Soothing Syrup

BOOM! POW! CRASH! Every 15 minutes all night long bombs burst in Havana as token that the advertised Terrorist week against the Government of Gerardo Machado had commenced. Beyond breaking a great many windows and killing a three-year-old child, the bombs did little damage. When it comes to terror, horn-spectacled Dictator Machado is still more than a match for his opponents. Cursing, police reserves and ununiformed gangs of the dreaded Porra (secret police) poured out and went to work.

Doors were battered in, homes raided, prisoners rushed to jail, clattering patrols of cavalry were called out, motor cars everywhere were stopped and searched. Two boys 14 and 15 years old were shot down at the base of the General Gomez statue as dangerous enemies of the Republic of Cuba. With blazing guns and a fine disregard for passersby police chased one youth right down the middle of the Prado.

These, like most recent political murders in Cuba, took place away from the haunts of U. S. tourists and under decent cover of darkness. Next day the Porra grew reckless.

In the early afternoon, Correspondent J. D. Phillips of the New York Times stepped out on the balcony of his house on Avenida de los Presidentes in the Vedado residential section to enjoy the sunshine. A gang of Negroes, some with rifles, some with pistols was sitting on the top of a high bank on the opposite side. A car swung out of the gates of Principe Fortress, turned into the street and stopped. Two boys were pushed out.

"Now run!" barked a voice.

The Negroes jumped to their feet, firing as the frightened boys ran. Laughing, the sentries on the Fortress wall fired a few shots too. The first volley missed.

"Don't shoot any more! Don't shoot ..." one boy begged as he died. The other doubled back like a hare, was killed at 40 yards.

The Negroes scrambled down their bank, poked the bodies, then strolled off. The victims were Abilio and Ramiro Valdes Daussa, sons of Treasury Paymaster Francisco Valdes Leon. Their crime was hiding explosives in their home. Letting the Negroes shoot them down was perfectly legal under Cuba's ingenious ley de fuga (law of flight) which allows police --including the Porra--to kill prisoners "attempting to escape." Reports quickly circulated that Father Valdes Leon had committed suicide in his cell. This was denied by Prison Supervisor Ambrosio Diaz Galup.

"He is still alive," said Ambrosio Diaz Galup.

Later in the week three students met in a house at Marianao, Havana suburb where Oriental Park racetrack is located. A raid by secret police resulted in their deaths. The youths sold their lives dearly, killing three policemen.

U. S. correspondents in Cuba asked the U. S. State Department for protection last week. In Washington, Representative Hamilton Fish Jr. and Senator Borah were reported rumbling about demanding U. S. intervention in Cuba. But Secretary Hull announced:

"The only action with regard to Cuba that the Administration is considering is the appointment of an Ambassador."

Persons close to the Roosevelt Administration unofficially proffered sugar as a soothing syrup. If Cubans would be good and stop shooting each other the Government might be inclined to increase the present 20% tariff preferential on Cuban sugar to 50% and allot to Cuba a definite annual quantity of sugar for U. S. consumption, probably 2,000,000 tons.

Soothing syrup is not quite so quixotic a remedy as it might seem. It is apparently the Roosevelt thesis that merely substituting a regime run by ex-President Mario Garcia Menocal, hopefully encamped at Miami with a band of young chance-taking revolutionaries, for the Machado Administration would not end Cuba's reign of terror in the slightest, that there can be no stable government in Cuba until there is a degree of economic recovery in sugar and tobacco.

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