CUBA: Lost Milestone

For years visitors to Cuba’s National Capitol have plodded across the vast “Hall of Lost Steps” to gawk at a giant diamond in the floor. Last week it was gone from its star-shaped setting. On the Day of St. Dismas, patron of good thieves, a thief crashed the glass covering, chiseled out the 23 -carat shiner. * Alongside he jotted cabalistically: 2:45-3:10, then ap parently left by the Capitolio’s front door.

Built by ex-Dictator General Gerardo Machado, Cuba’s Huey Long, the $20 million Capitolio has been called a monument to graft. The yellow diamond, en circled by gold from pen points which had signed contracts for the building and the central highway, had been donated by the contractors and the workers. Before that, the bauble is said to have belonged successively to an Austrian nobleman, an Eng lish collector, a Paris jeweler. Skeptics claimed it was a fake. Either way, it had been a satisfactory zero milestone to measure off Cuba’s central highway.

At week’s end the diamond was still missing. Two Capitol guards were under arrest. Why had no one seen anything, heard anything, asked the angry Senate President? One guard confessed that he had been sleeping at home during guard hours. Another said he was snoozing in the elevator.

* About the size of a nickel.