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The Commissioned Officers had gone home readily enough. A few re-enlisted in the ranks. But most of them were furiously outraged by the Revolt of the Sergeants. They knew they could never return to their commands without loss of face. When Top Sergeant Batista called back "officers whose records were not stained by participation in the misdeeds of the Machado regime," 300 of the Cuban Army's proudest officers boiled over. Figuring it was their last chance to tell Batista what they thought of him, they went in a body to see him, led by Col. Horacio Ferrer who had been President de Cespedes' Secretary of War. Sergeant Fulgencio Batista left that meeting in a towering rage, his face dark with blood, surrounded by 24 bodyguards armed with machine-guns. The officers retired to Havana's National Hotel, strategically isolated on a cliff-walled hill. Even more strategic, the National Hotel housed U. S. Ambassador Sumner Welles and Cuba's Financial Adviser Adolf Augustus Berle Jr.
Batista's men soon surrounded the National Hotel, off & on training machine-guns at it. The officers coldly refused to return to their commands or to disperse. Wives and friends brought them sidearms. Once Batista's men, come to smoke them out, met Ambassador Welles in the lobby and had to back out. They vaguely understood that where the U. S. Ambassador lives is U. S. territory. Some of the officers wanted to rally the enlisted men, of whom each felt he could count on perhaps a score, and march on the Palace. Most were willing to compromise if the revolutionary government would consent to appoint a President and Cabinet. The officers sent out Col. Ferrer to treat with
The Junta. Jostled by the shouting, jigging mob in the Palace were five men trying to think calmly: two professors, an editor, a banker and a lawyer. As a sort of "brain trust" to the Sergeants, they were the commissioners of the "governmental executive commission." Unable to agree on a head man, these were collectively the Government.
Two of them elbowed for the leadership. One was Dr. Ramon Grau San Martin y Madrid, 49, able Havana surgeon, professor of anatomy at Havana University. A bachelor, he has the calm of a surgeon, the detached idealism of a professor. The other was Sergio Carbo, tall, black-haired, volatile editor of the radical weekly La Semana, which Machado once suppressed "for pornography." The crowd liked Carbo's strong, graceful speaking manner, liked to recall that he had helped lead the unsuccessful Gibara revolt against Machado in 1931. The other three commissioners were a retired banker and ABC member, spectacled Porfirio Franco; Lawyer Jose Miguel Irizarri, and the professor of penal law at Havana University, Guillermo Portela. The five partitioned the posts of government, each to his own talent: the doctor for Secretary of Public Instruction & Sanitation; the law professor for Secretary of State and Justice; the editor for Secretary of the Interior, War and Navy; the banker for Secretary of Finance; the lawyer whose hobby was land division for Secretary of Public Works & Agriculture.