Word: urrutia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Urrutia of late had been trying to act like a President. He vetoed some minor Castro decrees, held up others. He favored going slow with land reform. But to Castro, his most maddening act was his denunciation of Cuba's Communists as "criminals" just when Castro was making common cause with the Reds in a bitter tirade against a committee of the U.S. Senate...
...such an atmosphere, a puppet President was expected to join in the chorus. But Urrutia, a slow-moving former city judge, has a stubborn streak of independence. (He caught Castro's eye and got elevated to the presidency because he once defied Batista and declared from the bench that Cubans have the right to rebel against tyranny.) Even while Diaz Lanz was testifying in Washington, Urrutia called a television press conference and said: "I reject the support of the Communists, and I believe that any real Cuban revolutionary should reject it openly...
Page from Perón. To fire Urrutia with maximum dramatic effect Castro borrowed a trick from another expert demagogue, Argentina's ex-Dictator Juan Perón, who once "quit" office to provoke an outburst of public support. The news hit Havana one morning by way of 5½-in. type in Castro's mouthpiece newspaper, Revolución: FIDEL RESIGNS...
...show went according to plan. Radio announcers frantically urged the country to "stay ralm." Labor unions went into emergency session. Students abandoned classes. Mobs gathered and marched on the Presidential Palace shouting: "Do not resign, Fidel! Do not resign!" Urrutia tried to save his skin. "Fidel Castro is our maximum leader!" he yelled down from a palace balcony...
Castro ignored him. That night on TV, his favorite medium for lecturing the country, Castro said in a four-hour harangue that he had differences with Urrutia that were both "moral and civic." For a starter, Urrutia was drawing "exactly the same salary as Batista" ($10,000 a month), while all the Cabinet members had voluntarily taken a cut to $700. Urrutia was buying a $40,000 house, while "I have no house; I have bought no house."† Waving and tapping a yellow pencil, Castro stepped up the pace of the attack until his voice grew shrill and sweat...