Teacher & Pupil

The grand salon of Havana's domed presidential palace was packed to its mirrored walls with sweating, frock-coated diplomats and Cuban officials. From the plaza outside rose the roar of crowds, the snip-snap of firecrackers. Cannon boomed in salute. Carlos Prio Socarras, 45, was being sworn in as Cuba's 17th President. With a warm abrazo, 61-year-old Professor-President Ramon Grau San Martin turned over his office to one of his favorite pupils, a student leader in the 1933 revolution that first raised Grau to the presidency, and his supporter ever since.

Grau had picked Prio, his former Labor Minister, to succeed him; he expected that Prio would continue the Grau brand of mild New Dealism. But for a week before the inauguration Habaneras were saying: "Prio will continue the work of the vie jo [old man]--till noon, Oct. 10." Nobody had to tell Prio that Grau's popularity had slipped, that Cubans wanted a change in the way their government was run.

Law & Order. Husky, slim-waisted Lawyer Carlos Prio might be just the man to bring about a change after four years of his predecessor's austerity. Socially popular, Prio always worked hard & long before setting out with his wife Mary for an evening of parties. Unlike high-minded Grau, who refused to believe that his appointees might graft and soldier on the job, Prio harbored no such illusions.

Under the indulgent Grau, 100 revolutionary gang murders have passed unpunished since 1944. Prio, who showed his mettle last year by breaking Communist control of Cuban labor, has assured Cubans that he intends to bring in law and administrative order. "The limits of anarchy," he said last week before his inauguration, "have been reached under the present government. I have no intention of beginning mine in the same condition."

Three days after the inaugural, Prio would have his first test. Havana bus workers were scheduled to strike for higher wages promised earlier by Grau. The company had cried that it could not afford to pay them. Grau's answer would have been a subsidy from the boom-filled treasury. In his inaugural address to congress, Prio announced that he had persuaded the country's businessmen to cut food prices 10% (thus presumably washing out the need for a wage hike). That might be enough to avert a bus strike, but such economically iffy methods were unlikely to help in settling the biggest labor dispute of all: how much Cuba's 400,000 sugar hands would be paid for harvesting the winter's cane crop.

Wages & Prices. Though experts grant Prio two more years of sugar prosperity (almost 80% of the national income comes from sugar), sugar prices are already off 20%. When planters last summer demanded a proportionate cut in wages, Grau ducked the issue, left it on the desk for Prio. Would he enforce a wage cut? That was the biggest question Carlos Prio would have to face in 1948.

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