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Spring. With a Constituent Assembly in the offing this will be an eventful political spring in Cuba, and last week there were many rustling signs of spring among Cuba's politicians. As the buzzards wheeled lazily by day and the business life of Cuba went peacefully on in the sunbright streets and sleepy countryside, at night in the city of Havana the secret conferences of dark-eyed men talking softly and rapidly became longer and subtler and more intense. The Republican Actionist Party of impeached President Gómez, who spent the winter attending exhibition baseball games with ostentatious humility, suddenly spurted with a violent manifesto characterizing Acting-President Laredo Bru as "a decorative figure and a phantom, imprisoned in the palace as a legal fiction," and demanding that the Army stay clear of the elections for the Constituent Assembly. Grizzled, conservative old General Mario Menocal, vice president and smarting under his finessing by Republican Gómez in last year's Batistafied election, finished grinding sugar at his central (mill) in Camagüey and turned up in Havana for "unofficial talks" with Dr. Gómez. That was exciting enough, but not nearly so much a sign of political spring as the news that onetime President Dr. Ramon Grau San Martin, who has been living in Miami since Boss Batista turned him out in January 1934, was proposing to return. Strong though General Menocal is, Dr. Grau, a deep Pink if not a real Red, is even stronger with the Cuban electorate, and Batista might welcome him back as an ally to stave off eclipse by the martial Menocal.
These stirrings gave Havana a high political fever, with rumors of new coalitions circulating hourly. About all that any Cuban politician knew surely was that, let coalitions form where they might, for the moment the undisputed boss of Cuba was husky, brown Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar.
Bosses. For the first time since he was born in a farmer's hut in Oriente Province 36 years ago, full-blooded Fulgencio Batista was without a boss to chafe him. His first boss was a tailor who apprenticed him at the age of 12. Batista now brags that before he quit a year later he could make a suit of clothes himself. Afterward he worked in a grocery store and bar, as a railroad fireman, engineer, conductor. Once he studied to be a barber. In the sugar boom of 1920, Cuba's Dance of the Millions, he was administrator of an Oriente cane plantation and likes to recall how he spurned his chances then to enrich himself dishonestly. Next year he entered the army as an infantry private. He was smart enough to study shorthand, which enabled him to win a competitive army examination and become a court stenographer with the rank of sergeant. Four years ago Sergeant Batista was scribbling obscurely at courts martial when Franklin Roosevelt sent his friend Benjamin Sumner Welles as Ambassador to see whether the ominous groundswell against ruthless President Gerardo ("The Butcher") Machado could be oiled over without a Revolution.