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Sumner Welles gave only one gingerly touch to the corrupt Machado regime when, to his dismay, it crumbled completely, unleashing forces that soon proved too violent to handle. His hand-picked President Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, a polished Cuban nonentity whose father was a Revolutionary hero in 1868, lasted for 23 days of riot and bloodshed. Those days turned Sergeant Fulgencio Batista from a stenographer into a martial dictator. While Mr. Welles was anxiously trying to calm everything down again, Batista met with a five-man junta which handed the presidency over to Dr. Ramon Grau San Martin, surgeon and fiery professor of anatomy at the University of Havana. When the lower officers besieged their Machadista superiors in the Hotel Nacional, Batista led them. Few days later Mr. Welles found that he not only had a new provisional president but an aggressive army with Fulgencio Batista, now Colonel, as its chief.
Sumner Welles is as chilly, precise and high-minded a Brahmin as Groton-&-Harvard ever produced. With a rich wife and an intense devotion to duty, he is a paragon of U. S. career diplomacy. Between him and his absolutely opposite number, the earthy, self-made Cuban farm boy Batista, now began a historic tug of war for Cuba. First round went to Mr. Welles when Dr. Grau began heckling the U. S.-owned Cuban Cane Products Corp. and failed to win U. S. recognition. Second round was Batista's: he eluded Mr. Welles' trap to discredit him through Dr. Grau by turning against Grau in time, forcing his resignation. After two days and two more provisional presidents, quiet, conservative Carlos Mendieta stepped in, won formal U. S. recognition within five days. Back in Washington, Assistant Secretary of State Welles hastened the repeal of the 33-year-old Platt Amendment authorizing the U. S. Government to intervene in Cuban affairs. When, after nearly two years of wrangling with an unruly Congress, Carlos Mendieta stepped out, Secretary Welles won another round by persuading Batista to hold a constitutional election for his successor.
Meantime, Mr. Welles, not without misgivings, had left Cuba in the hands of able Career Diplomat Jefferson Caffery. The election was duly run off in January 1936 and produced President Dr. Miguel Mariano Gómez, the first "legally" elected President of Cuba since Machado's first term (1924). Perhaps because of his faith in Sumner Welles, cocky Dr. Gómez made the mistake last December of talking back to Batista when the Colonel had Congress levy a 9¢ tax on each sack of sugar produced in Cuba to finance an Army-conducted program for rural schools. With Sumner Welles and Franklin Roosevelt busily hymning Democracy at Buenos Aires and friendly Jefferson Caffery on needles, Boss Batista won his first big round by having Dr. Gómez impeached for "interfering" with the Congress, replaced him with tractable Secretary of State Federico Laredo Bru.
Latest round was doubtful. Last month the State Department abruptly dispatched Jefferson Caffery on a "vacation," a move behind which many a Cuban could discern the long, disillusioned face of Sumner Welles, who all winter has quietly been trying, with indifferent success, to encourage formation of a liberal anti-Batista bloc in the Cuban Congress.