Unripe Revolution

On May 20, 1902, U. S. Major General Leonard Wood ordered the U. S. flag struck over Havana's Morro Castle. Up went the Cuban flag (blue & white stripes, a triangular red field with one white star). Cuba's Independence Day came & went last week and seldom had Cubans felt less independent. In the eastern provinces of Santa Clara, Camaguey and Oriente rebellion was smoldering precisely as it did 40 years ago when Spain was Cuba's tyrant. Some 2,000 insurrectos were hiding out in the hills at war with the regime of Dictator Gerardo Machado. They were mostly well-horsed, wellarmed, uniformed in blue denim. They fed at any sympathetic farmhouse. In guerrilla bands they were able to swoop on a village, overpower the Rural Guard, canter off to the hills with arms, food, money. More ammunition was smuggled to them from Mexico by small schooners slipping into the bays of the southern coast. From band to band went couriers, reporting arms shipments and the Government's moves. Now leaderless, the bands "await the arrival of a supreme leader." Inevitable spawn of Machado's Terror, they knew that if they tried to live quietly in their homes, they might soon be jailed or dead. To stamp them out President Machado last week sent to Santa Clara his favorite strong-arm man, notorious Major Arsenio Ortiz.

At news that Ortiz was coming, the rebels flickered among the hills like fireflies. They attacked a Rural Guard patrol in Sancti Spiritus, killed three guardsmen. Twenty-five of them quietly overran and pillaged the sympathetic village of Taguasco. Others derailed a Havana-Santa Clara City passenger train, dynamited railway bridges at Jiqui, Donato and Tarafa. They looked for reinforcements, ammunition and money from the Cuban exiles in Miami. Cuba's onetime President Mario Menocal had disappeared from Miami. Some said (but few believed) he was on the high seas with the men and guns the Santa Clara rebels wanted. In Manhattan the Junta, sending out for more ice water, went on bickering because "the time is not ripe" for Revolution.

Meanwhile Ortiz went to work. He set two planes to scouting the coast every night, two gunboats to keep more rebels from landing. He started with 100 men, a crew of officers he had picked himself. Machado sent him 300 more men. He had carte blanche to do what he liked. The Government issued no reports but Cubans needed none to know how Ortiz would operate. Than he, no man in Cuba is more famed for murder. Half Negro, he is a big, bull-shouldered man with a plump, cheerful face, small, shadowed eyes. As military supervisor in Oriente Province in 1930, he was accused of 44 political assassinations which he called "suicides." He enjoys performing executions personally and "Ortiz' Mark" means a bullet at the base of a corpse's brain. Civil courts indicted him for six "marks" but he was never brought to trial, lived in an officers' club while under arrest. This sample of Ortiz' work is particularly well known: Two years ago two Oriente students who had spoken against Ortiz happened to come to Havana. Another Cuban named Wycliffe Grafton was with them when Ortiz called. Said Ortiz, smiling, "Well, boys, I have you here at last." Grafton, claiming U. S. citizenship, was freed. Five days later the other two were found dead, their teeth knocked out, their eyeballs ruptured.

Ortiz is married to a white woman whom he took from a convent. Last week Cubans doubted the story that his two grown daughters, pistols strapped to their sides, were his aides-de-camp in the field.

Practical Cubans looked not to the rebels in the hills for deliverance but to Havana where U. S. Ambassador Sumner Welles was calmly talking business. They wanted him to promise a lower U. S. tariff on sugar, and a U. S. guarantee to buy 2,000,000 tons a year. In exchange Cuba would lower tariffs on U. S. imports. Keeping in touch with the U. S. State Department by telephone, Mr. Welles steered wide on the subject of U. S. intervention. His calmness disarmed Cuba's Secretary of State Orestes Ferrara who suddenly bubbled over that the U. S. had promised to do "everything humanly and superhumanly possible" to keep Machado in power. Mr. Welles did not bother to point out that his no-meddling instructions work two ways: while the U. S. might not overtly help kick Machado out, neither might it do anything to help keep him in.

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