Cold Welcome

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Clay Calhoun, as his name suggests,* looks like a solid Southern gentleman. A handsome 30-year-old with a fullback's build, he has a flourishing export-import business in New Orleans. He also has a millionaire father-in-law—hearty, red-faced William Stevens of Miami, a building contractor in Venezuela since the days of President Isaías Medina.

In mid-February, Father-in-law Stevens drove out to Miami's International Airport to see Calhoun off on a business trip to Caracas. Just before take-off time, he pulled a wad of newspaper clippings from his pocket. "Show these to the boys in the office when you get to Caracas," he said. That evening, when the plane landed at La Guaira airport, a delegation of brown-faced, unsmiling Venezuelan army officers met Calhoun. The reason: since December, exiled Venezuelan President Rómulo Gallegos had been an intermittent guest in the cozy, twelve-room villa of Father-in-law Stevens on Miami's Star Island.

Helped by the police, the army officers rummaged endlessly through Calhoun's luggage, even split open the linings of his bags. Then they searched his pockets. When they found the newspaper clippings, they smiled in triumph. The clippings were from the Havana weekly Bohemia. Among them was an article by Andres Eloy Blanco, Foreign Minister in the ousted Gallegos regime. It described an exchange of letters between Harry Truman and Gallegos on U.S. recognition of the military junta that overthrew Gallegos. * To the representatives of Venezuela's revolutionary government, such a document was subversive.

The police shoved Calhoun into a back room, stripped him to the buff, and searched him. Then, as he vainly shouted for the U.S. consul, they hauled him off to Caracas' Model Jail. In his cell, Calhoun repeated his demands to see the consul. When he got no action, he kicked out the cell window, went on a hunger strike.

On the fourth day, Calhoun's wife, worried because she had not heard from him, phoned her father. Stevens got his Caracas office on his son-in-law's trail. Next day, at the U.S. embassy's insistence, Calhoun was released—and escorted by armed guards to a U.S.-bound plane.