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The trucks made straight for the airfield, where a chartered DC-3 stood waiting. Alemán and three henchmen took the U.S. money aboard, leaving the rest to be changed later at Cuban banks. In Miami, he carried the currency to the Du Pont Building headquarters of his $70 million Florida real-estate empire where, an employee has said, "bundles of $1,000 bills were tossed around like wrapped packages of pennies." Later a reporter asked Alemán, "How did you get all that money out of the Treasury?" "It was easy," said Alemán. "In suitcases."
Pleasures & Palaces. Ex-President Prío also did well for himself, apparently without the use of suitcases. When he was a student and budding politico, Prío said, "there wasn't a peseta in the house to go to the movies." By the time he was Senator, he was a millionaire, owning at least two houses and two country estates. While President, he quietly built one of the hemisphere's most fabulous mansions at La Chata, near Havana. The place has an air-conditioned barbershop, a zoo, a stable of Arabian horses and a swimming pool with a small waterfall on one side and a dining terrace, bar, and kitchen on the other. Its estimated value is somewhere between $1,000,000 and $3,000,000. Prío's presidential salary: $25,000 a year.
In spite of its graft and corruption, there was some good to be said for Cuba's seven-year-old democratic regime. Havana under Grau and Prío was a haven of free speech and free thought. They built schools, hospitals and highways. They gave Cuba a national bank, made loans to expand industry and diversify agriculture, and improved labor standards in a land plagued by seasonal unemployment. And, despite fantastic sums spent to sway elections, they kept the way open for democratic change.
There was at least an even chance that an honest man would have won the June 1 election. The result of Batista's coup is that the cynical old political practices will go on as before. Batista gave the lottery to the same lieutenant who handled it for him under his earlier dictatorship; he placed the customs, a traditional source of political enrichment, in army hands. In scrupulous conformity with the existing code, he left Prío's personal properties untouched—just as Prío had never laid a hand on his.
Southern Democrats? The U.S. people like to believe that the whole Western Hemisphere is safe for democracy. The fact is that, with a few such exceptions as Uruguay, Chile and Costa Rica (the list is always subject to change), most Latin American countries are not democracies in the sense understood in the U.S. The notion that they are is an illusion fostered during World War II under the Good Neighbor policy.