Vote of Confidence

Between warm afternoon showers, thousands of shirt-sleeved Cuban men and cotton-frocked girls trooped down Havana's laurel-hedged Prado. In brazen defiance of the armistice decreed for election week, they shouted the names of rival mayoral and congressional candidates. Sound trucks blared the notes of a conga, then broke out with political exhortations. In the Parque Central, dusky ti-1.trope performers attracted a crowd, then made campaign speeches from their precarious perches. In the sweltering evening, a great neon campaign sign, towed by an amphibious jeep, swam ghostlike along the harbor front.

But election day last week was orderly, the polling apparently honest. The result was a smashing victory for President Ramon Grau San Martin's left-wing regime, his Autentico Party and Communist supporters. Grau's man, Manuel Fernandez Supervielle, won Havana's mayorship, the island's No. 2 political job. Most of the island's 125 new mayors would also be Grau men. Apparently enough Grau legislative candidates won to give the President, for the first time, a majority in Congress.

In short, the Cuban electorate approved Grau's strongly prolabor, socialistic program which had included Government seizure, retention and operation of factories, fuel supplies, and trolley lines. The election results also proved that the Communists had the power to deliver the labor vote in smashing style.

Solid Havana businessmen who lunch in the highceilinged, masculine La Florida, sugar millers, newly capped Manuel Cardinal Arteana and the Catholic Church were notably unhappy this week. Ex-Dictator Fulgencio Batista, who had waited, vampirelike, in Florida for signs of Grau disintegration, sighed in disappointment.

King Sugar. But Cuban capitalists were not panicked. King Sugar, the billion-dollar industry* which accounts for some 75% of Cuba's exports, was riding high. All of 1946's estimated 4,700,000-ton crop would be snapped up by a food-hungry world. The 3 1/2-c- per Ib. that the U.S. would pay for most of it, though only half the world price, still guaranteed a profit.

With the burgeoning Government revenue, Grau had great plans for Cuba: 500 rural schools, a trade and agricultural institute, a badly needed public beach for Habaneros, a $100,000-a-month workers' housing program. Grau also planned an agrarian bank to encourage long-term development of truck farming and cattle raising, and new roads to bring farm products to town. His reiterated basic aim: a Cuba half industrial, half agricultural.

Until the new farms started producing beef and beans and until the new houses were built, Grau had a more immediate problem in keeping wages and living costs (up 275% since prewar) in line. Another poser: how to keep the Communist tail from wagging the Cuban dog.

* 53% U.S.-owned. Total U.S. investment in Cuba-$1.5 billion.

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