Shrewd Dictators

Baby Bombs. Troubled by the daily succession of "baby bombs" which have made Cuba pandemonium for weeks without doing much real damage (TIME, Jan. 26 et seq.), Dictator-President Gerardo Machado offered last week to compromise with his detonating enemies.

Secretary of Interior Clemente Vivancos blandly announced, "No better time could be chosen to restore normal life to the nation than now." If enemies of the Machado Government would stop their baby bombing and other disorders at once, continued Senor Vivancos persuasively, the

Government would promptly put through Congress an amnesty bill and restore to Cuba's people the Constitutional rights which Dictator Machado suspended last autumn. Fascist Medicine-- As an antidote to Italian business depression Dictator Mussolini prescribed lowered wages and lowered prices three months ago (TIME, Dec. 1). Fortnight ago came the first strike by Italian workmen in many years (TIME, April 6). Last week Dictator Mussolini decided that his patient had taken enough anti-depression medicine. "We have reached a limit [in wage cuting]," declared II Duce at Rome, "beyond which it is impossible to go without running into danger that the antidote may become a poison. . . . Italy was the first to apply what has now been adopted by almost the whole of Europe.... On the whole certain symptoms of recovery may be seen, but ... we are still waiting for the factors of recovery--in the first place moral factors--to enter into play simultaneously and collectively." Under the new policy announced by II Duce last week, cut wages will not be upped, but there will be no more cuts. State Nep. In Moscow iron-willed but supple-witted Dictator Josef Stalin went back last week to the maxim of LENIN: Advance three steps, retreat two, net gain one!

Lenin's shrewdest retreat was his NEP ("New Economic Policy"). Having found out that the State monopolies could not supply fast enough the goods which were absolutely demanded, Lenin retreated two steps in 1921 by admitting to Russia private, capitalistic traders nicknamed "Nepmen."

Two years after Lenin's death Stalin took three steps forward by abolishing Nep, stamping out Nepmen. Last week Stalin took one step back, permitted correspondents to announce as blatantly as they liked an experiment he has tried out quietly for some time in various parts of Russia: the state Nep.

It works this way: Side by side stand a state trust store and a state Nep store. A workman with a card entitling him to buy a pair of shoes can get them at the state trust store by standing in line all day, or if the store has no shoes by waiting several weeks until shoes arrive. At the state Nep store, however, anyone can buy a pair of shoes instantly, with or without a card, but at a very high price.

To have restored the private Nepman (who also gave quick service at high prices) would have been to take two steps back. Shrewd Stalin has taken one.

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