For the Cause

Mexico's aging maestro, Diego Rivera, 66, is one of his country's most assiduous Communists and one of the most successful publicity seekers in the world today. His formula for making news: invite attack. In recent years he has earned headlines for the cause with a mural which includes the printed legend, Dios no existe (God does not exist), and with worshipful portrayals of Mao and Stalin (TIME, March 17). Last week the jug-bellied joker did it again, this time with a huge mural on the facade of a Mexico City theater.

The mural, tracing the history of the theater in Mexico, showed Mexico's favorite comic, Cantinflas, in the cloak of Juan Diego -- the 16th century Indian to whom, by pious belief, the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared. A Roman Catholic group protested that this time Rivera had "exceeded the human limits of tolerance" by painting a leering Cantinflas as the symbol of "those who have turned their backs on Christ." Nothing of the sort, replied Rivera, with unctuous glee; his Cantinflas symbolized "the opposition of Mexico's poverty-stricken peasant masses to the country's 9,000 millionaires."

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