Word: urrutia
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...Moncada Barracks, in the eastern Cuban city of Santiago. He also needed a display of hero worship so that he could accede to "popular demand" and resume the post of Prime Minister, which he had quit the previous week during the histrionics that preceded the purge of President Manuel Urrutia (TIME, July 27). He got it, and returned to office...
...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...
Sobs at the Palace. As Castro's tirade roared on, now comprehensible, now incoherent, Urrutia watched a television set in his wife's sitting room at the palace. His face was ashen, and his right cheek twitched nervously as Castro's high-pitched voice filled the room. At one point, a female secretary yelled toward the TV screen: "That's a lie!" The President's wife retreated, red-eyed, to her bedroom. Finally, Urrutia rose, went into a small office, wrote out his resignation, sent it to the television studio, turned his head...
...criticism: "One must suppose that he has foreign policy and U.S. opinion mostly in mind. The attacks on him in the U.S. have wounded and angered him." But when Castro himself said that his resignation stemmed from his feud with the President of his own choosing, Manuel Urrutia Lleo (see THE HEMISPHERE), and that a lot of the trouble arose because Urrutia had spoken unkindly of the Communists, the Times withdrew the Matthews analysis from its later editions...