CUBA: Switch?

The green sugar island of Cuba has been the citadel of Communism in the Hemisphere. Communist leaders control the 400,000-strong Cuban Confederation of Labor (C.T.C.). The C.T.C., in turn, is the cornerstone of Communist-line Vicente Lombardo Toledano’s Latin American Federation of Labor (C.T.A.L.). Last week, in that very citadel, Don Vicente got an unexpected buffeting.

Reports that Auténtico (Cuban Revolutionary Party) leaders were trying to move in on the C.T.C. at its annual convention had sped Lombardo from his Mexico City home to Havana. He had hardly settled into his $24-a-day room in the swank Hotel Sevilla-Biltmore when he discovered how right those reports were. Waiters belonging to the Auténtico faction refused to serve him (but servants who followed their union’s Communist leaders loyally made his bed). As the 2,000 pistol-packing, trigger-happy delegates (both Auténticos and Communists) jockeyed to get their credentials certified, pistols popped. One Auténtico was killed, one wounded. Later, two auto loads of Auténticos raced by Communist headquarters, sprayed the entrance with their automatics.

Auténticos charged that Lombardo Toledano was a “foreigner sticking his nose in internal affairs.” In Congress, Auténtico deputies asked for the Mexican’s ouster from the country. After Cuba’s Minister of the Interior canceled the convention in the interests of public safety, Lombardo Toledano quietly flew away.

Was easygoing President Ramón Grau San Martin, himself an Auténtico, at last moving to oust his political allies, the Communists, from the C.T.C., thus curb them as a political party? Some Auténtico leaders thought so. If that happened, the C.T.C. would probably shed its C.T.A.L. connections and hook up with the A.F.L-sponsored, right-wing Inter-American Federation of Labor. But smooth, well-tailored Don Vicente, back in his Mexican penthouse office, said “our relations with Grau are still cordial; he believes, as ever, in the ideals of the C.T.A.L.”