The framed documents above the fireplace in Washington's Cuban embassy all bore the signature of Cuba's onetime Presidnet Ramon Grau San Martin.  They were Guillermo Belt's commissions as Cuba's ambassador to the U.S., minister to the Soviet Union,* cheif delegate to the U.N., and representative in the Organization of American Sates.  This week of next, the documents will come down.  After four years in Washington, Bill Belt, 43, is going home as a private citizen.

Poised and polished, Bill Belt had come to Washington with an attractive wife, five smiling little Belts, and the memory of a Confederate grandfather (John Benjamin Belt of Beltsville, Md., who emigrated to Havana after the Civil War).  The Belts made a social splash; their open-handed hospitality was soon a town topic.  But Belt was no cookie-pusher.

Able and ambitious, he argued long and well for bigger Cuban sugar quotas.  At the inter-American conferences in Rio and Bogota, he made headlines by his insistence on outlawing economic aggression--a campaign aimed at the threat of reduced Cuban quotas in the U.S. Sugar Act of 1948 (TIME, Aug. 18, 1947).  As Cuba's spokesman in the U.N., he championed abolition of the veto, favored the Arab cause in Palestine, argued that some way must be found to bring Spain back into the community of nations.

In the Headlines.

He never let the State Department brass forget that he represented a sovereign nation.  Once, when he asked for an appoinment with Secretary of State Marshall, he was told that the Under Secretary would see him instead.  "If I am not received by the Secretary by noon tomorrow, he insisted, "I shall resign and tell the American press why."  Marshall saw him.

Such incidents were not popular with the State Department, bu tthey did not alter the fact that Belt was probably better known and more influential than any ambassador Cuba ever sent to Washington.  With characteristic self-assurance, he said last week:  "I think I have done a great deal to maintain U.S. friendship on a basis of dignity and equality."

Belt's power lay in his rock-solid friendship with President Grau.  "Cuba's foreign policy," habaneros used to say, "is made in the Washington embassy, not in Havana."  When Grau's first Minister of State, Gustavo Cuervo Rubio, complained in 1945 that Belt was hogging the headlines, Grau fired Cuervo.  When his successor, Alberto Inocente Alvarez, tried to give Belt orders, Belt flew to Havana and Alvarez was out of a job.

In the Anteroom.

 It was such mixing in domestic politics that finally cost Belt his own job.  Last year he tried to get his friend Grau to back him for the presidency.  Grau chose eager Carlos Prio Socarras instead. ("That," said Grau last week, "was a mistake.")  Prio, who had more than once cooled his heels in an anteroom while Belt took the backstairs route to Grau's office, never forgave his rival.

At week's end, Belt's successor in the Washington embassy had not yet been named.  But Cubans were sure that whoever he was, things from now on would be different.  Said Havana's Prensa Libre:  "Cuban-American negotiations will henceforth be carried on in Havana."