Baiter Baffled

Out of the dying clangor of Cuba's smashed revolution last week arose a cheerful springtime chirping from U. S. Ambassador Jefferson Caffery. "Not only has the sugar industry picked up," said this fashionable career diplomat, "but the seasonal fruit and vegetable industry has shown remarkable improvement." Imports from the U. S. for the last quarter of 1934 were up 127%; customs collections for approximately the same period, up 50%; Havana bank clearings, up $60,000,000. All this, however, was just such "imperialistic optimism" as Cuban radicals expect from a U. S. Ambassador to Cuba. Much more remarkable was the fact that the interviewer who reported Mr. Caffery's words without criticism for the North American Newspaper Alliance was Imperialist-Baiting Author Carleton Beals.

For five years Carleton Beals has had a fine time writing books to prove that U. S. money is the curse of Latin America. In his tract on the Capitalistic Rover Boys in Cuba, entitled The Crime of Cuba, he lambasted the then U. S. Ambassador Harry F. Guggenheim whose family had given Baiter Beals a Guggenheim Fellowship to study imperialism in Mexico. Fact was that last week Journalist Beals had not made up his mind about the present regime of President Carlos Mendieta and Chief of Staff Fulgencio Batista.

Cuban students, whose revolution had just failed, were calling the Government "more brutal and imperialistic" than the tyranny of Gerardo Machado which they overthrew two years ago. But what most enraged them was the fact that the Cuban people are swinging away from them and back to the old-line parties of the early Machado days. And, in snug Paris exile, Machado was saying, "Just as I expected." Meanwhile the Chase National Bank last week submitted to President Mendieta a long argument showing why his Government should resume interest payments on a $60,000,000 Chase-sponsored loan.

Thoroughly confused, Anti-Imperialist Beals, knowing that U. S. businessmen now own 80% of the rich Cuban sugar lands, obtained only one joker from Mr. Caffery's mouth. "Ultimately," he quoted the Ambassador as saying, "the Cubans may want to buy back the land they need for a healthy economic life."

A few days later Beals's uncertainty shone even more brightly in an interview with swart, little Strong Man Fulgencio Batista. "I can never become President," said this onetime Cuban Army sergeant. "The people cannot be deprived of their politics. But if we were to hold elections soon they could not beimpartial. Such elections would merely appear to be a maneuver to defraud the will of the people. I believe in the fullest democracy, but at times it is out of the question. I do not believe in dictatorship, yet some peoples need good dictatorship. . . . We must buy back some of our land. . . . But we mustn't injure anybody's interest. We must take it easy, slowly, with due consideration. The misguided opposition wishes to do things too fast."

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