CUBA: An Honest Man

The best Finance Minister Cuba ever had resigned last week. José (“Pepin”) Bosch, 54, Lehigh-educated millionaire businessman (Bacardi rum and Hatuey beer), had entered the cabinet of President Carlos Prio, his old friend from revolutionary days, in order to help the government out of the fiscal red. He did the job in 14 prodigious months.

When Finance Minister Bosch took office, there was a deficit of $18 million; as he stepped out, Cuba had its largest surplus on record — more than $15 million. The secret of Bosch’s success was uncommon ministerial honesty and unswerving drive to collect taxes uncollected by lax predecessors. “Everyone will pay,” he announced, “without exception or privilege. I’ll send them bills.”

Back to the Black. Knowing most Cuban industrialists by their first names, and aware almost to the peso of what they should be paying, Bosch upped income-tax collections from $6 to $25 million, business-profit tax revenues from $20 to $45 million. Members of Carlos Prio’s own family paid up back taxes. The President himself told the story of an industrialist who went to the Treasury to try to get off paying $18,000 in profit taxes, wound up paying $120,000, then “went around telling everyone that at last there was a man in Treasury who wouldn’t let him get away with anything.”

Bosch tidied up corruption in the customs service. Finding hundreds of businesses operating without licenses, he made them pay the official fees. Throwing out a racket whereby contractors were never paid till they had kicked back 30%, he squared accounts, began paying-as-you-go.

Such a Finance Minister was poison to politicos. Bosch all but stopped the gravy train that had shuttled in & out of the Treasury since the republic’s birth.*Outraged Congressmen got up all kinds of investigating committees to harry him. They quizzed him in practically every field of government finance, sometimes till 3 in the morning. A fortnight ago they summoned him for more heckling on his plan for reorganizing a rundown government workers’ retirement fund. Bosch testily told them he had a previous engagement, went off to a Bacardi board meeting at which he was elected company president.

Back to Kickbacks? Bosch said last week that he was leaving public office on doctor’s orders. Undoubtedly, he was fed up with politicos. He had done the job he had been asked to do, but he realized that as the 1952 presidential campaign drew nearer, pressure would grow to finance the government campaign out of the Treasury, as it was financed more or less in 1948. Said Havana’s newspaper Alerta: “Bosch took office to the profound disgust of the politicians, and leaves accompanied by their broad smiles as they wait outside the ministry doors to assault the Treasury he guarded.”

*The late Senator José Alemán, President Grau’s Education Minister from 1946 to 1948, is acknowledged to have been the most skillful engineer ever to operate on this run. Asked how he got “all that money” out of the Treasury, he is said to have replied: “In suitcases.”