5th, Kidnapping & 6th

In Cuban politics a zero hour came last week when opponents of provisional President Carlos Mendieta hired suburban Havana radio station CMQ to criticize the new electoral plan devised by Princeton's President Harold Willis Dodds (TIME, Dec. 16) and radio station COCO announced a speech in praise of the plan to be made by the Chief Executive. Day of the speeches the Communications Department ordered CMQ to cancel its anti-Dodds speech.

Three hours before it was time for the Mendieta speech over COCO 16 men with submachine guns and pistols shot the radio tubes and equipment of station CMQ to blazes for a $40,000 loss. At about the same time Nicolas Castano Padilla, 66-year-old Havana banker, importer, sugar mill owner and lumberman, was kidnapped and held for $300,000 ransom. At once 4,500 Cuban police and soldiers and 300 secret service agents were let loose upon Havana to catch the kidnappers, and amid seething turmoil the opposition demanded for perhaps the dozenth time that President Mendieta resign.

Colonel Mendieta was the fifth President of his troubled country since 1933, when Cuba overthrew her "tyrant" General Gerardo Machado, who now lives in Europe. There was no critical reason why he should resign, but the Cuban political snarl had at last grown too involved and ominous for Colonel Mendieta. With the beauty of phrase which comes readily to Cuban orators, he abruptly declared: "The Cuban people said when they called me to the Presidency that it would be as the nation's savior. Now I shall again be the nation's savior, if I resign. Hence I am abandoning the Presidential Palace."

Automatically this made Cuba's colorless and cautious Secretary of State Jose A. Barnet y Vinagres Acting President. Next day the electoral College elected him the Republic's sixth President in 28 months. He clung to about the only thing in Cuba's political ferment he could cling to, the date set by Princeton's Dodds for the next regular election of a President of Cuba, Jan. 10.

Few Cubans thought this election would be decisive but the favored candidate remained this week Dr. Miguel Mariano Gomez, who, it is expected, will be supported by a Nationalist-Liberal-Republican party coalition and who is seemingly favored by Cuba's military "Strong Man," genial, naive, back-seat-taking Colonel Fulgencio Batista, who two years ago was a simple sergeant.

At week's end the ostensibly irrelevant but to Cuban politicians basically fascinating ransom of $300,000 for Sugar Tycoon Castano was understood to have been paid. In Cuba such major kidnappings are commonly supposed to be the work of patriots who can think of no other way to raise enough money for a revolution. Sexagenarian Castano was finally discovered by soldiers in the suburbs, said no ransom had been paid.

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