Fist Fighter

After 14 months of waiting for Provisional President Carlos Mendieta to turn into Santa Claus, every amateur Robespierre in Cuba went out last week for Mendieta's political scalp. It was not that they wanted quick elections to set up a stable government. Most of them knew an election would call their bluff. It was not that Mendieta was a tyrant. Most of the opposition "sectors" consider him too weak. The nearest thing to a sensible plan anyone had was to overthrow Mendieta, forcing his Chief of Staff Fulgencio Batista to set up a military dictatorship and thus offer a perfect target for a good rousing Revolution later on. Last week's weapons were the ubiquitous Cuban bomb and the dread general strike which ended the reign of Tyrant Gerardo Machado two years ago.

The strike went over splendidly. Newsworthy were Cuban enterprises that continued to function. The all-important sugar mills, with their season's grinding half done, ignored the strike but their activity was menaced when the railways stopped. Two open-shop Havana newspapers kept publishing. Soldiers, marines, police and strikebreakers ran a few street cars, the radio, telegraph and the main Havana postoffice, the docks, power plants, water works and tax collection offices. That was all. Most Government departments, which President Mendieta had filled with the supporters of his onetime allies, struck. The staff of a Havana insane asylum walked out, leaving inmates to themselves. Crowed bantam Generalissimo Batista: "This strike is a disgrace to the civilization of Cuba." He sent out his soldiers to scour Havana, sent Army planes swooping over the roof tops.

Old Mendieta seemed near the end of his rope but Cubans had forgotten that in his youth their President was famed for his violent temper and his willingness to fight with his fists, a practice always impressive to Latins. Abruptly last week the hard-pressed President declared a dictatorship far more absolute than anything of Tyrant Machado's. Most sacred of Cuban fetishes is the autonomy of Havana University but President Mendieta had the University seized by soldiers, who found vast stores of ammunition and a few stolen cars on the campus. He announced that all Government employes who did not come back to work at once were automatically fired.

In Havana the crashing of rifle fire and bombs kept citizens indoors behind closed shutters. U. S. businessmen were astonished to get anonymous warnings to "close up and leave the country within three days." His dander up, Mendieta declared first a "state of siege," then a "state of war," then he declared all the striking labor unions dissolved. Said he: "I have the duty of my post to complete: first, because I am the President of the Republic; second, because I am Carlos Mendieta; and, third, because I am a leader-- a fact I have never wanted to make use of but that I am disposed to demonstrate if necessary. . . . If the campaign now confronting me was directed only against the Government, I could meet it with that attitude, but it is being directed against wealth and property, peace and order, and the Cuban family."

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