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U. S. business almost certainly did not realize what it was setting up in Cuba. In 1924. Businessman Machado was a very different man from the pale, pocked, suspicious butcher of today. Gerardo Machado y Morales is an Hombre del '95, one of the veterans of Cuba's War for Independence in which he rose to be a brigadier general. His handling of his electric power company, and later of a sugar company, was admirably efficient and he talked loudly and most convincingly against the corruption and inefficiency of Cuban politics. The best President Cuba ever had was her first, a hand-picked candidate of General Leonard Wood—General Tomas Estrada Palma. The cost of government rose from $8 per capita under Estrada Palma to $45 under Mario Garcia Menocal, a bearded Cuban socialite who bears a marked resemblance to Brigadier General Cornelius Vanderbilt. All this General Machado—old veterans called him El Gallo, "The Rooster"—promised to stop. The U. S. tycoons that backed his candidacy so substantially thought they were giving Cuba another Estrada Palma. The Blood Standard. Two things might have given critics some hint of what was to come. Before his election Gerardo Machado was bitterly opposed by Armando Andre, editor of El Dm. Ninety days after Machado took office Editor Andre was brutally murdered by hired thugs. That was the first "Machado murder." The retaliatory organization, the A. B. C., was not established until six years later when political assassinations mounted well up in the hundreds. Cuba never abolished the death penalty but not since the days of Estrada Palma had it ever been inflicted. No sooner was El Gallo in office than he ordered the garrote hauled from the National Museum and put to work. Cuba's garrote is a barbarous relic of the Spanish regime, a high-backed oaken chair equipped with an iron collar and a plunger just beneath. A powerful lever at the back of the chair tightens the collar, strangles the condemned, at the same time forcing the plunger into the back of his neck, dislocating the spine. For years President Machado's garrote was operated by Francisco de Pineda, a confessed murderer serving a life term, who rejoiced in the official title of "Minister of Executions."