Among the brambles and pine trees of Cuba's eastern Sierra Maestra range, along trails they know well, Rebel Fidel Castro, 31, and his band of 600 guerrilla fighters this week mark an anniversary. It is one year since Castro landed 81 seasick adventurers from Mexico in an invasion that drew only derision from President Fulgencio Batista, 56. The dictator is no longer derisive. Last week, in Colon Cemetery in Havana, he dropped his broad face in his hands and wept as a guard of honor buried Colonel Fermin Cowley, 47, one of his top commanders, who was gunned down by a carload of Castro men on a downtown street near his headquarters in Holguin (pop. 36,000) in rebel-ridden Oriente province.
Batista is angry as well as sad. Though the army and most of organized labor are still his, he cannot put down the revolt, has managed only to spur it with clumsy counterterrorism. Risking shoot-on-sight orders, Castro partisans are putting the torch to the budding sugar-cane crop on which the Cuban economy depends. The army said it shot four rebels in the cane fields last week. "Criminals!" shouts Batista now. "Communists!"
The Plotters. Actually, the top leadership of the running rebellion is so prosperous, conservative and respectable that amused Habaneros are calling it "the best-dressed revolution in history." Of the chief rebel plotters outside the Sierra, four are lawyers, three are physicians, two are financiers, one a millowner. Deftly combining rebellion with business-as-usual, each earns more than $20,000 a year. The rebels conspire behind brocade curtains in air-conditioned homes and offices. Wrote TIME'S Reporter Sam Halper after sitting in on one such meeting last week: "Silent servants opened the doors, poured the drinks and arranged the foam-cushioned armchairs in a neat plotters' circle. The only proletarians were the help."
The rebels talk and bicker incessantly. But they dig deep to support the cause, and they constantly risk their lives and fortunes for a single, basic political goal: return of constitutional government, which Batista disrupted by his 1952 army coup, staged just 82 days before a presidentia1 election that he seemed certain to lose. "This," they insist, "is not a social revolution."
Nervy Foe. The well-heeled rebel leaders who are financing the bomb throwing like to draw a distinction between themselves and Cuba's political gangsters of the past 25 years. In Batista they have taken on the shrewdest and nerviest veteran of the gun-slinging school. A dirt-poor lad from Oriente province, he painfully acquired the rudiments of an education, carefully plotted and led the "sergeant's revolt" that won out in 1933. He voluntarily relinquished power, a rich man, eleven years later.
Under the succeeding regimes of the constitutionally elected Presidents Ramón Grau San Martin and Carlos Prio Socarrás, rival gangs polished off some 100 political victims. Both the Grau and Prio regimes milked the nation of millions in graft. After Batista came back, he rammed through a one-candidate election in 1954 and his administration set new records for corruption. The middle-class opposition groups began forming.