Vivas for a V.P.

As a Cuban newspaper reported it last week. Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon "knocked a home run" right after he landed in Havana, the first stop on a four-week good-will tour of the Caribbean and Central America. Instead of sticking to the usual bland official generalities, Nixon wowed his Cuban audience at Havana's military airport by confiding that he greatly admired the prowess of three eminent Cuban athletes: Washington Senators Pitcher Conrado Marrero, Chicago White Sox Outfielder Orestes Minoso and ex-Welterweight Champion Kid Gavilan.

Again and again last week, in Cuba, Mexico and Guatemala, Nixon showed the same deft soft-collar touch. When a Cuban reporter at a news conference asked him to say something in Spanish, Nixon first explained through an interpreter that his high-school Spanish was badly rusted; then he drew a burst of sympathetic laughter from the Cubans by saying good-naturedly: "Buenos dias. Muchas gracias. Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis." Upon landing in Mexico City from Havana, Nixon got off to another ice-breaking start by reminding the Mexicans that he had visited their country before. "My wife and I first came here on our honeymoon 15 years ago," he said, adding wistfully that in those happy days the whole two-week automobile trip had cost a total of $166.

Presidents & Peddlers. In each country he visited, Nixon called upon the chief of state--President-elect Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, Presidents Adolfo Ruiz Cortines in Mexico and Carlos Castillo Armas in Guatemala--to present a silver-framed picture of Ike and Mamie Eisenhower and to chat about affairs of state. But Nixon also shook hands with and talked to the common people he met at every turn--leather-palmed cane-field workers, ragged fruit peddlers, schoolkids, mothers with babes in arms. Unaccustomed to such free-and-easy mingling, the Latin government officials who escorted the Vice President around often seemed a bit uncomfortable, but run-of-the-plaza Cubans, Mexicans and Guatemalans were obviously pleased.

Nixon's wife Patricia did her share of friend-winning, too. She followed a womanly schedule of her own that took her to hospitals, orphanages, a school for blind children, an asylum for the deaf.

Understanding & Confetti. In Mexico City the Vice President paid a visit to the renowned Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, where for the first time in memory the organ boomed out The Star-Spangled Banner. Foreign statesmen on official tours usually refrain from visiting the shrine, possibly out of fear of offending the once ardent anticlerical sentiment that still lingers faintly among many educated Mexicans. But at the church, Archbishop Luis Maria Martinez said to Nixon: "You have shown understanding in coming to this shrine, for it is the heart of Mexico." When Nixon came out, the Mexicans waiting outside showered him with confetti, shouted vivas for him, for President Eisenhower and for the U.S.

From Mexico the Nixons flew to Guatemala. Beyond lay El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

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