Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  After his return to Cuba, Batista rapidly shed his earlier respect for constitutional proprieties. When it became apparent that he was not going to win the 1952 elections, he and his military supporters seized power. Political parties were suspended and elections deferred. The US government recognized the new regime, which was also welcomed by the US investors who controlled the island’s sugar industry and enjoyed a quota arrangement that guaranteed US purchase of 40 per cent of the annual harvest at a generous price. Increased world demand for sugar during the Korean War gave Cuba the second highest per-capita GDP in Latin America, making it an irresistible prize for Batista and the shady cronies he had acquired during his eight-year exile.

  Batista had become an intimate of Italian-Americans with such noms de guerre as ‘Joe Bananas’ or ‘Fat Joe’. The leaders of US organized crime, Salvatore ‘Lucky’ Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Albert Anastasia and Santo Trafficante, had agreed to turn Havana into the ‘Latin Las Vegas’, and a key entrepot for North African heroin destined for the US. The deal was done in 1946, with crooner Frank Sinatra providing the night’s entertainment. Batista was brought in on it early, becoming co-owner of Havana’s Hotel Nacional with Luciano and Lansky.

  By the mid-1950s the island was attracting 300,000 US tourists a year and Batista pledged to provide dollar for dollar matching funds for investors in Cuba’s burgeoning hotel and gaming sectors. Anyone investing $1 million in a hotel or $200,000 in a nightclub would automatically receive a gaming licence, without such inconveniences as criminal background checks. As in earlier eras of prosperity, Americans travelled, many of them drawn to the thriving sex trade in a Havana thronged with whores and offering floor shows such as the one featuring ‘Superman’ and his fourteen-inch penis. They also tried their luck at gaming tables, while overall the mobsters enforced their own brand of justice by breaking the fingers of cardsharps and scam artists.

  A quarter of the Batista government’s ‘dollar for dollar’ was paid back to the President personally, and the police required over a million a month in protection money. In return the Mafia investors were exempted from formal taxation for ten years, and were freed from import duties on building materials, equipment and furnishings. Havana was soon lit up with garish casinos and clubs, including an entire wing of the Nacional that Lansky refurbished for high rollers, and where Eartha Kitt entertained the punters on opening night. Thereafter, Mrs Marta Batista’s shadowy representative appeared each night with a big bag, one of the means whereby the Batistas amassed a fortune estimated at $300 million, not counting the brother who simultaneously pillaged the nation’s parking-meter revenues.

  Legitimate business was no more ethical. The telecoms giant AT&T presented Batista with a gold-plated telephone, still displayed in Havana, in return for hiking local call charges. The unrestrained rapacity of US investors, legal or illegal, compounded deep nationalist resentments. The place was ripe for a Latin Nasser; instead it got a Latin Lenin, although it took the US time to decide who it was dealing with. It took the Latin Lenin some time to decide who he was too.19

  Castro Becomes Fidel

  Fidel Castro was the second of five illegitimate children borne by a housemaid to an illiterate Galician immigrant who had built up a 10,000-acre sugarcane estate in eastern Oriente Province, an enterprise which employed 500 workers. Castro was brought up by his maternal grandparents, who lived in a shack, and was later sent to foster parents while he and his younger brother Raúl attended a Jesuit school in Santiago de Cuba. It was not until he was seventeen that his father finally married his mother and formally recognized his children by her. Thus, although he was indeed from a prosperous background – when he arrived at the University of Havana in 1945, it was in his own car – Castro grew up with the resentments of a ‘poor white’.

  Six foot three and powerfully built, at school Castro excelled at sports, particularly baseball. In 1949 he was offered a contract by the New York Giants. He turned them down.20 He read voraciously, counting Alexander the Great, Napoleon, the Spanish Fascist José Antonio Primo de Rivera and Lenin among his heroes. It is not difficult to see how his early life also gave him a precocious passion for social justice. Although enrolled to study law at the university, he was clearly destined for politics and spent much of his time exercising his vocal cords. University politics were indistinguishable from gang warfare, and Castro became accustomed to carrying a gun.21

  Had he been associated with left-wing politics, the CIA might have red-flagged him. But Castro neither waddled nor quacked nor bore any resemblance to the Communist duck. Quite to the contrary, at Havana University his mortal enemy was Rolando Masferrer, who had been a Communist Party enforcer in the Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigades in the Spanish civil war. Elected to the House of Representatives in 1949, under Batista Masferrer was to run Oriente Province as his personal fief, employing a murder squad known as ‘the Tigers’.

  In 1948 Castro took part in the violent disorders in Bogotá that accompanied the establishment of the Organization of American States. Young nationalists from all over the continent had gathered to protest against what the demagogic Argentine dictator Juan Domingo Perón denounced as a new manifestation of US imperialism; but the assassination of the populist Liberal Party leader Eliécer Gaitán detonated an anarchic civil war in Colombia known simply as la Violencia. The experience was defining in a way that whatever books Castro had read were not.

  Castro may have struggled through a bit of Marx, but unlike his younger brother Raúl he did not join the Communist Youth Movement. The Communists were far too cautious, waiting for history to take its inevitable course, and Fidel was impatient to become a protagonist. He grew infatuated with the idea of being a revolutionary, of striking martial poses and giving ‘the people’ an authentic voice – a voice that could ramble on for hours at a stretch, without speaking notes.

  Although he had married and started a family with the daughter of one of Batista’s political henchmen, the coup of 1952 thwarted Castro’s ambition to become a congressman. Still only twenty-seven, he felt a sense of urgency and on 26 July 1953 he and 150 followers launched attacks on the Moncada army barracks in Santiago de Cuba and at Bayamo in his home province. The aim was to seize weapons with which to arm a wider revolt. The attackers were outnumbered and half of them were captured, tortured and murdered. Adverse public reaction to such brutality benefited Castro by the time he surrendered four months later, and instead of being murdered he was tried and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. At his trial he depicted himself as the spirit of historic Cuban liberties denied and pronounced that ‘history will absolve me’. Following the rigged November 1954 elections, Castro was among those who gained from a general amnesty of political prisoners.

  He, Raúl and the twenty or so members of his 26 July Movement went to Mexico, determined to return and overthrow Batista’s government. They set up a guerrilla training camp on a farm about twenty miles outside Mexico City. There a fellow spirit entered Castro’s life, the Argentine medical student Ernesto Guevara Lynch, known as ‘Che’ from a term unique to River Plate Spanish akin to ‘pal’ in English. Guevara had fled Guatemala at the time of the CIA coup, an experience that left him with a faith in revolution as a biological process, which ‘cleanses men, improving them as the experimental farmer corrects the defects of his plant’. He was not especially clean himself, since never washing or changing his clothes was a mark of revolutionary authenticity. Like Raúl Castro, Guevara was better versed in Marxism than Fidel, although neither man could match his charisma.

  On 24–25 November 1956, Castro and eighty-two armed adherents set sail for Cuba on the yacht Granma, paid for by the President Batista had deposed in 1952. Within a short time of landing they were almost annihilated in their initial contact with Batista’s troops. Fifteen survivors escaped to the Sierra Maestra, the mountain range along Cuba’s south-east coast in Oriente Province. Although the terrain was unpromising,
the area was inhabited by peasant squatters aptly known as precaristas, whose hatred of the authorities made them invaluable allies of the small guerrilla band. Much the greater part of the resistance to Batista was carried out in the cities, where a vicious cycle of terrorist attacks and retaliatory police torture and summary executions simultaneously granted Castro’s band the time necessary to establish themselves in the mountains while eliminating potential rivals to his leadership.

  Castro’s apotheosis into Fidel, the romantic, bearded legend in olive combat fatigues, came courtesy of the New York Times. A journalist called Herbert Matthews ventured into the Sierra Maestra, where he reported: ‘The personality of the man is overpowering. It was easy to see that his men adored him . . . Here was an educated, dedicated fanatic, a man of ideals, of courage and of remarkable qualities of leadership . . . one got a feeling that he is now invincible.’ Matthews did not notice that the ‘hundreds’ of fighters he observed in the guerrilla camp were a far smaller number rotated repeatedly into view by Raúl. Matthews’s report caught the imaginations of many Americans and he was only the first of many foreigners, including some usually hard-headed Russians, to succumb to Fidel’s magnetic presence.

  Even the CIA station in Cuba did not buy Batista’s charge that Fidel was a Communist, and he was regarded favourably by the State Department, which badly wanted the gangster regime gone. Adding to his lustre, the Cuban Communist Party supported Batista and disdained Castro’s band of ‘adventurers’. The Catholic Church gave qualified support to the resistance and even provided the guerrillas with a resident chaplain, while a major Cuban sugar baron donated $50,000. Raúl Castro and Guevara might talk Marxism late into the night, but at this stage the Movement was simply a patriotic front, combining moderate liberals with fervent anti-Communists backed by Trujillo, who hated his fellow dictator and whose agents in February 1957 shot their way into Batista’s palace in a failed attempt to kill him. It was also overwhelmingly white and middle class, as Cuba’s blacks and mulattos generally supported the mulatto Batista, and the labour unions were a pillar of his regime.

  Even when his force was only 150 strong, Fidel acted as if he was ruling his part of Oriente Province, with his own newspaper and radio station. He issued decrees calling for non-payment of taxes to the government, and criminalizing anyone who joined the armed forces after 5 April 1958. But this was after the crucial blow struck by the US government, which on 13 March 1958 placed an arms embargo on Batista, despite the pleading of Ambassador Earl Smith. In a remarkably inept display of opportunism, the British government earned the enmity of the resistance by selling Batista some Sea Fury aircraft, which did nothing to sustain his regime but were to play a key role in defeating the CIA’s invasion two years later.

  While Batista vainly tried to dislodge Castro from the Sierra Maestra, his opponents daily undermined the regime by attacking bridges, roads and rail links, and with headline-seeking kidnappings and skyjackings. Although captured rebels were usually tortured and shot, Fidel adopted the policy used by Mao in China and ordered that captured government troops should be well treated and released. The rebels also confiscated livestock and distributed them to needy peasants, and provided rudimentary medical services and schools. They also shot the more vexatious landlords’ men. The effect of this in combat was readily apparent when column commanders Raúl Castro, Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos debouched from the Sierra Maestra to wage war along the length of the country.22

  By early December 1958 the US government was openly pressuring Batista to go, preferably ceding power to a caretaker regime to preserve order. Without even warning his military commanders and mobster cronies, Batista fled at 4 a.m. on New Year’s Day, leaving his accomplices to scramble for seats in whatever was able to fly or sail away from the island. He flew first to the Dominican Republic and then to Mexico, being refused asylum in both places. Trujillo clipped him of a few millions on the way through.

  A Caribbean Animal Farm

  Castro’s regime was exceptionally popular, and would remain so for many years. He seemed to be a revolutionary nationalist, a Garibaldi or Nasser, bent on freeing Cuba from colonial shackles, rather than a totalitarian tyrant intent on creating a ‘new man’ to serve ‘the revolution’, which he defined in Guevarist terms as a process with no time limit. There was a powerful sense of new beginnings, and it was favourably noted that the new masters of Cuba were personally austere with regard to money, although of course they took their pick from among the large number of young women excited by the hot rush of liberation. The new leaders also looked different from the world’s other politicians, their bohemian long hair and beards contrasting markedly with the buttoned-down and overly hygienic Americans and the charisma-light chunky Soviets. Fidel was thirty-six, Raúl thirty-one, Guevara thirty-four, Ramiro Valdés, the Minister of the Interior, was thirty, and Manuel Piñeiro, the first General Directorate of Intelligence chief, a mere twenty-eight.

  The first revolutionary government briefly reflected the popular-front approach of the 26 July Movement. Manuel Urrutia, a respected judge who had defied Batista, became president, while a prominent lawyer became prime minister. Respected members of the legal opposition to Batista took several important portfolios, joined by younger figures from the Movement. They agreed to postpone elections for eighteen months and to abolish political parties. Given the viciousness of the Batista regime, a reckoning was inevitable – although it was modest compared with the post-Second World War épurations in Europe. By the end of January 1959 some 200 accused torturers and murderers had been executed, seventy shot into a common grave in one night and most without benefit of trial. A few senior batistianos were given show trials, the most notorious in a stadium packed with people howling for their blood.

  It did not take long for it to become apparent that the law was what Fidel said it was. He was Máximo Líder, his only official post being supreme commander of the armed forces, as befitted a Garibaldian romantic with a wider role as revolutionary inciter-in-chief. He insisted that air force officers who had been acquitted of bombing civilians should be retried and found guilty, while the defence lawyers and supportive witnesses from the first trial were detained and required to recant. Guevara, in charge of the fortress overlooking Havana harbour, was particularly ruthless and arbitrary, and exhibited special animosity against wealthy Cubans. The Villoldo family owned a 30,000-acre farm and several General Motors car dealerships. Guevara sent armed men to storm the home of Gustavo and his wife Margarita, who were dragged away to the fortress. Guevara gave Gustavo the choice of handing his assets to the state or seeing his two sons shot. On 16 February Gustavo Villoldo took a fatal overdose of sleeping pills to avoid this choice. His sons survived and Gustavo Jr would be a member of the CIA squad that directed the operations in Bolivia in 1967 that ended with Guevara shot after capture.23

  In an early indication that relations with the US would be turbulent, Fidel said that if Washington did not like these trials it could send in the Marines, and then there would be ‘two hundred thousand dead gringos’.24 In a conversation with President Rómulo Betancourt of Venezuela, he volunteered that he was thinking ‘of having a game with the gringos’. The Eisenhower administration remained unsure whether Fidel was intent on confrontation or simply raising the stakes towards an eventual settlement, even though from April 1959 onwards the new regime sponsored subversive acts in Panama, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. At a conference of US ambassadors to the Caribbean, those willing to give Castro the benefit of the doubt, including Philip Bonsal, the new man in Havana, outnumbered those favouring a hardline response. The State Department hinted that a major economic assistance programme was possible, but Fidel did not pursue the offer.25

  Just before his departure on a tour of the US in April 1959, Fidel explained at a reception in the US embassy that elections could not be held before necessary agrarian reforms and general improvements to popular health and education. His unstructured vi
sit to the US distracted from that significant shift in priorities. Predictably he was fêted at various Ivy League universities, where the spoiled offspring of the Western bourgeoisie found much to like in this tropical communitarian, so removed in spirit from the dull puritanism of Moscow or Beijing. Newspaper editors were charmed by Castro’s jokes, as were the usual suspects from the American gauche caviar. UN delegates were less enchanted when he gave the longest ever speech to the General Assembly.

  As far as the US government was concerned, reactions to Fidel were mixed. Following a two-hour meeting the CIA’s leading expert on Latin American Communism declared that ‘Castro is not only not a Communist, he is a strong anti-Communist fighter.’ Vice President Nixon was not so sure: ‘I was convinced Castro was either incredibly naive about Communism or under Communist discipline and that we would have to treat him and deal with him accordingly.’ Eisenhower repaired to Augusta, Georgia, to play golf and chose not to meet the bearded revolutionary, missing an opportunity to flatter his inordinate vanity by dealing with him as one soldier to another. There was undoubtedly an echo of the attitude dating back to John Quincy Adams, the second US President, who compared Cuba to an apple that, when shaken loose from the Spanish tree, could only ‘gravitate’ to the US. Otherwise, Fidel ingratiated himself so successfully with credulous Americans that Raúl telephoned to warn him that his own people were saying that the ‘Maximum Leader’ had fallen into the habitual bad ways of Latin Americans exposed to the perfidious Yankees.26