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Father. Perched for the moment on the top of his long, potentially rich island with not a U. S. Marine in sight, Boss Batista commands the biggest army in Cuba's history (12,000 regulars, 20,000 reserves and a national police force of 4,000). He spends $19,000,000 a year on them, has replaced the tumbledown shacks of the stingy Machado regime with spruce modern barracks. Leaves are frequent: potatoes are peeled and floors swept not by soldiers but by civilians.
In a country where blood has been spilled as freely as in Cuba, where the highest criterion of patriotism is actually having risked one's life, and where revolution preoccupies college students as normally as football does in the U. S., the use of armed force as an instrument of political progress seems perfectly natural and not at all barbaric. And it is not as a killer but as a father that Boss Batista sees himself using his martial power. He thinks of Cuba's three million guajiros (landless peons), from whose midst he has risen, much as he thinks of his two children, Mirta, 10, and Ruben Fulgencio ("Papito"), 3, to whom the Boss has given a Colonel's uniform and with whom he loves to romp when he arises at noon. Boss Batista explains that it was not fascism but such boys as Papito he had in mind in setting up, under the direction of his Secretary of State and closest civilian henchman, Dr. Juan J. Remos, 1,000 civic-military schools, staffed by Army sergeants, in Cuba's remote rural districts. There are about 70,000 children and adults in the schools now, learning to read, write, delouse themselves, ply trades. Army sergeants were chosen as teachers, says Batista, because they were the handiest group who knew how to read and write. Fatherly Batista has also secured a firm Army grip on orphan asylums, tuberculosis sanatoriums and charitable institutions, administered by a group of seven Army-controlled corporations, to whose income he wants to add the estimated $1,400,000 annual profits of Cuba's weekly lotteries. The U. S., says Batista, has always been very kind and fatherly toward Cuba, and a profitable thing that attitude has been for the U. S. Now, says he, let paternalism begin at home, and let the profits stay there, too. Batista, and not the U. S. State Department, will be the father of his country.
Money. However fatherly Boss Batista becomes, he knows that he and Cuba must remain at least economic nephews of Uncle Sam, who buys 65% of Cuba's chief cash crop and controls a good share of the land that grows it. Cuba also needs capital, which so far the U. S. has supplied. Last week Secretary Hull greeted with diplomatic enthusiasm the news that President Laredo Bru had appointed a five-man commission to tackle the $80,000,000 defaulted public works debt inherited from Boss Machado. This comprises $40,000,000 in public works bonds (some $34,000,000 of which are held in the U. S.), $20,000,000 in short-term credits held by Chase National and two other Manhattan banks, and $20,000,000 in contractors' certificates about half of which are held by Boston's Warren Bros.