Unhappy Doctor

In the luxurious third-floor apartment of Havana's rococo presidential palace, bachelor Ramon Grau San Martin had finished his morning cup of sweet black coffee. On the stroke of 9 he walked down the private stairway to his office below. He was ready for a day-long procession of visitors.

Long medical practice (at $50,000 a year) has made Grau one of Cuba's best listeners, and he gets many a political earful. One morning last week, six deputations (a women's delegation, veterans, politicians, sugar growers, students, labor leaders) and a succession of individual pleaders poured out their complaints to him. Grau, grey and even more austere than in 1944, heard every one.

Despite good times and a boom in sugar, Cubans were griping last week. From scrubby street gamins in Havana's Barrio de Colen to the panama-hatted businessmen in the Manzana de Gemez, they panned Grau for the high price of lard, the scarcity of beef, the roaring black market. There were demands in the press for his resignation. Habaneros tell the story of the Camaguey man who had been badly beaten up for talking about Grau. "Did you say very bad things about him?" asked a sympathetic cop. "No, I praised him, and then a mob attacked me," said the victim. Currently the most popular Cuban is Senator Eddy Chibas, ardent duelist and once Grau's close friend, who fills the air every Sunday night with rasping radio attacks on "the Government of dishonesty and indignity."

Honesty Is Not Enough. What had happened to Grau? Was he not the man who was going to clean up Cuba after Batista? During his dramatic 127 days' presidency in the 1933 revolution, many of Cuba's most progressive laws were enacted. On taking office again in 1944, Grau said: "There is nothing wrong with Cuba that an honest administration can't cure." To show his good faith, he publicly declared the extent of his fortune ($231,512 in cash and securities, plus real estate). But graft did not stop--for in Cuba no one man can stop it.

In nearly three years of the Grau administration, 58 political murders have been committed; just two men have been arrested and none convicted. After Eddy Chibas' charge that Grau's Commerce Minister played the black market, the Minister resigned. And Grau, the professed democrat, governs by decree just like Batista. He has an alliance with the Communists that all but the Commies deplore. His attempt to seize for the Government the differential between the 1947 and 1946 sugar prices has alienated 50,000 sugar growers and a large part of his Autentico Party. "Never in the Republic's 45 years," said Sergio Carbo, another ex-Grau man, "has a Government squandered so much, robbed so much, or deceived the people so much."

By now, Grau had made enough mistakes to rule him right out of the 1948 presidential race, for which his friends once tried to back him despite the constitutional ban on reelection. Hasty critics overlook Grau's educational program (236 schools built, more building), his high-capacity (if slow-building) housing and public-works plans, and his own defense that "never in history has there been a

Government more respectful of the liberties of man."

In the face of all the griping, the Army, so important in Cuban politics, is still on Grau's side. That makes for security. Most weekends Grau hops into a military plane and flies off with his family and fat, pompous Army Chief Genovevo Perez Damera to sun himself on the beach at beautiful Veradero.

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