Love & Bullets

Diplomats from 51 nations gathered in the flower-bedecked Hall of Mirrors ia Havana's Presidential Palace last week to see General Fulgencio Batista sworn in as President of Cuba. It was the cheerful strongman's third inauguration as Cuba's chief of state. He had made himself President for the first time in 1940, after running the country for seven years as a military dictator. Out of power from 1944 to 1952, he then took over again in a military coup, adopted the title of Provisional President. Last year, eager to drop the "provisional," he ran for President and won easily, since he was the only avowed candidate in the race.

After taking the oath, just after noon, Batista strode to a second-floor balcony, delivered a five-minute speech to the 65,000 people in the park below. "My opponents say the people are with them," he cried, "but I say the people are here with me . . . In contrast to those who want war, we want peace. Against those who want blood, we want love."

Despite the talk of peace and love, bullets flew in Havana only six hours before the inauguration as a raiding party of cops shot it out with a longtime enemy of Batista's, Orlando Leon Lemus. Known all over Cuba as El Colorado (Red, the color of his hair, not his politics), Lemus was one of the most pistol-happy of a pistol-happy tribe: the Cuban "revolucionarios," who plotted against Batista in the '30s and early '40s, then became government-coddled racketeers under Batista's successors. Last week, tipped off that El Colorado was up to his old conspiratorial tricks, the cops swooped down on his hiding place in the suburb of Santos Suarez, killed him and one of his henchmen. On the premises the raiders found 70 submachine guns, 40 rifles, scores of pistols--a sizable arsenal for a man to have lying around the house, even in Cuba.

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