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"We are bourgeois," recalls one, "and we used the materials we felt safe with. We worked through the Rotary Club, the bar association, the medical association." At first they held a long "civic dialogue" with Batista, aimed at persuading him to hold a fair election. That failed. "Then we tried military action, thinking that a few key leaders here and there would do the trick." Batista got wind of this plot, led by Lieut. Colonel Ramón Barquin, and squashed it handily (TIME, April 23, 1956).
In desperation, the rebels gave their support to the only rallying point available—Castro. Castro accepted the deal, saying: "Fighting the revolution is the job of our generation, but we will not be ready to govern. That will be your job." When Castro made it to the hills last December with the remnant of his invasion force, the wealthy, noncombatant rebels supplied guns and money.
But Batista unwittingly gave Castro his biggest boost: a brutal counter-terrorism campaign that drove thousands of Cubans from neutrality to opposition. Irresponsible police thugs in Havana blunderingly murdered Pelayo Cuervo Navarro, a respected, nonviolent leader of the anti-Batista Orthodox Party ("About like killing Lyndon Johnson," say the rebels). A 15-year-old boy, suspected of bomb tossing, was castrated in Santiago and shipped home dead to his mother. When Rebel Frank Pais, a young schoolteacher, was shot by cops in Santiago, 80,000 Cubans marched to his funeral and closed down the town for seven days with a general strike.
Paying Back. When the rebels tried to extend the strike to Havana, they bumped squarely into two pillars of the Batista regime—solid prosperity and a tough, bull-necked labor leader named Eusebio Mujal, 44. As secretary-general of the Confederation of Cuban Workers (C.T.C.), Mujal bosses 1,200,000 workers, half the total labor force, and he bosses them for Batista. Guarded by a cordon of bully boys in open-necked shirts, Mujal explained his stand bluntly last week: "People who treat labor well deserve well of labor."
Among Batista's concessions to Mujal: an obligatory dues checkoff that puts $20 million a year in the union cashbox, gradually rising wage minimums set by the government wage board. New industrial investment during the past four years totals $612 million. The civic struggle has caused the tourist business to slump, but four luxury hotels are going up—including the 20-story Havana Riviera and the $22 million Havana Hilton (of which Mujal's Restaurant Workers' Union owns a $9,000,000 chunk). "Without a general strike in Havana," says Mujal, "Castro has no chance. As long as I live, there will be no general strike."
The rebel leaders admit bafflement at how to win friends with dirty collars. Moreover, after failure of an anti-Batista navy uprising in Cienfuegos (TIME, Sept. 16), once dissident officers are for the moment behaving themselves. Uncertain how to turn the stalemate into a victory, the rebels demand that the U.S. cut off arms to Batista—a move which they think would be a powerful enough blow to the army's morale to bring the dictator down.