The Hemisphere: Careerman to Havana

To touchy Cuba, where Ambassador Earl E. T. Smith, a political appointee, had just resigned under rebel criticism (TIME, Jan. 19), the U.S. State Department last week prepared to rush one of its top careermen, Manhattan-born, Yale-educated Philip Bonsai, 55.

Bonsai, since March 1957 Ambassador to Bolivia, has had to deal before with a thorny Latin American situation. In 1955, as Ambassador to Colombia, he was accredited to the government of Dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. Distinctly not one of the diplomat types who deem it a simple duty to stay close to the boss, Spanish-fluent Philip Bonsai moved with ease among intellectuals and politicos in Colombia. Among them was Alberto Lleras Camargo, a leading Rojas oppositionist. Rojas put pressure on the State Department and the U.S. eventually withdrew Bonsai, but the urbane diplomat became a hero among Latin Americans as knowing the difference between dictators and democrats. Seventeen months later Bonsai had the pleasure of going to Bogota as a member of the U.S. delegation to the inauguration of President Lleras Camargo.

In Cuba Bonsai will represent the U.S. before a government making an erratic return to democracy and prone to blame Washington for all its troubles. But he has a unique spiritual link with an earlier rebel Cuba through his late father, Journalist-Diplomat Stephen Bonsai, who in 1897 wrote The Real Condition of Cuba, an eloquent report on the tyranny that won him the gratitude of the rebels, later a Cuban decoration.