CUBA: Peten's Passenger

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Junta. All the polite protests of Sumner Welles could not convince close observers last week that the Roosevelt Administration entirely approved of Gerardo Machado. Certainlv anti-Machadoans did not believe it. Reporters discovered that the 3,000 Cuban exiles in Washington. Miami. New York were convinced of and acting upon the following: Hating 10 revive the old war-cry of Yankee Imperialism before the World Economic Conference at London next month. Washington has fought shy of armed intervention under the Platt Amendment.* The April series of political assassinations shocked President Roosevelt into the determination that Machado must go. From Washington wires were gently twitched to force his resignation. The State Department let it be understood that the wires would not be pulled until the exiled opposition in the U. S. could unite on a definite program of action after Dictator Machado's removal. They must present a candidate acceptable to the U. S. Until last week the five different parties that form the anti-Machado junta in New York had just one point in common: a burning desire to take every Machado appointee out and shoot him. Faced with the prosaic necessity of organizing a real government, they were thrown into greatest confusion. They remained locked in conference rooms in Manhattan's Hotel Ansonia, arguing themselves hoarse. Growth of a Tyrant. For a fortnight bellicose Representative Hamilton Fish has been rumbling about U. S. intervention in Cuba and denouncing the backing of the Machado dictatorship by U. S. banks and utility companies as an outrageous example of "dollar diplomacy." Stories of the backing of Dictator Machado by U. S. tycoons are even older than stories of Dictator Machado's murders. A few facts are undisputed. In 1924 horn-rimmed Gerardo Machado y Morales was an officer of the Santa Clara subsidiary of Electric Bond & Share, to whom he had sold his own power company a few months earlier. His son-in-law, Jose Emilio Obregon. sometimes called the "Wood Louse" because of his handling of shiploads of lumber donated to Cuba by the American Red Cross after the 1926 hurricane, was manager of Chase National Bank's Havana branch (1927-31). The Chase Bank first loaned the Machado Government $30,000,000, paid off by an issue of gold , bonds payable in 1945; then another $20,000,000 which is still frozen on its hands. Cubans like to add some additional data: Electric Bond & Share is supposed to have provided the $500,000 campaign fund that won Machado his first election; as an inaugural present an official of Electric Bond & Share is supposed to have given him a $20,000 armored car; of Chase's $30,000,000 first loan. $2,000,000 went into commissions—$500,000 to "Wood Louse"' Obregon.

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