The fact that approximately 119 officers in the Cuban Army were shot or blown into small pieces by Baptista's rank-and-file Monday has certainly strengthened the case of those who have sounded the usual cry: "Let's intervene to establish law and order." Advocates of this course cite the civil war in progress and the strong possibility of its expansion in the future; they argue the irreconcilability of the opposing factions and declare that even a dictatorship of the Machado stamp is preferable to anarchy. There is some logical force behind this stand: as long as a large part of Cuba wants a government which is wholly inconsistent with American economic domination, a stalemate, or worse, can be the only result. But the interventionists miss the real point, as usual with such simple reactions to complicated problems, they attack the symptom and ignore the disease.

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What really overthrew Machado, killed the officers of the Plaza Hotel, and pitched Cuba into an anarchy from which, it appears, only a brutal rule can pull her, was the Hawley-Smoot Tariff of 1929. The very gentle ex-Senator Smoot of Utah, who alternates his campaign for literary purity with an effective defense of Western and Southern United States sugar concerns, was able in this piece of legislation largely to exclude Cuban sugar from the American market, thus in a rather short space of time ruining the island's main industry, provoking the violent unrest born of poverty which eventually broke over Machado's bespectacled head and threatens to keep the situation in constant turmoil until the cause is removed. If you are a liberal, the cause is simply the stupid tariff. If you happen to be a Marxist, the cause is the economic conflict between rival sugar interests which produced the tariff and which will keep it there; which cast off the Phillipines because of their competition in the same field, and which (if the forces are anywhere near being equal) will prevent either the annexation or the dropping of Cuba, leaving her stranded in chaos halfway between the two.

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Pollux confided to me that he was nothing short of alarmed at the imminence of a third Battle of the Century. What, he asked, if Billy Sunday, following the example of Aimee Semple Macpherson Hutton who plans to team up with the great Mrs. Costello, should offer a partnership to Machine-Gun Kelly, another famous humanitarian? And what if their paths should cross, what if the Kelly-Sunday team should muscle in on legitimate Costello-Macpherson territory? When they meet in evangelistic competition are life-lines thrown out, or pineapples? Pretty questions, Pollux, I admit, and ones fraught with considerable menace. CASTOR.