CUBA: Interference

Noisy, arrogant Colonel Fulgencio Batista, Cuba's would-be Dictator who lately rallied 100,000 Cuban peasants to his side with the highly original slogan of a "9% sugar tax to educate Cuban children"' (TIME, Dec. 28), was crowing and preening himself last week as never before.

Peasant-Conservative Batista, who has long been set on getting rid of head-in-the-clouds democratic President Miguel Mariano Gomez y Arias, blatantly dragooned the Cuban Senate last week into voting the President out of office. The trumped-up impeachment charge against President Gomez was "interference with legislation.'' though he had done nothing worse than veto Batista's sugar-tax bill. Since this bill had been engineered by Batista from the beginning, the charge of "interference" struck many Cubans as ironical, but with the Army behind Batista the politicians promptly impeached and ousted Gomez.

Sixty-one-year-old Vice President Federico Laredo Bru immediately succeeded to the Presidency.

Manifestoed ex-President Gomez, as a private citizen: "If the army chief continues to put in and take out presidents, he should come out openly in proclaiming a government of force."