Shipboard Friendship

Mamie Keselenko and Regina Lazar, two mildly adventurous Manhattan schoolteachers on a holiday jaunt to Mexico City, counted themselves very lucky last week when, hardly out of New York harbor on the 5.5. Oriente bound for Havana, they fell in with a voluble group of Manhattan intellectuals. Leader of their new friends was Clifford Odets, able young left-wing author of three (Awake and Sing, Waiting for Lefty, Till the Day I Die) of the twelve plays now running on Broadway. Among Odets' 14 companions were a Brooklyn Congregational minister, two Negroes, a correspondent for The Nation, a national women's debating champion, a War veteran. The Negroes danced with Mamie and Regina. The intellectuals informed the girls that they were on their way to make an investigation of Cuban tyranny and undercover U. S. capitalist influence in Cuba. Their particular prey was to be ''America's butcher boy in Cuba," U. S. Ambassador Jefferson Caffery. Every one of them was, moreover, the official representative of a portentous-sounding Union, League, Association, Order or Committee. And they bought drinks and talked. Mamie and Regina suddenly had visions of a lovely time in Cuba.

What the girls did not know was that two U. S. Government agents were also on board and that the Cuban Government was expecting the girls' new friends. At the Havana dock, Cuban police and immigration officers swarmed aboard, herded the investigating commission into a corner and with it Mamie Keselenko and Regina Lazar. Late that night they were all led to a pier, their papers confiscated. Two launches ferried them across Havana Bay. On the dark shore they marched uphill, nudged along by submachine guns, to the Tiscornia Immigration Station. Later that night Author Odets was permitted to send a cable to his father in Philadelphia.

The Cuban Government announced, "These people look more like agitators than investigators." Said Odets: 'The commission represents those Americans who are irreconcilably opposed to the domination of Cuba by American financial and industrial interests. . . . Newspaper reports indicate the complete destruction of civil liberties in Cuba. We insist upon returning. And when we come back, we will come with names they can't afford to touch.''* Next evening Odets & companions were ferried back across Havana Bay, bundled aboard the Oriente, shipped ignominiously back to Manhattan.

As the commission sailed away, the U. S. Consulate, which had done nothing at all about the jailing of the commission, went to work to do something about Mamie Keselenko and Regina Lazar. They were still sweltering in Tiscornia Immigration Station, clutching their round-trip tickets to Mexico City.

The two schoolteachers were promptly released and forgotten, but in Manhattan able Playwright Odets was boiling with vivid word-pictures: "The food at Tiscornia was a strange broth of malt and beans. The water had an odd odor. The beds had no mattresses and the bare springs dug into our backs. The crude actions of the Cuban Government and the American Embassy make clear the fear on their part of honest investigation. Ambassador Caffery has a heart of Sugar. Vice Consul Donald D. Edgar played both ends against the middle. He is a fish. I am a Liberal, not a Communist.

"Naturally we were anxious. You just can't feel comfortable with Cuban soldiers all about, patting their guns and regarding you eagerly as if they would like to take a pot shot. I've been in some exciting plays and they tell me I have written some dramatic scenes, but for a personal experience this was the most exciting."

* Mr. Odets was presumably referring to such eminent U. S. liberal-radical names as Corliss Lament, Alfred Bingham, Heywood Broun, Malcolm Cowley, Elmer Rice. Edna Millay, Dorothy Thompson, Mrs. Gifford Pinchot.

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