837.00/1854
The Minister in Cuba (Long) to the Secretary of State
[Received October 30.]
Sir: I have the honor to report that the Department’s telegram (No. 202) of October 22nd, 7 P.M., deciphered late Saturday evening, was taken up with President Menocal on the morning of the 25th and he expressed a disposition to prepare a statement regarding the political situation. I gathered the impression that in effect it would recommend fair play during the election period.
It may be interesting to the Department to receive a more detailed report regarding the preliminaries to this conclusion.
A long conference on the financial situation had been concluded and it was near one oclock when President Menocal said so many complaints were coming to me about election irregularities that he wanted to emphasize his position as he could afford to let nothing stand that might reflect upon his record. He defended his actions in general terms and asked me if anything which impressed me as of importance had come up lately.
I seized this opportunity to take up with the President the question of the traffic in “Cédulas”, then referred to the unprecedented number of Military Supervisors recently appointed by him and to the fact that the Supervisors’ actions had given the opposite party reasonable grounds for complaint, adding that this and other irregularities seemed to have produced a general popular discontent with the manner in which the elections are being conducted.
Here the President interrupted me to say that he regretted the traffic in Cédulas and that the electoral boards had not gathered proof to stop such practice. He stated that if I had any specific information he would be glad to act upon it, to which I replied that many reports had reached me to the effect that innocent country people were having to turn over their Cédulas through one intimidation or another. It was also stated that Cédulas had been bought but I had no positive proof of these assertions, which however were so general as to suggest that there must be some truth to it or else the charges would not be so continuous. The President said he did not doubt that trading in Cédulas had been practiced by both parties and that he thought the Liberals had bought more Cédulas than the Conservatives. He thought this trading in Cédulas not likely to produce much popular discontent in which one side was as much to blame as the other, moreover the voters could easily get duplicates or triplicates of their Cédulas before election day if they chose to do so.
[Page 34]He continued in respect of the Supervisors, that it was true a large number had been named, many more than he wished for, but the Liberals had been very persistent in their threats of starting an uprising if this, that, or the other thing did not happen. It was so four years ago when similar threats were not taken seriously but the revolution actually did start then and caught him napping, which experience he did not intend to have repeated now. One by one, he claimed, complaints had come in from different parts of the Island and when they seemed to be justified, a Military Supervisor was selected. Naturally, he commented, he could not select a Supervisor whose loyalty to the Constituted Government was in doubt. The importance of selecting no Liberals was driven home by the fact that Liberal agents had already begun to interview officers of the army in the interest of the Liberal cause, which confirmed him in the conviction that the only proper thing for him to do was to select men who were unquestionably loyal to the Government. Among these, he did not doubt, some had evidenced an excess of zeal to serve the Government and he thought it would be a good thing for him to caution all Cubans to be fair in the approaching election.
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I have [etc.]