MEXICO: Communist Valentine

Artist Diego Rivera, the persistent but bumbling Communist who was recently readmitted to the party after 26 years in the outer lightness (TIME, Oct. 11), last week sent his international masters a hand-painted valentine for Christmas.

Rivera, who too often zigged when the party zagged, was so pleased with his pardon that he worked on a huge (8 ft. by 16 ft.) canvas, depicting—according to the Gospel of St. Marx—last year’s liberation of neighboring Guatemala by General Carlos Castillo Armas (see cut).

The picture, one of the most fanciful and macabre of all of Rivera’s heavy-handed propaganda paintings, shows a servile, rat-faced Castillo Armas shaking hands with U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Castillo Armas bows low; at his belt is an automatic pistol, and in his jacket pocket a thick packet of $10,000 bills. Secretary Dulles, in a battered felt hat and paratrooper’s uniform, grips with one hand Rivera’s idea of an H-bomb. On the bomb is a leering caricature of President Eisenhower. Whispering in the secretary’s ear is his brother, Allen Dulles, head of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Between Dulles and Castillo Armas, U.S. Ambassador John Peurifoy (now envoy to Thailand) passes out greenbacks to eager Guatemalan soldiers. As presumably downtrodden workers load a banana boat, and the battered corpses of little children lie unnoticed underfoot, Archbishop Verolino, the papal nuncio, blesses the joyous scene.

With none of his old flair for publicity, Good Communist Rivera quietly prepared to pack off the finished canvas as a token of his zeal to “a certain country.” Though Rivera refused to be more specific, he did not deny that the certain country was the Soviet Union.

Communist Artist David Alfaro Siqueiros also found a logical Marxist solution for his problems last week. Since the government was buying art for a projected modern museum, said Siqueiros, why not let artists pay their income taxes with their work instead of their money? When the Finance Minister okayed the proposal, Rivera was the first to barter a $3,600 painting for his tax bill. But anti-Communist Rufino Tamayo, whose work is selling like hot cakes, said haughtily: “I prefer to pay my taxes in cash. I have no paintings to spare.”