In Havana

One night last week a special train bored southward from Washington to Miami.

U. S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull carefully hung up his grey tropical worsteds, drooped his black shoes outside the door of Compartment D, eased his lanky bones into bed. Stay-ups among his staff of 25 and the 14 accompanying newsmen clustered about the club-car radio, listening to the Democrats in Chicago nominate Henry Wallace for a job which Cordell Hull would not have (see p. 13). To Cordell Hull, the matter of who was going to run the U. S. Senate during the next four years was far less important than who was going to run the Western Hemisphere.

A warm drizzle was falling, 42 hours later, when Cordell Hull, in his same grey suit, black shoes and a yellow straw hat, stepped from the Miami night boat to the wharf in Havana. "I am happy to be in Cuba again," said he, remembering that when he was last there he was a volunteer captain in the Spanish-American War. His job then was to help free Cuba from Europe. His job this week was to keep Cuba and the rest of Latin America from turning to Europe--and Hitler.

What with Latin-American suspicions, rivalries, fear of the Nazis (see p. 28), the job was bound to be difficult. So formidable was the task that Cordell Hull & colleagues deliberately cultivated the idea that all they hoped for in Havana was "an exchange of information," a common understanding which might be the basis for later, concrete achievement. A big bargaining point was President Roosevelt's plan to up the U. S. Export-Import Bank's capital and lending power $500,000,000 to finance inter-American trade.

This week the Secretary of State went through the unavoidable, formal round of public posturings. But he did his real work in the corridors and rooms of Havana's swelegant Hotel Nacional de Cuba. Astonished was many a high-hat diplomat when a grey, modest, smiling-eyed gentleman in a slack lounge suit wandered in, took off his coat, sprawled in a chair, talked as though Secretaries of State and Foreign Ministers were human beings. With the same tactics in 1933, Cordell Hull had saved the International Conference of American States at Montevideo from complete collapse. Until he exhausted this shirt-sleeve diplomacy in Havana, wise men did not entirely discount U. S. hopes for: 1) some sort of Pan-American "collective trusteeship" over French, Dutch, perhaps British possessions in Latin America; 2) at least a start toward a Hemisphere trade cartel, wherewith to combat Nazi commercial and political fifth columny; 3) military cooperation, when & if necessary.

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