In 1995, when I first visited Cuba, the door to the Capitol building, constructed by the regime of President Gerardo Machado (1925-1933), still showed the evidence of public outrage over his betrayal of the Republic and democracy. Literally defaced by university student protestors were the faces of Cuba’s presidents on the panel of a bronze door that was supposed to celebrate Cuba’s peaceful transfer of power in elections from 1902, the year of Cuba’s independence from a US military occupation, to Machado’s own administration. Immediately above the panel where students had scratched off Machado’s face, also scratched out was the face of not only Machado but his number-one political backer, US Ambassador Cuba Sumner Welles. He was a hated political figure because he had long ensured that the Cuban state would put US investors’ interests before those of Cuban citizens at every opportunity. On August 12, 1933, Machado, fled Cuba for Miami with millions stolen from Cuba’s national treasury and thereby evaded the justice that a vast revolutionary movement for democracy sought to impose. JUNE 1995.
