Any definitive judgment on the flare-up in Cuba must be suspended until the situation becomes somewhat clearer.  Americans however, cannot be expected to ignore a drama so charged with tragedy occurring off our shores in a country so closely connected with our life and history.

The first sensation is inevitably one of tragedy.  Lives--many of them young and hopeful lives--are being lost.  There is a ferment, a tension, a danger, a disruption of normal life, a sever blow to the economy--a whole complex of bad things that must approach the intolerable for Cubans.  The Batista regime has no cause for self-righteousness or for gloating over the fact that the first major effort to bring a general strike in Havana on Wednesday failed.  The end is not yet in sight.

Americans--and this goes for the State Department, Congress and the American Embassy in Havana--ought never to lose sight of the fundamental cause of what we see in Cuba today.  This was the seizure of power through a garrison revolt on March 10, 1952, by Gen. Fulgencio Batista and his rule since that day as a military dictator.  Cubans have misruled themselves to a shocking degree since they won their independence at the end of the last century, but except under General Batista and in the last five years of the Machado regime (1928-1933) they have lived as free men.

The usurpation of power in 1952 by General Batista set up a chain reaction of terrorism to overthrow his dictatorship and counterterrorism to suppress the struggle for freedom.  What we see today is one chapter in that dark and bloody history.

For the rest, we must wait to see whether the spark set off in Havana on Wednesday will lead to a great and final explosion or whether President Batista is in process of clamping the lid back again over the seething torment that has lain under the surface of Cuban life in recent years.  In either case Cuba has a long travail ahead.  Such is the bitter fruit of dictatorship.