Dunners

U. S. Senators commonly travel abroad for pleasure & profit when Congress is not in session. Equally common is the practice of dispatching protective committees to foreign capitals to make demands, usually futile, for payment on defaulted dollar bonds. Last week Cuba witnessed a surprising combination of those two commonplaces. At the head of a protective committee two U. S. Senators marched into the Presidential Palace in Havana for no other purpose than to dun. The committee's chairman was Senator Gerald P. Nye; its counsel, Senator Burton K. Wheeler.

In all respects except its nominal leadership the protective committee was quite orthodox. Since the private activities of U. S. Senators are not limited by law, the committee when it was formed about a year ago, made a shrewd bid for Senatorial patriotism and prestige. Thus it was that Senators Nye & Wheeler popped up in Havana last week at the behest of unhappy holders of $40,000,000 of Public Works bonds issued in the U. S. in the twilight of the Machado dictatorship. After Machado fled, the Grau San Martin Government repudiated the loan as illegally contracted, and the Cuban Supreme Court is now pondering charges that the Machado Administration and Chase National Bank, which underwrote the issue, had "usurped authority and entered into bribery." Chairman Winthrop Aldrich of Chase indignantly denied such irregularity but since 1933 Cuba has paid nothing on either the $40,000,000 of bonds owned by private U. S. investors or an additional $20,000,000 of "short-term" credits held by Chase and other U. S. banks.

"I wish to make it plain, however, that we are not here in the interests of any banker in the U. S.," announced Senator Wheeler on arrival. But the Montana Democrat, who championed the "death sentence" for utility holding companies without a qualm for stockholders, almost wept for "the small investors who put their life savings into the Public Works bonds because of their confidence in Cuba's honor & integrity."

Senator Nye arrived later by plane from Washington, where in the last Congress he introduced no less than four neutrality resolutions and a bill to take the profits out of war. U. S. Ambassador Jefferson Caffery obligingly arranged an interview at the Presidential Palace. As everyone expected, President Mendieta politely pointed out that nothing could be done until his provisional Government was replaced by an elected one. And after the interview Senator Nye made an awkward effort to appease Cuban feeling, declaring: "We made no demands for payment nor was there any peremptory tone in our conference with Mendieta. . . . Cuba is not the only nation that needs to be spanked for not meeting its foreign obligations."

Then in a later interview with a New York Herald Tribune correspondent the North Dakota Senator revealed a hidden streak of old-fashioned imperialism that amazed his countrymen and embarrassed an Administration which boasts a "good neighbor" foreign policy. Senator Nye spoke frankly of intervention: "The constitutional Government replacing the Mendieta de facto Administration must quickly recognize this important obligation to U. S. investors, and if it fails to do so, the U. S. will surely take charge of collection."

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