“But the president of one of America’s biggest, most prestigious publishing houses at the time (a man who had never been in Cuba, by the way), had the courtesy to respond to my father in a curt rejection letter. ‘Mr. Márquez-Sterling,’ he wrote, ‘You certainly have peculiar notions about Cuba.’
“So here’s an American who got all his information about Cuba from Herbert Matthews of the
New York Times
, Jules Dubois of the
Chicago Tribune
, and Jack Paar, responding this way to the man who had lived in Cuba his entire life, whose family had been involved in Cuban politics for two centuries, who helped draft the Cuban constitution of 1940, and who probably won her last elections!
“Like I said, given the wholesale ignorance—let’s be polite and call it that—on Cuban matters, given the enormous success of Castro’s propaganda offensive on these matters—you want to pull your hair out sometimes!”
Well put, Mr. Márquez-Sterling. I know
exactly
what you mean. It reminds me of my old college history prof, Dr. Stephen Ambrose: “Castro threw out an SOB and liberated Cuba.” Liberated Cuba from what? There were no ration cards or food shortages under Batista.
There was no totalitarian control of the media. I’ll quote a U.S. State Department document here: “It is no exaggeration to state that during the 1950s, the Cuban people were among the most informed in the world, living in an uncharacteristically large media market for such a small country. Cubans had a choice of fifty-eight daily newspapers during the late 1950s, according to the UN statistical yearbook.” It is true that newspaper articles were occasionally subject to modifications at Batista’s behest. More seriously, as in the case of Manuel Márquez-Sterling, some of Cuba’s cheekier reporters were occasionally jailed or manhandled by Batista goons. But Batista’s censorship was an on-again, off-again type of thing.
Batista didn’t control what Cubans learned in school. He didn’t decide who they worshiped, what they earned, where they traveled or emigrated. Recall Jeane Kirkpatrick’s book
Dictatorships and Double Standards
, in which she distinguishes authoritarian from totalitarian rule: “Authoritarian regimes do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations. . . . Totalitarian regimes claim that the state has jurisdiction over the whole of society—that includes religion and family, the economy. The real point is that totalitarian regimes have claimed jurisdiction over the whole person, and the whole society, and they don’t at all believe that we should give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s. They believe that everything is Caesar’s—the government should claim it and control it.”
Well, Batista probably didn’t even qualify as
authoritarian
. He was certainly no Franco or Pinochet, or even a Stroessner or Peron. (Had he been, had he extinguished Castro’s rebels like a true dictator, Miami jukeboxes today would feature more Tanya Tucker than Gloria Estefan.)
The first two presidents I mentioned above (Franco and Pinochet) were professional military men. Batista, though a “general” (self-appointed), is said to have disliked military trappings. He’d made it legitimately to sergeant in Cuba’s pre-1933 professional military. He merited that. Chances are he’d have made colonel, perhaps even general, on genuine merit. But his heart wasn’t in it.
Batista joined the military, like so many others of his humble social stratum in Cuba, as a means to get ahead in life, to get an education, and to have a job. But Batista’s true calling was politics. “I think you’ll find him a likable individual despite what others may have told you,” Eisenhower told Earl Smith upon his appointment to ambassador in the summer of 1957.
7
Batista’s first coup in 1933, known as the “Sergeants’ Revolt,” disbanded and demoralized Cuba’s professional military, replacing much of the professional officer corps with a new crop of self-appointed “colonels” and “generals.” This bunch was much better versed in political guile, corruption, and the third degree for political enemies than in any of the military basics and virtues. A professional military would have come in handy in 1958, but Cuba didn’t have one.
President Batista always went out of his way to be photographed in civilian clothes in a family setting. He was scrupulous in keeping his uncouth military and police operatives well behind the scenes, and was rarely seen with them in public. “Batista never wanted to be a black soldier,” wrote Cuban journalist Gastón Baquero, himself black and employed by Cuba’s oldest and most aristocratic newspaper,
El Diario de la Marina
. “Instead, Batista always longed to be a white
caballero
[gentleman].”
The mulatto sergeant-become-president Fulgencio Batista always studiously avoided the “caudillo” image. That was for President Trujillo in the neighboring Dominican Republic, for President Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela, for President Rojas Pinillas in Colombia, and all the rest. Cuba was different from the rest of Latin America. It was more North American culturally, commercially, and—as Batista was desperate to prove—politically. Batista wanted to put up a respectable, democratic image.
Batista was mostly self-educated. He read voraciously and was always boning up on his English. He kept a bust of Abraham Lincoln in his office and a home in Daytona Beach. When Ike refused him exile in the United States he was hurt, but—as a shrewd and seasoned politician himself—he “understood the reasoning.” All who knew Fulgencio Batista say he genuinely yearned to be a popular, democratically elected leader, which he’d actually been from 1940 to 1944.
Batista, de facto head of Cuba after his coup in 1933, voluntarily relinquished his post in 1940 and presented himself as a candidate in Cuba’s presidential election that year. He won handily in what American observers described as scrupulously clean elections.
Another interesting fact: In 1940, at a time when Cuba’s population was almost 70 percent white, Cuba’s people elected a
black
president, one who’d been born to former slaves in a palm-leaf shack with dirt floors. Cuba’s aristocracy still scorned Batista. As president, he was denied entry into the exclusive Havana Yacht Club.
Race was a factor in Cuba’s revolution. When Batista’s soldiers captured some of Castro’s men who tried to invade Cuba from Mexico in 1956, they exclaimed “
Son blancos
!
” (Hey, they’re whites!) “Get them!” Many or most of Batista’s soldiers were black and practically all of Castro’s rebels were white.
“You’re from the Georgia? Good! I really like your treatment of blacks up there. Down here all blacks are
marijuaneros
[marijuana smokers, dope fiends] or Batistianos.” This was a July 26 Movement’s (Castro’s group) operative talking. He was signing up an American volunteer named Neil McCauley for Castro’s rebel force in 1958.
Castro’s regime replaced a government where Cuban blacks served as president of the senate, minister of agriculture, chief of the army, and as head of state.
8
Nowadays Cuba’s jail population is 80 percent black, its governmental hierarchy 100 percent white. Only 10 percent of the Communist Party’s central committee is black (and Cuba’s most prominent political prisoner, Oscar Biscet, is black). In April 2003, three black Cubans “hijacked” a ferry and tried to escape to Florida. They were captured, given a summary trial, and executed by firing squads. Castro responded to the outrage of Cuban exiles with, “What’s all this fuss about me shooting three little negritos?”
9
“I never saw a black face on my official three-day tour of Cuba,” says talk-radio host and columnist Lowell Ponte. “And that was a Potemkin tour back in 1977. I was a visiting journalist for the
Los Angeles Times
. Surely you’d think they’d try to snow me—like they snow so many others? Problem was, they were showing me around only to high government officials—and the Communists simply couldn’t find one who was black!
“But finally they dragged one out. He was a principal at a school, where the little kids, after their Communist indoctrination, all went to work in a battery factory where their hands and arms were all exposed repeatedly to acid. . . . Try this any place else in the world and we’d have Oprah, Katie, Eleanor Clift, Rosie, the whole bunch, up in arms about ‘child labor, child slavery.’ Castro, naturally, gets away with it.”
The corruption and sporadic brutality of Batista’s regime rankled Cuba’s middle and upper classes. “We didn’t care who overthrew Batista as long as somebody overthrew Batista,” said pre-Castro Cuba’s wealthiest man, Julio Lobo. “I’ll take complete chaos over Batista’s rule.” Lobo owned fourteen sugar mills, several Cuban banks, and Havana’s baseball team. He said this while being interviewed by British historian Hugh Thomas. In the late 1950s, Lobo bankrolled Castro’s July 26 Movement (perhaps partly as protection money to keep Castro’s “guerrillas” from burning his cane fields and blowing up his sugar mills). Three months after Batista’s overthrow, Lobo presented Castro’s government, in a public ceremony, with a check for $450,000 as a goodwill gesture (or perhaps as more protection money against the confiscation affecting many of his competitors).
Exactly one year after this gesture of revolutionary goodwill, Lobo received a request on government stationery from the new head of Cuba’s national bank, the noted economist Che Guevara. The legendary revolutionary wanted a word with the legendary businessman. At the midnight meeting, Guevara offered Lobo a government post as minister of agriculture. As a perk, Lobo could keep
one
of his fourteen mills and even his house. See? Guevara smirked. So much for those rumors about me as some rigid Marxist ideologue!
Julio Lobo asked for a day to think it over. He scooted out of Cuba the following night, without even packing a toothbrush. Castro and Che’s offers were often the kind you couldn’t refuse.
“We know now that Castro was trained as a Communist in 1946 and 1947 in the Russian embassy in Cuba.” This was Julio Lobo in exile, giving the commencement speech to LSU’s graduating class in 1963 (he was an alumnus). “We now know that Castro was sent to Bogotá to disrupt the Conference of Prime Ministers in 1948, where he took a very sinister participation, killing with his own hands several people.... Books give so many details about Castro’s Communist activities during that period that it is incredible that he was not only not prevented but actually aided and abetted in the process of taking over Cuba.
“It is noteworthy that the laborers and peasants whom Castro purported to save always maintained a stony indifference to Castro’s summons for a general strike. It was the idealistic bourgeois and the intellectuals who were what Khrushchev called ‘useful idiots’ who assisted and helped unwittingly the Communist takeover.”
Lobo’s audience included several Cuban exile students perfectly familiar with his record. LSU always held a sizable contingent of Cuban students, who often attended LSU to study chemical engineering for careers in Cuba’s sugar mills. One of these students in the audience was my cousin, who told me that he and his fellow exiles applauded politely, but they all knew Lobo was one of the “useful idiots.”
Another useful idiot was José “Pepin” Bosch, owner of Bacardi, another huge Cuban company—until Castro snatched its properties and the Boschs fled and refounded Bacardi in Puerto Rico. Bosch had backed and financed Castro’s movement throughout the late 1950s—possibly with even
more
lucre than the shrewd and crafty Julio Lobo.
Early in the Cuban “rebellion,” the United States government sent a “fact-finding mission” headed by CIA officer (and liberal) Lyman Kirkpatrick to Oriente province. The U.S. ambassador to Cuba, Arthur Gardner, had reported that Castro had Communist leanings. The pro-Castro Boschs were eager to convince Kirkpatrick otherwise, so the Bacardi folks became the “fact-finders’ ” hosts and guides. They made sure Kirkpatrick’s men met all the “right people.” Among them was an elegant young lady who spoke flawless English, Vilma Espin. “We only want,” she told the shrewd CIA fact-finders, “what you Americans have: clean politics and a clean police system.”
10
Lyman Kirkpatrick seemed highly impressed with Espin’s credentials as a Cuban democrat. Unfortunately, Vilma Espin was a rabid (but secret) Communist Party member. Two years later, she married Maximum Brother Raul Castro, a man even more swinish and bloodthirsty than his brother Fidel.
During Castro’s first year in power, Bacardi’s José “Pepin” Bosch was still so smitten with the glorious
revolución
that he begged a plane seat and accompanied Castro on his triumphal April 1959 tour of the United States. “Radical chic” didn’t start with Tom Wolfe’s witty revelation in 1970. Bored and ditzy debutantes threw themselves at Castro and his “rebels.” Take the aforementioned Vilma Espin herself. She was a graduate of both Bryn Mawr College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her father was a high executive at Bacardi and her family was rolling in money. Cuba’s old aristocracy loved Castro until they were stuck
living
under his system—that radical chic-ness disappeared in a flash, and most of them ended up in exile.
Living under Fidel is hard even for most leftists. Practically all of Salvador Allende’s Marxist partisans who found refuge in Cuba after the Pinochet coup have since fled in desperation—some to the United States. My own family had a branch of old-line Cuban Communist Party members. They live in Miami today.