Guatemala: Echoes from a Sardine

A stormy old name out of Central America’s turbulent past was stirring new winds last week. From Venezuela, where he lives in exile teaching “History of Philosophy and Culture,” Juan José Arévalo, 57, the anti-Yankee President of Guatemala from 1945 to 1951, announced that he will return home next month to start building for the 1963 presidential elections. As he prepared his comeback, one of his old U.S.-baiting books—The Shark and the Sardines, published in 1956 —was raising hackles in the U.S. in a new printing hotly promoted by Castroites.

The book itself is the standard, dogeared list of U.S. “crimes”—some true, some partly true, others patently false—against its smaller neighbors over the past 150 years. It serves Castro’s purpose so well that he has had 150,000 copies printed in Spanish to be sold for 5¢ per copy. For whatever U.S. audience that could be reached, a New York Castro-phile named June Cobb translated it into English. U.S. publisher: Lyle Stuart, a Manhattan publisher of erotica and Castroite propaganda who has also served as treasurer of the New York branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

The harpoons for “Uncle Shark” may prove a current embarrassment for Arévalo, who now sings a less strident line and says he will not even take royalties from Castro. But his book was no momentary aberration. A self-styled “spiritual Socialist,” he blamed his country’s ills on the United Fruit Co., which had immense holdings in Guatemala, accused the U.S. Government of backing the company’s “exploitations,” once expelled a U.S. ambassador who offended him. In office, though a devious administrator, he gave his country some freedoms it had not known under a previous long line of dictators. The one party he refused to legalize was the Communist—but he did nothing to restrain the Communist clique behind gullible Army Colonel Jacobo Arbenz, who succeeded him as President.

Though Arévalo has been out of the country since 1953, his image is still compelling. President Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, a conservative, says that he “will not interfere with his return, but there are anti-Communist elements here that might object.”

To minimize criticism, Arévalo protests, “I am a Christian and an idealistic anti-Marxist.” He insists that “I am not anti-American. I oppose the American Government when it turns into a protector of American corporations.” He still fumes that the United Fruit Co. runs Guatemala, but promises that “we plan to maintain free enterprise in agriculture, industry, culture and commerce.”

As for Castro, says Arévalo, Communism will not work in Latin America or anywhere else. “You can see that by going over their record in Cuba.”