"Announcement!" shouted Rebel Major Humberto Sori Marin from the concrete arena of the Havana Sports Palace. "This man is being tried for murder and robbery." The crowd of 15,000 roared its approval. "And he is an assassin," added Sori Marin, chief of the three-man panel charged with deciding guilt or innocence. "You know what the sentiments of Fidel Castro are about this trial," he said, and thoughtfully told the spectators: "Do not throw pop bottles."
Thus one night last week began Fidel Castro's showpiece trial, first of a planned 1,000 trials in the Havana area, for a captured underling of exiled Dictator Fulgencio Batista. The defendant was Captain Jesus Sosa Blanco, 51, a brutal killer who commanded the Batista garrison at Holguin. Charged by Rebel Prosecutor Jorge Serguera with 56 murders, he faced certain conviction. He faced it with flair.
"Kill Him! Kill Him!" Dressed in a blue denim prison jacket, Sosa Blanco grinned at the crowd. He raised his manacled hands, postured like the villain of a rigged wrestling match. The mob yelled, "Kill him! Kill him!" "This is the Colosseum in Rome," jeered Sosa Blanco, when he got a turn at the microphone. "I met brave rebels in the mountains, not types like you here. All you do is talk."
All night long the trial went on; 45 witnesses offered facts, hearsay, gossip. "This is the worst criminal in the world!" screamed Maria Jacinta Galvez Martinez. "He killed every member of the Argote family -my neighbors." Argelio Argote, 12, confirmed that Sosa Blanco "came and took my father away." A wrinkled woman named Tomasa Batista Castillo fought to get at the prisoner: "I begged you not to kill my husband, because of our eleven children. You said the rebels could raise them." A soldier of Sosa Blanco's said calmly that he had seen the prisoner shoot 17 defenseless farmers.
Sosa Blanco's lawyer, a regular army attorney who had been cleared by the rebels of any Batista ties and appointed just before the trial began, pleaded eloquently for calm justice. He argued that there was no death penalty in Cuba when the crimes took place, that Captain Sosa Blanco was a soldier serving under orders in a civil war. He had not a single witness to call. At dawn, after 13 hours and when the crowd had thinned to 500, the tribunal returned the verdict: death. But the court agreed to hear an appeal, and the execution was put off until this week.