I took a hotel room overlooking the Presidential palace and the garden-filled square in which it stands. The streets around the square had been closed to traffic, and it had become a kind of no man’s land, patrolled by police in all sorts of uniforms. There were khaki-colored bulletproof cars at the corners, ready for action, and every so often one would be started up, driven restlessly, with its siren moaning, a few yards up the road, and then brought back. The atmosphere in the neighborhood of the palace was clearly trigger-happy. Visitors to Havana were advised not to loiter as they walked past the front of the palace, or to point cameras in the direction of the machine-gunners crouching behind parapets of sandbags on the palace roof. These exceptional police precautions dated from an afternoon last spring when twenty-one students—who actually brought along their own photographer—had staged an abortive attempt on the regime by driving up to the palace gates in a truck and then dashing through them in the hope of shooting their way up to the President’s office, on the second floor. A handful of the attackers almost reached their objective. But the President happened at that moment to be lunching with his wife in his residential quarters, in another part of the building, and there on the landing outside the locked office door the last members of the assault party died. What little chance of success this desperate venture might have had was thrown away, right at the beginning, by a gross lack of coordination. Cuban revolutionary movements are weakened by much internal division. Two separate student organizations had united temporarily to plan the attack, but the larger group, which possessed a bazooka that might have made all the difference, failed to put in an appearance. The hopeless little battle was over in five minutes, but then the government tanks came on the scene, and it was hours before the troops ceased firing their heavy machine guns into the surrounding buildings, in the belief that they harbored snipers. Many motorists, trapped in the line of fire, spent most of the afternoon lying under their cars, and a fair amount of incidental damage—some of a freakish kind—was produced by this protracted bombardment. The abstract sculptures standing in front of the National Museum, which faces the Presidential palace, were badly shot up, and a friend of mine returned to his hotel room facing on the square to find that a couple of the suits hanging in his wardrobe were full of bullet holes. The government paid him a hundred dollars in compensation for these.
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At first, I was inclined to take the view that, apart from a crop of incredible new night clubs (one of them had lawns of spurious grass, and an artificial sky), nothing much had changed in Havana since I first visited the city, almost twenty years ago. In those days, people regarded the topic of democracy with a sort of cynical resignation. In reality, they used to tell you, things weren’t a great deal different from the old colonial era, when the ruling Spanish bureaucracy treated the country as a privately owned farm, to exploit in whatever way it thought fit. The main difference was that nowadays it was Cubans who took it out of Cubans—and that was perhaps some slight consolation. Whoever was in power was expected to help himself to the public funds. As long as the administration contented itself with diverting, say, 20 percent of the national revenue into its pockets, its conduct was considered reasonable, if not just, and nobody grumbled much. Nor was it thought particularly scandalous when an outgoing President made it quite evident by his real-estate investments in Miami that he had become a multimillionaire during his term of office. When a government changed, it was a change of personalities, not of principles. The old pernicious, grafting Hispanic system went on. Elections were a sort of white man’s version of an African magic ritual that nobody believed in very much any more but that was still carried on, out of ancestral habit. I remembered that at the time of this first visit to Havana an unemployed man’s vote cost a peso—one dollar—and I also remember, quite vividly, a remarkable incident that occurred in the Parque Central one day, when the town loafers who congregated there decided to get together and employ a recognized trade-union practice to force the price up to a peso and twenty-five centavos. A politician who had come down to the park with the intention of buying up their votes was stung by this inequitable conduct into threatening them with a tommy gun, and somehow or other it managed to go off. I was just around the corner at the moment, and it was the first time I had ever heard a tommy gun fired on a real-life occasion, although I immediately recognized the sound from my experience of films based on the Chicago scene. Passersby, who had probably gone through this kind of thing before, dropped to the ground and stayed there until the staccato hammering stopped, and then scrambled to their feet and went racing away across the flower beds in the direction of the sound. The siren of a police car howled briefly in the vociferous traffic, and soon policemen, pistols in hand, were herding us away from the sight of whatever had happened. Next day, the newspapers came out with an account of the incident. It seemed that in addition to wounding several down-and-outs, the politician had succeeded—doubtless by the purest mischance—in killing a policeman, and for this he had been lynched by the police in a most gruesome fashion, described in the report with gloating attention to detail. The paper conceded ultimate victory to the loafers. From that time on, it concluded, the price of a vote would be one peso twenty-five. (I understand that it is now double that.) All this was, of course, before the days of Fidel Castro—or, rather, in the days when Fidel Castro was of no more importance than any other scatterbrained young potential revolutionary, and was years away from being the leader of the first genuine maquis, of the Second World War kind, to be organized in the Western Hemisphere.
The Fidel Castro rebellion began with an appallingly disorganized attack, carried out by the leader and a handful of his fellow-conspirators in July, 1953, on the miniature fortress known as the Moncada Barracks, in the city of Santiago de Cuba, capital of Oriente Province, at the east end of the island. At that time, Castro, a lawyer with intellectual interests and without a practice, was twenty-nine years old. He and his little group of followers, armed with a few pistols and rifles, assaulted the barracks in the almost insane belief that once this strong point was in their hands, the town of Santiago—supposedly unfriendly to President Batista—would rise up and join them, and that by some strange talismanic power the revolution would spread itself spontaneously throughout the rest of the island. Amazingly, about half the attackers actually got into the barracks, only to find themselves trapped within a high-walled yard, their escape cut off. For a few moments they stood there, arms raised in surrender, and then the machine guns on the walls opened fire. Castro, who stayed outside the barracks, got away, but was later cornered, and gave himself up. It was the Archbishop of Santiago in person who delivered Castro over to the police, to insure that the young rebel would not also be slaughtered on the spot. This was one of many occasions on which leaders of the Catholic Church in Cuba have shown themselves sympathetic to the anti-Batista revolutionaries. Castro was tried, received a sentence of fifteen years, and was released nineteen months later under a general amnesty decreed by the President. Here is the one and only advantage of being a Cuban revolutionary, as opposed to being a revolutionary in any other country. In Cuban revolutions, the police do not take prisoners if they can help it, and they have been charged—even by judges of the Supreme Court—with the torture of suspects, but anyone who manages to survive the carnage that inevitably follows a failed revolt rarely serves more than a fraction of his prison sentence. As soon as Castro was released, he took refuge in Mexico and there began training a small band of followers in exile—all intellectuals and sons of good middle-class families, like himself—for an invasion of the home country. One of Castro’s many tactical errors was to issue propaganda announcements giving the approximate date decided on for this project. Cuba would be freed from the rule of President Batista, he promised, by the end of 1956. By the middle of November, therefore, all garrisons were alerted, Batista’s small fleet of armed launches was at sea and on the watch, and his planes continually patrolled the areas where a la
nding was likely to take place.
Castro’s “invasion,” when it finally came, was farcically mismanaged—in what would seem to be the tradition of Cuban revolutionary action. There was a good deal of support in Oriente Province for Castro’s movement, and on November 30th, the day it had been advertised that he would land, armed revolts took place in Santiago and in the four other principal towns of the province. For several hours, uniformed Castro supporters were in control of the streets, and the police were under siege in their barracks. But Castro and his invaders failed to appear and Army reinforcements began arriving from Havana, so the insurgents lost heart and gradually melted away. Known opponents of the government were subsequently arrested by the hundred, and many were summarily shot. Castro arrived on December 2nd—two days late—after a rough crossing, to find that the last vestige of revolt had been crushed. His total force consisted of eighty-two very seasick men, who were unable to find their landing beach and finally came ashore in a swamp. Batista’s air force spotted and strafed the boat as it put in, and the men scrambled away through water and slime, leaving most of their arms, including two anti-tank guns, behind. The survivors, who had only a rough idea of where they were, split up as soon as they reached hard ground. In the distance, they could see the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, but before they could get to the shelter of its tropical forest and its ravines, most of them had been intercepted and butchered out of hand by government troops. Only twelve men, Castro among them, came out of this grisly adventure alive, and it was months before it became generally known that he had indeed escaped and was hinding in the Sierras.
From this unpromising start developed a tough and successfully organized resistance movement. The number of young men now fighting in the Sierras is not known, but it may amount to a thousand, and most of the armed forces of Cuba are kept constantly employed in the effort to contain them, while spectacular coups, such as the recent kidnapping of Juan Fangio, the world motor-racing champion, are frequently carried out by undercover rebel groups in the cities. Castro men like to act in the tradition of the romantic outlaw. Fangio appears to have been charmed with their good manners during his short period of captivity, part of which he spent watching a television broadcast of the race he should have competed in. Three days after the Fangio incident, a party of rebels held up the National Bank of Cuba, in the heart of Havana, but instead of taking any of the cash from the safes, they contented themselves with setting fire to thousands of checks. In the mountains, the men are organized in small bands that keep constantly on the move and avoid sleeping two nights in the same place. The rebels have with them two Catholic priests, a Protestant minister, and several doctors. Castro announced not long ago that for the time being he had no use for further volunteers, unless they could bring their own weapons with them.
The Sierra Maestra is the least known and most neglected area in Cuba; it consists of a seventy-mile range of jungled mountains with peaks rising to over six thousand feet, and is inhabited by a handful of farmers, said to be descendants of outlaws, who live in almost savage simplicity and grow a little coffee for the market. Castro, who is regarded in many parts of Cuba as a sort of Robin Hood, seems to get on well with these backwoodsmen, and he and his band have repaid their good will and protection by organizing schools and medical centers in an area where illiteracy was total and no doctor had ever been seen. The military tactics employed by the rebels are the classic methods of guerrilla warfare, in which head-on engagements with government troops are always avoided, and ammunition and supplies are collected in surprise attacks on Army and police posts. No one has ever discovered that Castro has any war aim other than the elimination of the present dictatorship, in order, he says, to open the way for a new and non-Cuban kind of democracy, which has never been very clearly defined but which is supposed to be in the process of creation by members of Cuban parties in exile in the United States. Castro proposes to achieve his aim by disrupting, if necessary, the economy of the country to such an extent that the United States, to protect its investments, will be compelled to apply pressure for the removal of Batista from power. The remarkable thing is that despite the injury to many private interests that Castro’s plan of action involves, his popularity throughout Cuba remains high—even, it seems, with those who suffer actual damage from his acts of sabotage. It is typical of Castro that one of the first plantations he burned belonged to his own family.
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The man against whom Castro’s activities are concentrated—President Fulgencio Batista—has either been in office or loomed large behind the scenes in Cuba ever since his extraordinary coup, in 1933. History offers probably no other instance of a sergeant’s not only staging a successful mutiny but going on to take over the government of the country. In 1933, Sergeant Batista was a stenographer employed in the Havana garrison. He was noted for his good looks and his persuasive charm. At that time, there was a good deal of unrest among the enlisted men, because of impending pay cuts, and the country was in a state of political turmoil following the downfall of President Machado, who had just bolted in a plane to the United States. Bands of the armed students who had been responsible for Machado’s overthrow still roamed the streets, wreaking summary vengeance on supporters of Machado’s tyranny. So powerful were these bands that before hatching his plot Batista took care to get on good terms with the students’ revolutionary committee, the Directorio Estudiantil, which in those days conducted its own secret courts-martial and once actually executed, by firing squad, a member found guilty of traitorous activities. Having won over the students, Batista put into action a fairly simple plan of his own, which depended for its success on the fact that Cuban officers were then privileged to sleep out of barracks, and practically always did. On this occasion, when the officers of the garrison had gone home for the night Batista simply posted his own picked men on guard duty, with orders not to admit their superiors when they arrived the next day. Then he telephoned every garrison on the island and told the noncommissioned officers on duty that the sergeants were in command.
It seems unlikely that at this juncture Batista thought of himself as the country’s eventual leader, and he would probably have been quite ready to treat with a representative of the officers for the redress of the soldiers’ grievances. Preliminary discussions were begun, but the officers, believing that the United States would never permit a large-scale mutiny to succeed within what was accepted as its sphere of influence, broke off contact with the mutineers, retired to the Hotel Nacional, and barricaded themselves in. United States warships now appeared off Havana, and Batista, spurred on by militant students who threatened to attack the officers if he did not, and fearing that, in any case, he had gone too far to turn back, gave the order for an assault. His men opened fire on the hotel with old French seventy-fives, sighting their target, it is said, through the barrels of their cannons. Considerable toll was taken among the attackers by accurate rifle fire from the hotel—many of the officers were excellent marksmen—but in the end the defenders’ ammunition gave out, they were obliged to surrender, and many of them were massacred in cold blood. No Marines were landed, and Batista, by then a colonel, tightened his grip on the government.
Batista has turned out to be perhaps the most capable and progressive President that Cuba has ever had. His sense of humor is illustrated by his habit, in the old days, when the Communist Party had not been outlawed and was running its own radio station, of giving parties for his friends at which the principal entertainment was listening to the Communist broadcasters’ nightly manhandling of the President’s private life. Although in recent years Batista has taken openly to a dictatorial form of rule, he is surprisingly free from that brand of dictators’ megalomania that makes it impossible for anyone to escape the sight of their portraits in public places and in the press. Batista seems not to care greatly for publicity, and he probably does not even regard himself as an instrument wielded by divine hands to lead the Cuban people forward to their destiny.
Nevertheless, the social and labor legislation enacted since his access to power establishes Cuba as one of the most advanced nations in the Americas, and he has repeatedly disappointed business and industry by his failure to abrogate a law that makes it almost impossible to dismiss an employee on any ground—a law that is regarded as one of the greatest deterrents to capital investment on the island. The organized workers—whose wages have now reached their highest point in Cuban history—have repaid Batista by refusing, so far, to respond to Castro’s frequent calls for a general strike. On the other hand, Batista has alienated the affections of most middle- and upper-class Cubans by his destruction of civil liberties, his press censorship, his forthright rule by means of the Army, and his toleration of the many repressive excesses indulged in by his police. Although he was once believed to be unattracted by money, charges of immense corruption in his administration are now heard on all sides.
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