Eduardo Chibás by Ehrlich Ilan;

Author:Ehrlich, Ilan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Government Loan

The June 26 issue of Bohemia featured an interview with Treasury Minister Antonio Prío. Asked by Mario Kuchilán whether the government was preparing a loan, he opened his eyes wide and replied, “I would rather not talk about it.”[83] Three weeks later, Francisco Ichaso noted that the president and his prime minister remained mum on the subject but found it telling that the government did not offer any denials. Even as the administration stonewalled about the loan, two related issues—namely, the pillaged treasury and its capacity to support an ever-expanding bureaucracy—could not be so easily minimized. Government jobs were the Auténticos’ lifeblood, and Prío had insisted the so-called deficit would not endanger them. Hence, there was palpable shock when twelve thousand public employees received pink slips in July. Auténtico congressmen were particularly outraged. Some suspected that Grau’s “deficit” had diminished the funds available for government work.[84] Moreover, the positions being cut had specifically been handed out by Auténtico representatives—some of whom counted more than one thousand places at the public trough at their disposal. Teodoro Tejeda Setién, a congressman from Las Villas province, was thus being quite honest when he referred to the displaced as “our employees.”[85] Invited to address the Auténtico-Republican parliamentary committee, Tony Varona euphemistically explained that Cuba was suffering a “post-war crisis.”[86] Predictably, those who complained loudest regarding the government’s newfound penury were legislators loyal to Miguelito Suárez Fernández. The real question, then, was whether the administration was prepared to antagonize them less than a year before midterm elections.

Ichaso, in his Bohemia column, mentioned the persistent rumor that Prío planned to obtain a “river of gold” in order to bring back the go-go epoch of Grau.[87] This would maintain Auténtico unity at the cost of abandoning one of the party’s last remaining principles. Having been formed during the late 1920s and early 1930s when President Gerardo Machado negotiated loans on what they considered exploitive terms, Auténtico founders, including Prío, had considered them anathema from the start. For this reason, Manuel Fernández Supervielle had campaigned for Havana’s mayoralty in 1946 on a platform of bringing water to the city without foreign money or concessions. Of course, Supervielle’s chief propagandist had been Eduardo Chibás, who was opposed to a loan then and remained steadfastly against one now. Asked by a reporter for his opinion, Chibás recalled that he had accused the government of attempting to borrow foreign money six months earlier on his radio show. Eddy also could not resist one of his traditional crowd-pleasing refrains, saying:

What President Prío has to do now if he wants to behave honorably and logically is not to look for a loan of 100 or 200 million pesos to replace the millions that have been stolen from the public treasury but to throw the thieves in prison and confiscate the money they robbed. But he cannot do this because he would have to begin by incarcerating the majority of those who surround him.[88]

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