Word: urrutia
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...just twelve hours one day last week, Fidel Castro boldly and brutally crushed his puppet President, Manuel Urrutia. With an expert and cynical maneuver, Strongman Castro set a mob on the Presidential Palace, then went on television to denounce Urrutia as a "traitor." Not since the time in the 1930s when Dictator Fulgencio Batista went through five puppets in two years had a President of Cuba been treated with such contempt...
...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...
Diaz Lanz wrote a farewell letter to President Urrutia: "All those actions against me are due exclusively to the fact that I have always opposed an attitude which permits Communists to take prominent positions within the rebel army." The weakling President replied: "I absolutely reject Communist ideology," but within moments the palace recalled the letter, issued a substitute omitting Urrutia's anti-Communist statement. The government launched a nationwide man hunt for anti-Communist Diaz Lanz, but he got away, probably to Miami...