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Soon afterward, Batista married his present wife, Marta Fernández. The President had literally run into her with his car a few years earlier while she was riding a bicycle down Fifth Avenue in Havana's swank Miramar district. She has borne Batista three children. He also had three children by his first wife.
In exile, the Batistas lived at Daytona, where the ex-President liked to row in the Halifax River and browse in his library. He also looked after his extensive Florida real-estate investments, which reportedly include several big Miami Beach hotels.
He ran for Senator in absentia in 1948, and was elected. In 1949, Grau having given way to Carlos Prío as President, Batista finally went home. Guarded by 20 soldiers, he lived at Kuquine, talking with politicos, playing canasta, and keeping in trim by working out daily on an exercise machine. There he bided his time until last month's revolt.
Pork & Passports. Why was there practically no opposition when Batista pulled his coup? The basic answer is that seven years of riotously rotten government had left the average Cuban too cynical about democracy to fight in its behalf. When Grau San Martin was swept into office in 1944 on a wave of popular demand for housecleaning, he said: "There is nothing wrong with Cuba that an honest administration can't cure." Then the scholarly professor and his successor proceeded to give the island, which has seen plenty of corruption in its time, the most graft-and gangster-ridden government in its history.
Cuba's freewheeling democrats operated according to the rule, stated by a former Grau minister: "It's a credit to you if you're honest, but it's no great discredit if you're dishonest." Everybody helped himself. Senators who had spent half a million buying enough votes to win got their investment back in millions. For the President's congressional pals, there was a $4,000,000-a-month ration from the state lottery pork barrel. Sticky-fingered politicos picked up fortunes on contracts, customs deals, sugar quota allocations.
Suits & Suitcases. It was wonderful fun for the highbinders who could get it. Still pending in a Havana court is a lawsuit brought by an Orthodox (Reform) Party Senator demanding that Grau and his ministers, including Prío, explain what happened to $174,241,840.14 that seemed to have disappeared during Grau's regime. The Senator's title for his case: "The greatest theft in history." But the greatest of the thieves is not named in the suit. José Manuel Alemán, Grau's favorite minister, who stole not one but an estimated hundred million dollars, died in 1949.
One story told of Alemán in Havana: on the afternoon of Oct. 10, 1948, he and some henchmen drove four Ministery of Education trucks into the Treasury building. All climbed out carrying suitcases. "What are you going to do, rob the Treasury?" joshed a guard. "Quién sabe?" replied baby-faced Joseé Alemán. Forthwith, his men scooped pesos, francs, escudos, lire, rubles, pounds sterling and about $19 million in U.S. currency into the suitcases.