The Hemisphere: Spiritual Home

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Until lately, Guatemala's former President Jacobo Arbenz has enjoyed lonely notoriety as the only head (until his downfall) of a Communist-dominated government in Latin American history. Now he may have to share the title with Cuba's Fidel Castro. Last week, visiting Cuba, Arbenz felt so much at home that he decided to move in permanently.

In 1954, facing the invading forces of U.S.-backed Rebel Carlos Castillo Armas, Arbenz abandoned the presidency to make a panicky dash for safety in the Mexican embassy. He thereby won the scorn of a militant young Argentine leftist then temporarily living in Guatemala—Ernesto ("Che") Guevara. Said Che, who is now Castro's one-man brain trust: "If Jacobo Arbenz had been a man, he would have taken himself to the streets and fought."

Leaning heavily on his spirited and strongly Marxist wife Maria Cristina (nicknamed "Maruca"), Arbenz left Mexico, alighted briefly in France and in Switzerland, where $2,000,000 of Guatemalan government money reportedly waited in a numbered bank account. Then he settled in Prague. In 1956 he visited Moscow for several months, but the Russians sized him up as a lightweight, Marxist-wise. Leaving his two daughters in a Russian boarding school, he headed back to the Western Hemisphere, landing in Montevideo in May 1957. Politically, he observed the rules of asylum by masking his Communist contacts as Russian language lessons. He indulged his love of cognac in all-night drinking bouts, threatening to flatten anyone who dared doubt his boxing ability. When he left on his Cuban junket three weeks ago, Maruca, who had urged him to go, stayed behind.

As a possible spearhead for spreading Castro's influence to Guatemala, Arbenz is likely to prove of small value. Guatemala's leftists tend to consider him a quitter and a has-been. Instead, Arbenz will continue the role of propaganda showpiece that he began last week before the cameras of Havana's Televisión-Revolución. "Latin America was jolted by the intervention of North American imperialism in Guatemala," he said. "The Guatemalan situation will not be repeated in Cuba. When a people is so united and determined to win, when it has leaders so self-denying, audacious and brave, when it . . ."