The face of dictatorship in Cuba was the padlock on Havana University, the bodies dumped on street corners by casual police terrorists, the arrogant functionaries gathering fortunes from gambling, prostitution and a leaky public till. In disgust and shame, a nervy band of rural guerrillas, aided by angry Havana professional men (plus opportunists with assorted motives), started a bloody civil war that cost more than $100 million and took 8,000 lives. Last week they smashed General Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship.
Batista's end came on New Year's Eve. As he and his fellow crooks rode in a line of black Cadillacs to the army's Camp Columbia, outside Havana, for the usual New Year's Eve dinner, they did not smile. They knew that the jig, as well as the year, was up. "For the salvation of the republic," announced General Eulogio Cantillo at the end of a gloomy meal, "the military forces have decided that it is necessary for General Batista to withdraw from power."
For the record, Batista protested: "I will not leave without handing over power." A suitable stand-in President was hastily found. Then Batista and his bemedaled generals and Cabinet ministers abandoned manners and moved to airplanes drawn up at Camp Columbia field. The regime and its followers thereupon bugged out, some 500 strong, as fast as planes and ships would bear them.
Batista himself wound up in the Dominican Republic with his wife and one son, his other seven children in New Orleans, Jacksonville and New York. As the news broke across Havana in the early dawn, citizens put on the arm bands of the rebel 26th of July movement and tumbled into the streets, firing pistols and Tommy guns in riotous joy.
To Start, 81. At the end, Batista, who dominated Cuba off and on since 1933, looked like any tin-pot dictator funking out to save his health and—especially—his chips. The 1956 invasion of just 81 men under Rebel Chieftain Fidel Castro. 32, had grown to take over an island of 6,500,000 with a yearly national income of more than $2 billion from sugar, cattle, tobacco, minerals, tourists.
When Castro's seasick invaders fought past army patrols from a marshy beachhead to mountain hideouts two years ago, their extinction seemed certain. All that was needed from Batista's army, 21,000 strong and well armed, was the simple nerve required to go in and flush them out. The army tried terror instead of courage; it tortured suspects, shipped the dismembered bodies of students home to their mothers. Result: a flood of arms and recruits for Castro.
The peasant and student army crept from the Sierra Maestra on the southeastern coast to the Sierra del Cristal 100 miles east, then to the foothills, avoiding decisive battle while the muscle grew. Three weeks ago, with rebels holding most of rural Oriente province and total rebel strength up to 8,500, Major Ernesto ("Che") Guevara launched the offensive in Las Villas, 150 miles from Havana.