Under Arrest

Carlos Prio Socarras, 50, Cuba's President until his overthrow last year in a military coup, was arrested in Miami last week by a U.S. marshal. The charge: conspiring to smuggle arms out of the U.S. in violation of the 1939 neutrality act. Hotly protesting his innocence, Prio was freed on $50,000 bail to appear this week in a U.S. district court in Manhattan.

Unprecedented as it was to arrest a former chief of state and then to put him under heavy bond besides, there was little doubt that Prio had openly courted trouble. Ever since Dictator Fulgencio Batista booted him out of Cuba, the well-heeled former President has been hard at work organizing a revolutionary comeback from his Miami mansion. The current charge grew out of a police raid last December on a vacant filling station at Mamaroneck, N.Y., near Long Island Sound. Stumbling on an impressive cache of grenades, bazooka shells and explosives, the cops arrested four men. One, a New York munitions dealer, said that the arms had been bought by a Cuban named Jose Duarte for the account of Carlos Prio. Duarte, when questioned, identified himself as one of three Cubans who had been held up two months before at Fort Worth and robbed of $240,000, which they said Prio had given them to buy arms.

After the Mamaroneck affair, the State Department passed word to Prio to be more careful and stop abusing U.S. hospitality. Too busy with his plotting, Prio brushed the hints aside. When the blow fell last week he had just returned from a meeting of opposition leaders in Mexico at which plans for an uprising were reportedly discussed. Prio, whose democratic but graft-ridden government collapsed in a few hours in March 1952, seemed angriest that his arrest would give "comfort and satisfaction to a dictator." If brought to trial and convicted, he could be fined $10,000 or jailed for five years, or both.

For the U.S. State Department, the whole affair was a big headache. No matter how indiscreetly Prio had behaved, Latin Americans from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego would unfailingly interpret his arrest as overt U.S. support of Strongman Batista.

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