statement. The resolution was contrary to President Roosevelt’s foreign policy, to Pan-Americanism and to the opinion and decision of all Cubans, said he, adding that “the admirable policies of President Roosevelt . . . have profoundly consolidated confidence and union among all the nations of America.” Señor Cortina knew, if all Latin Americans did not, that Senator Smathers is a windbag whose opinions influence no other Senator.

*”Let no technical impediment be thrown in the way of our Americanizing Central America. Humanity, Philanthropy and Christianity demand that it should be at no distant day. Such is our Manifest Destiny.”—Representative Thomas Lilbourne Anderson of Missouri, 1859.