CUBA: The Strongman Speaks | TIME

In just twelve hours one day last week, Fidel Castro boldly and brutally crushed his puppet President, Manuel Urrutia. With an expert and cynical maneuver, Strongman Castro set a mob on the Presidential Palace, then went on television to denounce Urrutia as a “traitor.” Not since the time in the 1930s when Dictator Fulgencio Batista went through five puppets in two years had a President of Cuba been treated with such contempt.

Urrutia of late had been trying to act like a President. He vetoed some minor Castro decrees, held up others. He favored going slow with land reform. But to Castro, his most maddening act was his denunciation of Cuba’s Communists as “criminals” just when Castro was making common cause with the Reds in a bitter tirade against a committee of the U.S. Senate.

“Fidel, Himself.” The U.S. link to the Cuba furor was the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, chaired by Mississippi’s Senator James Eastland. Eastland’s witness was Major Pedro Luis Diaz Lanz, former head of Castro’s air force, who says he was fired for fighting Communist influence in the armed forces (TIME, July 13). Cuba’s No. 1 Communist, Díaz Lanz charged, “is Fidel himself.” He added that on a trip to Venezuela, he saw Castro go into a hotel bathroom for a private, two-hour talk with Venezuelan Communist Boss Gustavo Machado. Castro exploded in rage at the committee—”those political simpletons who seek to put a premium on treason”—and did not visibly cool off at President Eisenhower’s statement that “the U.S. has made no such charges.”

In such an atmosphere, a puppet President was expected to join in the chorus. But Urrutia, a slow-moving former city judge, has a stubborn streak of independence. (He caught Castro’s eye and got elevated to the presidency because he once defied Batista and declared from the bench that Cubans have the right to rebel against tyranny.) Even while Diaz Lanz was testifying in Washington, Urrutia called a television press conference and said: “I reject the support of the Communists, and I believe that any real Cuban revolutionary should reject it openly.”

Page from Perón. To fire Urrutia with maximum dramatic effect Castro borrowed a trick from another expert demagogue, Argentina’s ex-Dictator Juan Perón, who once “quit” office to provoke an outburst of public support. The news hit Havana one morning by way of 5½-in. type in Castro’s mouthpiece newspaper, Revolución: FIDEL RESIGNS.*

The show went according to plan. Radio announcers frantically urged the country to “stay ralm.” Labor unions went into emergency session. Students abandoned classes. Mobs gathered and marched on the Presidential Palace shouting: “Do not resign, Fidel! Do not resign!” Urrutia tried to save his skin. “Fidel Castro is our maximum leader!” he yelled down from a palace balcony to the mob.

Castro ignored him. That night on TV, his favorite medium for lecturing the country, Castro said in a four-hour harangue that he had differences with Urrutia that were both “moral and civic.” For a starter, Urrutia was drawing “exactly the same salary as Batista” ($10,000 a month), while all the Cabinet members had voluntarily taken a cut to $700. Urrutia was buying a $40,000 house, while “I have no house; I have bought no house.”† Waving and tapping a yellow pencil, Castro stepped up the pace of the attack until his voice grew shrill and sweat darkened his open green army shirt.

“He is blackmailing us with Communism,” Castro yelled. “Everything here which is promoting the ghost of Communism is promoting foreign aggression. The President is trying to draw up a plan exactly like Díaz Lanz. Maybe he can send for 15 North American agents and install them as ministers here.”

Sobs at the Palace. As Castro’s tirade roared on, now comprehensible, now incoherent, Urrutia watched a television set in his wife’s sitting room at the palace. His face was ashen, and his right cheek twitched nervously as Castro’s high-pitched voice filled the room. At one point, a female secretary yelled toward the TV screen: “That’s a lie!” The President’s wife retreated, red-eyed, to her bedroom. Finally, Urrutia rose, went into a small office, wrote out his resignation, sent it to the television studio, turned his head to the wall and sobbed. All that he asked in the note was an armed guard to see him and his wife and three children through the mob to the home of his brother-in-law. As the resignation was read over the air, Castro deadpanned: “Let him go if he wants to, like any other citizen.”

The new President of Cuba had already been picked that afternoon at a secret meeting in Havana’s Camp Liberty, with no civilian ministers present. Castro and the band of leftists and Communist-liners who hold down all of the top army jobs vetoed two leading choices as too pro-U.S., voted to hand the presidency to Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado, 40, an obscure country lawyer. In his old job as Minister of Revolutionary Laws, Dorticós had the humble job of drafting decrees. In his new job (he cut the salary to $2,500 a month), he will be the rubber stamp for Castro’s one-man rule—or else.

Most Cubans were still convinced that Castro is not the Communist that his old friend, Díaz Lanz. says he is. But by outlawing anti-Communism in Cuba, he had proved that, willingly or not, he is the Reds’ best tool in Latin America since Jacobo Arbenz fled Guatemala in 1954 and eventually fetched up in Prague, Czechoslovakia. And he is a strongman of terrifying power. No Cuban could feel safe when one man could, with mere words, so quickly reduce the President of his country to the status of a traitor.

*A glowing version of Castro’s moves clacked out to other Latin American capitals over the teletypes of Prensa Latina, a new wire service that set up shop in Havana last month after Castro argued that “the international news mo nopolies [i.e., AP and UPI] soy lies and calum nies to weaken our revolution.”

† Castro lives in a villa in suburban Cojimar, a suite at the Havana Hilton, and several apart ments scattered about town.

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