Fulgencio Batista - Cuba’s Mafia Backed Dictator Documentary

The man known to history as Fulgencio Batista was born as Rubén Zaldivar on the 16th of January 1901 in the town of Veguita in the municipality of Banes in eastern Cuba. His father was Belisario Batista Palermo, who had just returned to citizen life when Rubén was born, having fought in the Cuban War of Independence against Spanish rule in the late 1890s. Following the war, while Rubén was growing up, Belisario worked as a labourer on a sugar cane plantation and eventually as a sub-contractor for the United Fruit Company. His mother was Carmela Zaldivar Gonzalez, from whom

he took his original surname, his father not wishing to have his son named Batista. Rubén was the first of four sons which Belisario and Carmela would have. Rubén would only legally change his surname to Batista in 1939. Until then it was legally Zaldivar, though long before that he had begun going by Batista in an unofficial capacity. Both of his parents were of mixed blood and Batista seems to have had a mix of Spanish, African, Chinese and Carib blood, epitomising the complex colonial history of Cuba in the early modern and modern periods. The Batistas were not

wealthy. Carmela was only fifteen years of age when she gave birth to Fulgencio, while Belisario’s involvement in the War of Independence had not led to an esteemed position in its aftermath. Instead the family lived in a two room bohío, a house which had dirt floors covered with bark and palm trees as a makeshift carpet. One room served as a bedroom for the whole family, a situation which became more cramped as Batista’s younger siblings were born, while the other room was a living space. There was no bathroom or outhouse and the family made do with water

obtained from local streams and ponds, which was often unsanitary and led to illness. Unsurprisingly, given the abject poverty of the family, Batista left school before he became a teenager, and took up work as a manual labourer to earn extra money for the family, though he did return to a local Quaker school run by an American missionary group to take up some evening classes in the 1910s. He also learned English in his youth as the area the Batistas lived in was home to many Jamaicans who spoke English rather than Spanish as their first language. His mother

Carmela died in 1916, following which he left the family home at just 15 years of age, his relationship with his father being a strained one. In the months and years that followed he travelled around Cuba taking up various jobs as a mechanic, labourer and fruit-seller. Batista’s family circumstances and childhood and adolescent experiences were not uncommon in Cuba during the early twentieth century. The island had once been the centre of the vast Spanish Empire in the Americas. It was from here that Hernán Cortés had set off to conquer the Aztec Empire in 1519 and like many

of the other Caribbean islands it became a centre of sugar cultivation from the seventeenth century onwards, an enterprise which led to the mass arrival of slave labour from western Africa. Yet Spain’s protectionist trade laws ensured Cuba did not benefit as much as it might have from the sugar boom and the Spanish reliance on its gold and silver mines in Mexico, Bolivia and Peru ensured that other parts of its vast colonial empire in the Americans were not as developed as they might have been. Moreover, in the course of the eighteenth century the colonial communities in the

Caribbean colonies and those in Central and South America began to conceive of themselves as natives of the part of the Americas in which they had been born, rather than as Spaniards. This tendency was compounded following the American Revolution of the 1770s when the United States became the first European colony to emerge as an independent nation in the Western Hemisphere. Inspired by this example, when Spain was occupied by France during the Napoleonic Wars in the 1800s the colonial communities of Spain’s empire in the New World took the opportunity to become independent of Madrid. New nations like

Mexico, Gran Colombia, Argentina, Peru and Chile emerged as a result. But Cuba remained a part of Spain’s much reduced empire into the mid-nineteenth century. In the decades that followed a new sugar boom occurred across Cuba and the island became the world’s largest producer of sugar cane for a time. As a consequence of the profits which could be made from the industry, Spain was markedly reluctant to end the use of slavery in Cuba and the island was the second last place in the Americas to effectively ban slavery, with only Brazil taking longer to do so. Resistance

to Spanish rule was also growing amongst all classes. The end result was several revolts against Spanish rule in the nineteenth century, notably the Ten Years’ War between 1868 and 1878. A new war of independence broke out in 1895, one which would eventually end in Cuba throwing off Spanish rule in 1898 following the entry of the United States into the war early that year. Four years of US occupation of the island followed, but eventually Cuba was granted its independence and the Republic of Cuba came into being in 1902. Although nominally independent, it was clear from the

earliest days of the new nation that Cuba was a satellite state of the United States, one which was re-occupied between 1906 and 1909 after President Theodore Roosevelt became concerned about political instability on the Caribbean island and the danger to American economic interests which this posed. Meanwhile, the bulk of the population of Cuba, a large proportion of which were former slaves or the descendants of slaves, remained in poverty. These political and economic circumstances would shape Batista’s entire career. In the spring of 1921 Batista joined the Cuban military. His motivation in doing so was primarily financial as

a career in the army paid better than the work he had been undertaking in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Having enlisted he was soon transferred to the capital of Cuba, Havana, where he joined the First Battalion of the Fourth Infantry Company. There he began training as a stenographer who transcribed military documents and reports in shorthand. However, he left the army before long, unhappy with the elitism involved in its rank and file, though he continued his training as a stenographer. His departure from the military was short-lived and in 1923 he re-enlisted. Shortly afterwards he was

assigned to the security detail around the President of Cuba, Alfredo Zayas y Alfonso, at his home at Wajay in the suburbs of Havana. In the years that followed he gained gradual promotion within the military, eventually becoming a sergeant by the late 1920s. Throughout this time his abilities as a stenographer were the basis for his elevation. Yet he had not achieved a major rank even by the early 1930s and it might rightly be said that his rise to power in the 1930s was a very surprising development in Cuban politics. By the time he would come to

national attention, Fulgencio had started a family. In the early summer of 1924, when he was working as part of the security detail for President Zayas, Batista had met Elisa Godinez, a young woman four years his junior from a poor Cuban family of nine children. Godinez already had a child of her own by then. Their relationship developed fairly quickly and on the 10th of July 1926 they married. Their first child, a daughter named Mirta Caridad, followed in 1927. She was the first of three children, the other two being a son named Fulgencio Rubén after his father

and a second daughter named Elisa after her mother. Batista’s children later remembered him as a paradoxically devoted but often absent father. As a husband he was appalling, engaging in a seemingly endless string of extramarital affairs which may have begun even before he married Elisa in 1926. She was aware of these throughout the late 1920s and beyond, but in a country in which most people were still ardent Roman Catholics divorce carried a severe social stigma and Elisa seemingly never contemplated leaving her husband despite his unfaithfulness. As a consequence of these affairs he fathered at least one

illegitimate child in the 1930s, a daughter named Fermina, though it is speculated that there may have been several others. Batista’s ascent to power came rather suddenly in the early 1930s in an episode known as the Sergeants’ Revolt. The causes of this insurrection were multiple. Gerardo Machado y Morales had been elected as President of Cuba in 1925. As a former war hero from the Cuban War of Independence in the 1890s, Machado was a popular figure at first, but in 1928 he broke his own promise not to stand for a second term as president, a decision which

breached the terms of Cuba’s constitution which stipulated that presidents could not serve two consecutive terms in office. By that time his administration had become very repressive, reducing free speech in the country. Numerous prominent newspapers such as El Mundo, El Pais and The Havana American were shut down and there were also efforts to stifle free speech in the country’s universities. By the early 1930s Machado had effectively emerged as dictator of Cuba. This created unrest throughout the country which was compounded by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression which followed it. Because Cuba’s economy

was so closely intertwined with that of the United States, the Cuban economy was badly hit, with the price of sugar and staple commodities produced on the island falling considerably. Consequently, by 1933 there was opposition to Machado’s regime emerging not just within civil society, but also in the military, notably by the ABC group, an organisation of middle class intellectuals and professionals based in the universities which began engaging in terrorist activities against Machado’s regime. Its name came from the fact that individual cells of the organisation were codenamed A1, A2, B1 and so forth to disguise the identities

of members. Batista was a member of an ABC cell from 1931 onwards. Batista was also involved in the growing opposition to Machado within the military. In 1933 several mid-ranking officers in the Cuban military, many of them sergeants like Batista, began plotting to overthrow the government during meetings which they held at the Columbia Military Barracks. But before these army sergeants could act against the regime the United States began moving to force Machado out. These efforts were undertaken by Sumner Welles who had been appointed in April 1933 as the new Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs

by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Welles quickly moved to undermine Machado’s position in Cuba, co-ordinating with groups such as the ABC and the more senior generals and colonels within the Cuban military. He also advised Roosevelt that he should be ready to intervene militarily if needed and in the spring and summer of 1933 over two dozen US warships were sent to the waters between Key West and Cuba, while marines were also being prepared in Florida. They were not called into action. Realising that he now faced an overwhelming coalition that was opposed to him staying in power, Machado

agreed to step down as president on the 12th of August 1933. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada became interim president the following day with US support, but there was complete disunity between the different groups that had helped to overthrow Machado over what shape Cuban politics should take going forward in the country. The sergeants who had been meeting at Columbia Military Barracks would soon step into the breach. On the 19th of August 1933, just a week after Machado was ousted from power, Batista delivered the oration at the funeral of Sergeant Miguel Ángel Hernández y Rodríguez who

had been executed by Machado’s secret police the previous May. The event saw him emerge as a leader of the sergeants’ group along with Pablo Rodriguez. In the days that followed he was prominent in promoting a manifesto which was issued by the sergeants calling for the army officers and rank and file to be properly remunerated by the new government. This caused a split between Batista’s group and the ABC leadership. Tensions escalated in the two weeks thereafter until finally on the 4th of September 1933 the sergeants led by Batista took control of Columbia Military Barracks in opposition

to the government. In the hours that followed they began securing control of government buildings throughout Havana. The following day Céspedes was forced to stand down as the president and the sergeants declared the creation of a new Pentarchy, a body of five individuals who would govern Cuba in the interim until a new government was established. Thus, in an almost bloodless coup the Sergeants’ Revolt had succeeded in overthrowing the brief Céspedes presidency. Batista was the most powerful individual from within the military in this new dispensation. The new ‘Pentarchy’ was comprised of five individuals and was modelled on

a similar arrangement which had recently been installed to govern Uruguay. It consisted of Rámon Grau, a former professor of physiology at the University of Havana, a journalist by the name of Sergio Carbo, a law faculty lecturer Guillermo Portela, an attorney Jose Irisarri, and an economist and banker Porfirio Franca. One of its first major actions was to issue a proclamation stating that it had assumed control of the country, which was signed by the Pentarchy members, eighteen civilians and Batista as the representative of the military. In tandem, Carbo promoted Batista to the rank of colonel and it

was clear that he was the main power within the new dispensation with respect to the Cuban military. Yet this too was only a temporary settlement. Turmoil continued for days thereafter before the Pentarchy was dissolved and Rámon Grau was appointed as interim president in part to placate the student movement who played an important role in the insurrection which had overthrown Machado. Grau would rule as president for the next four months, during which Batista lost much of his influence. This would only be a precursor, though, for a renewed bout of political turmoil in early 1934. Following the

termination of the Pentarchy and Grau’s entering of office as president, Batista began liaising with Sumner Welles and the United States Assistant Secretary of State, Jefferson Caffery, to gain their support for a new coup to replace Grau and install a more pro-American candidate. Welles had facilitated the overthrow of the Machado government in August, but the administration in Washington was perturbed by the drift of politics in Cuba in the weeks that followed, viewing the Grau administration supported by a militant student and intellectual movement as unfavourable to US interests. Accordingly, Roosevelt’s government had declined to acknowledge the new

government and was considering its options in line with the Platt Amendment, a measure that had been included in the Army Appropriations Bill in the US in 1901 which stipulated that one of the conditions of US troop withdrawal from Cuba was that the US could intervene there again if its national and economic interests were compromised. Now Welles and Caffery determined that it would be more cost effective to support Batista in launching yet another counter-coup. Thus, on the 15th of January 1934, Batista forced Grau to resign from the presidential office with the support of the US government.

The students, ABC organisation and other parties who had vied for power over the past six months were side-lined as Batista claimed control of the government. However, he did not make himself president, but rather Carlos Mendieta was appointed to the position in what was now the fifth government administration to hold power in Cuba in less than six months. A certain legitimacy was lent to affairs when Welles ensured that the new government was officially recognised by Washington and Jefferson Caffery was appointed shortly afterwards as the new US Ambassador to Cuba. One of the first measures of the

Mendieta presidency, with Batista as the real power behind the puppet president, was to negotiate a set of terms on which Cuban-US diplomatic relations would rest. While America had granted Cuba independence in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of 1898, unlike Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines which became US overseas territories following that conflict, the Platt Agreement of 1901 and the Cuban-American Treaty of Relations of 1903 had been the cost of Cuban independence. These stipulated a range of scenarios in which Washington could intervene in Cuba’s affairs and also leased several naval bases to the United States,

notably Guantánamo Bay. The chaotic nature of Cuba’s politics in the early 1930s convinced Washington that an updated agreement was needed and so on the 9th of June 1934 a new Cuban-American Treaty of Relations came into effect, having already been signed in Washington D.C. two weeks earlier. The updated Treaty of Relations effectively revoked the Platt Agreement and toned down some of the language of the 1903 Treaty and the elements of it which impeded on Cuban sovereignty. Guantánamo Bay remained in lease from the Cuban government, but the agreement made in 1934 effectively enshrined a new principle of

non-interventionism in Cuban affairs by the US as part of President Roosevelt’s Good Neighbour Policy, a general drive towards less intervention in the affairs of Latin American nations by the US. The agreement had the advantage for Roosevelt’s administration of revoking the legal requirement to intervene in Cuba in certain circumstances and allowed him to counter foreign policy hawks in Congress who wanted an increased US presence in the Caribbean. More broadly, it ensured good relations between Washington and Havana. Batista visited the White House in 1938 in what effectively was a meeting of two heads of state for all

intents and purposes. For the remainder of the 1930s Cuba went through a number of presidents. Mendieta served until December 1935, following which an interim presidency of six months headed by Jose Agripino Barnet came into power. He was followed by Miguel Mariano Gómez, who only served as president between May and December 1936. Then Federico Laredo Brú became president, finally breaking the run of short-lived heads of state as he served for nearly four years, eventually only leaving office in October 1940. Throughout this period Batista was the real power behind a succession of weak presidents. Yet this should

not be overstated. He did not have dictatorial control of the country as many accounts of Cuban history at this time suggest. For instance, when he attempted in 1936 to establish a new system of rural schools which would be administered by the army, Gómez was able to veto the bill. Admittedly Batista then conspired to have Gómez removed from office and replaced by Brú, but the incident is indicative of the fact that Batista was not solely in control of affairs between 1934 and 1940. Yet as Chief of Staff, his official title, he was the most prominent figure

in the country. When he visited the White House in 1938 The New York Times referred to him as, quote, ‘the leading political figure of his country’, an apt description of an individual who was not quite a dictator, but who was nevertheless extremely powerful at the same time. In the late 1930s a more co-ordinated economic and social policy was introduced by Brú as president, but largely at the behest of Batista and his advisors. For instance, women were given the right to vote in Cuba in 1935, while under Brú’s administration from 1937 onwards considerable efforts were made

to reform the system of landholding and sugar production to improve the economic position of smallholders and producers across the island. The Plan Trienal or Three Year Plan was intended to transform Cuba economically and socially. It aimed to do so by breaking up the large agricultural estates, many of which were sugar plantations and the organisation of which was a legacy of Spanish rule in the nineteenth century. These were to be distributed more evenly, with smallholders and labourers sharing to a greater extent in the profits from Cuba’s main economic activity. Batista was also aware that Cuba was

excessively reliant on sugar production for its exports, a scenario which left the country at the mercy of international sugar prices. If the price of just one commodity went down on the international markets, Cuba and its people became poorer, a fact exemplified by the effects of the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression which followed. Accordingly, the Three Year Plan also aimed to diversify Cuban agriculture into the production of other cash crops. In tandem, a new national banking system was set up to facilitate investment by smallholders into their farms. Finally, the 50 Percent Law was introduced

which stipulated that all sugar plantations, farms and mills henceforth had to employ native Cubans to make up at least 50% of their workforce, a measure designed to slow the rate of immigration from other parts of the Caribbean such as Haiti and Jamaica, a not imprudent measure given that Cuba’s population had nearly doubled from two million people to four million in the course of the 1910s and 1920s. The Three Year Plan began to slowly reform Cuban landholding and the island’s economic system. A popular misconception is that the Cuban Revolution led to the introduction of measures like

this for the first time in the late 1950s, whereas in reality they were already underway during Batista’s time in the 1930s, just moving too slowly for many Cubans. During this period when Batista was the unofficial power in Havana it was determined that a new constitution was needed for the country. Up to that point the country’s politics were structured around the 1901 Constitution, which had been largely drawn up by US officials, with certain points imposed on Cuba as a requirement for American troops to leave the country the following year. Accordingly in the late 1930s steps were

taken to devise a new constitution, one which was finalised and put into place in 1940. It was one of the most progressive national constitutions anywhere in the world when it was ratified that year. The new document allowed for a US-style political system with a bicameral legislature consisting of a lower house or House of Representatives and an upper house or Senate, while third and fourth branches of government would consist of a President and Supreme Court. However, the real advances made under the new constitution came in the economic and social spheres, with provisions made in it for

the reform of landholding to end extreme poverty, social programmes to provide better healthcare and education and the introduction of a minimum wage. It has been often said that the Cuban Revolution which would occur in the 1950s was in many ways the offspring of the aspirational nature of the Constitution of 1940. Having spent years pulling many of the strings behind the scenes in Havana, Batista determined around the time that plans for the new constitution were being initiated to stand for election himself as President of Cuba in the 1940 general election. To that end in 1939 he

established the Democratic Socialist Coalition. This was a union of four political parties, the Liberal Party, the Nationalist Union Party, the Democratic National Association and the Communist Revolutionary Union. The inclusion of this latter group is interesting and points towards the fact that Batista in these early days of his political career was not an ideological enemy of the Cuban Communists. Indeed his role in developing the progressive constitution of 1940 contradicts the depiction of him as a brutally corrupt dictator, though as we shall see, there were two sides to Batista’s career, this earlier stage, and the dictator who

would emerge in the 1950s. At this earlier stage he was not only able to build a varied coalition of different political parties in 1939, but having done so he won a comfortable victory in the general election held on the 14th of July 1940, with the Coalition winning nearly 60% of the vote. Accordingly, Batista became the new President of Cuba, beating out Ramón Grau who had briefly served as President following the Sergeants’ Revolt of 1933. Batista’s term as president was a peculiar one in terms of his later clashes with the Cuban Communist movement, as in the

early 1940s when he finally emerged from the shadows to govern Cuba directly he did so with the active aid of the Cuban Communist movement. For instance, in return for their support in the 1940 elections Batista allowed the Cuban Communist party to organise and largely control the Cuban Confederation of Labour, a government sponsored labour union. Ironically, the Confederation’s first secretary general was Lazaro Pena, who would later go on to hold the same position under Fidel Castro’s regime in the 1960s. Other tangible signs of Batista’s alliance with the Cuban socialist movement included an agreement that there would

be no labour agitation in the early 1940s, while in return Batista enshrined a number of workers’ rights. In his correspondence we find Batista addressing senior members of the Cuban Communists as, quote, ‘your very affectionate and loving friend’. Overall these years saw a broad continuation of the policies which had begun to be implemented during the late 1930s as part of the Three Year Plan. As such, many of Batista’s policies were broadly progressive and aimed to better the economic and social circumstances of a wide cross-section of the Cuban population. But the conflicting element to all of this

was continued levels of endemic official corruption, a problem which had plagued Cuba since independence and which Batista did nothing to stamp out. Instead, as the years went by and his grasp on power continued, Batista became more and more inclined to benefit substantially from corrupt dealings himself. Much of Batista’s term as president and as the official head of state was concerned with international relations. When he entered office in October 1940 the Second World War had already been underway for over a year. The Western Hemisphere, though, remained largely unaffected by it for the time being, a result

of the United States refusing to intervene directly on the side of Britain, though Roosevelt’s administration was providing London with considerable financial and material assistance in other ways. Elsewhere other Latin American nations such as Argentina were sympathetic towards Nazi Germany. Many feared that Cuba, with its historical links to Spain, where General Francisco Franco had established a fascist regime with aid from the Nazis in the late 1930s, would also lean towards supporting Germany and its allies such as Benito Mussolini’s Italy. This suspicion was compounded when Batista legalised a pro-fascist group shortly after he became president, while many

of the policies involved in the Plan Trienal mirrored those of the European fascist states in being corporatist and statist. But these concerns were soon dispelled. In the spring of 1941 Batista ordered German and Italian diplomatic officials to leave Cuba and contacted Washington to suggest a joint US-Cuban invasion of Franco’s Spain. The latter proposal was never taken seriously, but it made it unequivocally clear that Batista had no intention of siding with the European fascist powers. He also sent a large consignment of Cuban sugar to Britain during the Blitz despite the naval blockade of the country by

Germany. More broadly Batista became a firm ally of the United States as a result of the war. When the Empire of Japan dragged the US directly into the conflict with the attack on Pearl Harbour on the 7th of December 1941, Cuba was one of the first nations to declare war on Japan in support of the US and the growing Allied alliance, doing so on the 9th of December. This was not just a symbolic gesture. Following the US entry into the war the German Kriegsmarine began sending wolf packs of U-boat submarines to patrol along the East

Coast of the United States, striking Allied shipping in the waters from Newfoundland in north-eastern Canada all the way south to the Caribbean. Batista’s government played a significant role in trying to curb these attacks and keep the sea-lanes between the Gulf of Mexico and the North Atlantic safe for Allied shipping to pass through. Although Cuba’s navy was quite limited it opened up the country to the construction of US airbases during the conflict, formed a defence pact with Mexico to monitor shipping in the Gulf of Mexico and patrolled the waters around the eastern Caribbean. The Cuban navy

even managed to sink one German U-boat, U-176, while also contributing to several rescue operations in the waters of the region after ships had been hit by German submarine torpedoes. By mid-1944 the result of the Second World War seemed assured as the Allies had opened new fronts in Southern and Western Europe against the Nazis and the Soviet Union began a rapid westward advance into Poland and Ukraine. In Cuba Batista, who was constitutionally prohibited from seeking a second consecutive term as president, began looking towards the new election later that year. As he was unable to run himself,

the Democratic Socialist Coalition elected to back Carlos Saladrigas Zayas as their candidate for the presidency. Saladrigas had previously served as Prime Minister within Batista’s administration between 1940 and 1942 and as Cuban Ambassador to Great Britain. He would face Ramón Grau, who once again stood for president as the Cuban Revolutionary Party-Authentic candidate. Batista’s coalition might have hoped for an electoral boost owing to the war, but Grau was viewed as the more progressive candidate and many poorer Cubans gave him their vote. Accordingly, when the election was held on the 1st of June 1944, Grau won election as

the new President of Cuba, securing over one million votes to 839,000 secured by Saladrigas. In part Saladrigas’s defeat was owing to discontent at war taxes which Batista’s administration had levied. Conversely, the Democratic Socialist Coalition won control over the Senate and the House of Representatives, splitting power in the three branches of government in ways which would serve to undermine Cuba’s democratic institutions in the years that followed. Batista’s initial reaction to the election of 1944 was to attempt to undermine Grau’s incoming administration to the maximum extent possible, spending vast sums of money on various programmes, while public

funds were also embezzled by Batista and others, a hardly novel development in a country where those who held public office were notoriously corrupt in the mid-twentieth century. Dispatches to Washington D.C. even noted that Batista seemed determined to cripple Grau’s administration before the new president ever took office. This done, Batista relinquished the presidency and decided to leave Cuba altogether, retiring to Daytona Beach in Florida. He would spend much of the remainder of the 1940s living in the United States, travelling between the south-eastern state and New York City where he generally stayed at the Waldorf Astoria hotel,

flush with money acquired during his time as president. Yet he did not abandon Cuban politics completely. In the 1948 general election he was elected to the Senate and thereafter returned to his homeland. At this juncture he formed the new United Action Party, but it would never involve itself in the democratic process, as the 1948 election would be the last free and fair election held in Cuba during the twentieth century. The period after Batista’s exit from the presidential office also saw his personal life change considerably. Though married to his first wife Elisa for nearly twenty years,

he had always been unfaithful. She was willing to accept his continuous infidelities and when they divorced in 1945 it was at his behest. It came as a shock to her and their three children when he told her late in 1944 that he wished to separate. His motive in doing so was a new affair which he had begun with Marta Fernandez Miranda not long before this. Born in 1923, she was just 20 years of age when Batista’s presidential cavalcade had accidentally forced her off of the road when she was cycling through Havana. Batista had been struck

by her and they continued to see each other thereafter. Before long he decided to leave Elisa for her. They finally married on the 28th of November 1945, just a few weeks after Batista’s divorce was finalised. They would eventually have five children together, four sons, Jorge, Roberto, Carlos and Fulgencio, and a daughter, Marta after her mother. During these years of Batista’s self-imposed exile in the United States followed by his return to Cuba, the country’s politics shifted in a way which would have implications when Batista returned to the frontline of the nation’s politics in the 1950s. Grau’s

administration and that of President Carlos Prío Socarrás from 1948 onwards were in many ways the golden age of the Republic of Cuba, when the most fair elections in Cuba’s history resulted in administrations which were committed to a better quality of governance than had been seen in earlier times. Moreover, both Grau and Socarrás tried to move Cuba away from its political and economic subservience to the United States and to foster greater equality within Cuban society. On the other hand, corruption remained endemic within Cuban politics, while Grau undermined the constitution of 1940 by governing in a heavy-handed

manner and undermining the House of Representatives and Senate, which his party did not control. Furthermore, the more permissive political atmosphere of the mid-to-late 1940s allowed for the emergence of radical political groups, many of which would be involved in the Cuban Revolution of the 1950s. Amongst these was Partido del Pueblo Cubano or The Party of the Cuban People which was founded by Eduardo Chibás in 1947. He ran for president in 1948 and came third in the election, running on a platform of anti-corruption and social justice. One of Chibás’ early supporters in Havana was a student by

the name of Fidel Castro, whose path would soon cross with Batista’s. Batista intended to run for election as president again in 1952 having formed a new political coalition called United Action. But it was clear in the run up to it that he was trailing far behind Carlos Hevia, who was standing as the candidate for The Cuban Revolutionary Party, and Roberto Agramonte of the Party of the Cuban People. In awareness of the fact that Agramonte looked set to win the election and he himself did not have a chance of emerging victorious in free and fair elections,

Batista turned to his old connections within the military and on the 10th of March 1952, three months before the election was scheduled to take place, he seized power again through the army. Unlike in the aftermath of the Sergeants’ Revolt in 1933 and the second seizure of power in January 1934, this time Batista had few reservations about seizing power directly. Following the coup he appointed himself as interim president. In an effort to lend an air of democratic legitimacy to this situation elections were eventually held on the 1st of November 1954 in which Batista won over 85%

of the vote, triumphing over his old rival Ramón Grau, who had attempted to withdraw his candidacy before election day. Therefore, Batista’s second term as President of Cuba was initiated through an election, but the ballots were rigged and he was effectively the dictator of the country from 1952 onwards. The economic situation of the country during Batista’s new period as Cuban dictator was one of extremes. For all the corruption of its political system and the dictators and puppet presidents who had governed it for decades, parts of Cuba were quite affluent, particularly in Havana and some of the

other major cities like Santiago de Cuba. But out in the countryside and in the slums of the capital many people eked out livings and lived in the kind of shanty houses that Batista himself had grown up in half a century earlier. Batista’s policies in his second iteration as the country’s dictator/president did nothing to reverse this. Indeed, in contrast to his earlier quasi-socialist and progressive policies in the late 1930s and early 1940s, in the 1950s Batista became vehemently opposed to the Cuban Communist movement and other socialist groups. The environment was also made more favourable for US

businesses such that in the 1950s American control of the main parts of the Cuban economy became even greater than it had been. 90% of all the country’s mines, for instance, were operated by US companies, while even the sugar industry, that most Cuban of enterprises, was still profoundly controlled by US interests. Added to all of this was the corruption of Batista’s government, which eclipsed that of earlier Cuban administrations. The nature of Batista’s regime in the 1950s was aptly captured in 1957 when the US Ambassador to Cuba, Arthur Gardner, presented a golden telephone to Batista in recognition

of the favourable concessions he had given to the International Telephone and Telegraph Company in Cuba. This was all symptomatic of the corruption of Batista’s dictatorship in the 1950s. Cuban politics had been highly corrupt since the inception of the Republic in the 1900s. For instance, one of its first presidents, Miguel Gomez, the head of state between 1909 and 1913 became embroiled in a number of corruption scandals and despite claims by everyone from Machado in the late 1920s, Grau in the mid-1940s and Batista himself both in the early 1940s and the mid-1950s that they wished to curb

official corruption in the Caribbean island nation, all of these leaders enriched themselves at the expense of the state and the Cuban populace. Batista pilfered tens of millions of dollars from the state himself, but the bigger problem was that he was not alone. This embezzlement and bribery filtered downwards to senior officials in his administration and then further down again to anybody who had the least little bit of authority, from minor local officials to police officers, a great proportion of whom were willing to sway decisions on legal, administrative and judicial matters for a small bribe. When corruption

becomes endemic to a society in this way it fosters resentment amongst the populace against the governing classes and creates an environment which is ripe for revolution. Much of this corruption was driven by the influence of US-based organised crime syndicates in Cuba and their ties to the regime in the 1950s. Many of the leading figures in this, like the Italian-American mob boss, ‘Lucky’ Luciano, the Jewish-American gangster known as ‘the Mob’s Accountant’, Meyer Lansky, and the Florida-based Italian-American crime boss, Santo Trafficante, had emerged as major players in organised crime in the United States in the 1920s on

the back of the profits which could be made from bootlegging during the Prohibition of alcohol there. During the 1930s their operations came under increasing pressure as they sought to diversify into casinos and illegal narcotics following the end of Prohibition. This in turn led figures like Lansky, Luciano and Trafficante to begin moving some of their operations to the Caribbean, intending to establish considerable control over these highly corrupt countries on the doorstep of America. Batista was well aware of this growing development, though it was while he was in exile in the US and Grau was president of

Cuba that the infamous Havana Conference was held at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba in December 1946. At this many matters relating to organised crime in the US were decided upon by the heads of Cosa Nostra from all over America, while additional measures were put in place to begin expanding the Mafia’s control over Cuba, buying up hotels and casinos and essentially turning the island into a fiefdom off the coast of America where Lansky, Luciano and their associates could conduct their business away from interventions by American law enforcement. By the time Batista returned to power in 1952

Havana had become known as the playground of America, where the rich went to engage in activities which were broadly illegal in the United States, from illegal drug purchases and use to gambling and prostitution. At the height of mob involvement in the city numerous casinos and hotels were owned directly by them, Lansky running the 21-storey, 383-room Hotel Riviera and Trafficante owning the Hotel Capri. There were also well over 200 brothels across the city by that time, with many of them run by the mob. Batista welcomed all of this. Back in the 1940s, when he was living

in the US, he had met with Lansky during his visits to New York and promised him that he and his associates would receive favourable concessions in Cuba should he return to power. Batista kept his promise in the 1950s. For instance, in 1955 Lansky was allowed to open a casino wing at the iconic Hotel Nacional where the Havana Conference had been held in 1946. Huge tax exemptions were granted to those who opened hotels and built casinos and a blind eye was turned to illegality at these establishments. In return Batista received huge financial payments from the mob,

receiving anywhere between 10% and 30% of the take directly from the casinos run by Lansky and Trafficante. Millions of dollars went directly from Lanksy, Luciano and Trafficante into Batista’s bank accounts in Switzerland. But these were not crimes without repercussions. The naked corruption of the government and the undue influence which was given to the mob in Havana further damaged Batista’s reputation amongst ordinary Cubans. By the mid-1950s there was growing unrest throughout the country. The first stirrings of what is known today as the Cuban Revolution began on the 26th of July 1953, just a year after Batista

seized power. On that date Fidel Castro, who we last saw campaigning for the Party of the Cuban People in Havana in advance of the 1948 general election, attacked the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba with 136 insurgents, most of whom had backgrounds with the Party of the Cuban People. These had begun training for armed insurrection in the weeks and months after Batista’s coup. Though the attack on Moncada Barracks was a failure and many of those involved, including Castro, were arrested and given brief jail sentences, it was a symbolic moment in the beginnings of what became

known as the 26th of July Movement. This gradually grew in the mid-1950s, as Castro returned to Cuba late in 1956 to initiate a guerrilla war against Batista’s regime following a spell in Mexico to train his followers. By that time the 26th of July Movement was moving towards a form of militant Marxist-Leninism and was presenting itself to the Cuban people as a legitimate alternative to Batista’s dictatorship or the seemingly never ending string of corrupt presidents controlled by American interest. Between 1956 and 1958 Batista was fighting a growing guerrilla war and insurgency across Cuba, primarily based out

of rural areas where Castro and his supporters could disappear into the countryside or small villages after they had struck at government targets. The heartland of the 26th of July Movement was the Sierra Maestra Mountains in southeast Cuba, the part of the island which Batista originally came from. In an effort to crack down on the insurgency Batista established a secret police and utilised the army, but the latter was only of limited efficacy. This was because there had been an attempted coup from within the ranks of the military in 1956 and in order to prevent further efforts

to topple him from within the army Batista had purged a substantial cross-section of the officer class. In the process many of its best tacticians, who might have been able to combat Castro’s rebels effectively, were removed from command positions. The employment of the secret police also backfired to a large extent as mass arrests, interrogation and the murder of thousands of Cubans further turned public sentiment against Batista’s regime and in support of Castro and his rebels. This was vital. For any guerrilla army to flourish it needs to have the support of the common people who will not

reveal how it is operating and who will provide logistical support to it. Batista’s heavy-handed efforts to suppress the 26th of July Movement in 1956 and 1957 handed extra support to Castro and his followers. While he was losing the support of the average Cuban farmer and labourer, Batista had a firm ally in the shape of the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower in Washington D.C. This must be looked at in context. Eisenhower’s officials knew that Batista was wholly corrupt and becoming an ever more vicious strongman in Havana, but the US had too many vested interests in Cuba

not to offer him the country’s support. These were originally economic, given the involvement of American companies and corporations in Cuba’s economy, but, more importantly, Castro’s embrace of Leninist-Marxism and now made Cuba a front in the Cold War. This was heating up just as the guerrilla war was taking off, with the Warsaw Pact established by the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe in the summer of 1955, the Hungarian Revolution brutally suppressed by the Soviets in the late autumn/early winter of 1956 and Moscow also taking the lead in the early stages of the Space Race in 1957. Consequently,

Eisenhower’s administration was anxious to prevent the emergence of a Communist government in Cuba. As a result, millions of dollars’ worth of arms and other military material were sent from the US to Cuba in 1956 and 1957 to aid the Batista regime in fighting the growing revolt. By the spring of 1958 the insurrection was beginning to pose an existential threat to Batista’s position. It was gaining increasing international attention and as discussion of Batista’s regime increased, so too did revelations about its corruption and growing number of atrocities. For example, in his efforts to crack down on the

growing insurrection, the Cuban army and Batista’s secret police began engaging in ever more brutal tactics, including torture and summary execution, the kind of state terror which he himself had won plaudits for denouncing over twenty years earlier at the funeral of Sergeant Miguel Ángel Hernández y Rodríguez in August 1933 shortly before the Sergeants’ Revolt. Now it was Batista dealing in extreme repression. In the course of the mid-1950s his regime would murder upwards of 20,000 Cubans as it sought to crush the 26th of July Movement and secure Batista in power. In conjunction Batista initiated Operation Verano or

Operation Summer, through which he sent roughly 12,000 Cuban soldiers into the Sierra Maestra foothills in June 1958 to destroy Castro and his army in their own heartland. The initiative lasted for six weeks and ended in complete failure, the rebels, who were massively outgunned and only numbered in the hundreds, defeating the advance by using hit and run tactics, land mines and defensive points where they had a height advantage as Cuban soldiers tried to advance uphill through narrow passes towards them. When the Operation was abandoned in early August hundreds of Cuban soldiers were dead compared to just

over two dozen rebels and Castro and his followers had scored a huge morale victory. Thereafter they commenced a new offensive across the island and gained growing numbers of followers. In the end a large factor in Batista’s fall and the eventual triumph of Castro’s Communist insurrection in Cuba was that the United States began to lose faith in Batista and his ability to control the situation. As atrocities mounted and the reports reached Washington from the new US ambassador to Cuba, Earl Smith, concerning Batista’s gross abuses of power, Eisenhower’s administration reduced its sale of arms, planes, armoured vehicles

and napalm to the regime and then terminated some supplies entirely in 1958. This came at the worst time possible, as the 26th of July Movement was already securing complete control of large parts of the island outside of Havana at this time. Despite the declining position, Batista determined to press ahead with fresh elections later that year in order to be able to claim that Cuba was still functioning as a legitimate democracy that the US should support. When these were held on the 3rd of November Batista’s favoured candidate, Andres Rivero Aguero, won 70% of the vote, but

the turnout was just over 600,000 voters from an electorate of nearly three million, while even the votes of the 20% of eligible voters who did turn out to vote were heavily doctored to ensured Batista’s candidate won the election. It did not have the desired effect and Eisenhower’s administration, on the advice of Ambassador Smith, refused to recognise Aguero’s election victory. Batista’s time in power was nearing an end. Following the election Smith met with Batista and informed him that he no longer had the confidence of Washington and that he should relinquish power. Batista hesitated, but in the

dying days of 1958 the tactical situation changed dramatically when one of the leading figures of the 26th of July Movement, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, seized control of Las Villas province in the centre of Cuba by defeating Batista’s troops in the region, who outnumbered the rebels by roughly ten to one. Guevara’s detachment captured the provincial capital of Santa Clara on the 28th of December. With this it became clear that the rebels had the tactical edge and that the Cuban armed forces were broadly unwilling to fight for Batista anymore. As Castro, Guevara and their followers prepared for an

assault in Havana in early January, Batista realised that his time in charge was at an end. At a New Year’s Eve party in the capital he publicly declared his intention to step down. By then planes had already been prepared to transport him and dozens of his leading supporters out of Cuba, heading variously to the Dominican Republic, Florida and New Orleans laden down with hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and stolen assets. Batista left the country at 3am on the morning of the 1st of January 1959 for the Dominican Republic. The following day Guevara’s advance

brigade arrived into Havana. In Washington Eisenhower and his advisors were horrified to realise that the Communists were now much closer to seizing complete control of Cuba than they had realised. Following Batista’s flight from Cuba, Castro and his revolutionary followers seized power in Havana. Fidel established himself as the new Prime Minister, though he was effectively a dictator who would rule Cuba for the next half a century. The new Communist regime immediately allied itself with the Soviet Union and began nationalising all US assets across Cuba. Over the next several years efforts were undertaken to begin implementing Communist

policies to extend education, healthcare and other services to all Cubans. Some of these policies were enormously successful, but they were achieved through the establishment of an authoritarian, single-party state which was just as, if not more, repressive than military rule under Batista had been. All of this is generally overshadowed, however, by international events in the four years following Batista’s flight. In its dying stages Eisenhower’s administration initiated efforts to undermine the new Communist regime in Cuba. This was pursued by his successor as President, John F. Kennedy, resulting in the infamous Bay of Pigs Invasion by US-trained Cuban

exiles in April 1961, followed by the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 when Cuba briefly became the crucible of the Cold War. Although relations between the US and Cuba have improved somewhat in recent years, the last Cuban leader that Washington considered an ally was Fulgencio Batista. When he left Cuba Batista did so with what is believed to have been in excess of $300 million dollars in cash and assets. While it was determined to overthrow Castro, the Kennedy administration was publicly scornful of Batista, stating that much of the cause of the Cuban Revolution had been the

support offered to this brutal and rampantly corrupt dictator by the Eisenhower administration. Unsurprisingly, Batista did not settle in Florida where he owned a home on Daytona Beach or anywhere else in the United States. Instead he headed for Portugal, living for a time in the 1960s on the island of Madeira before relocating to Estoril in the Portuguese Riviera, the affluent coastal area near Lisbon where royalty and the Portuguese nobility in days gone by, had resided in palatial homes. During these years he composed several books which sought to defend his time in power in Cuba and vilify

the revolution. These had names like Cuba Betrayed and The Growth and Decline of the Cuban Republic. Despite his antipathy towards Spain and the Franco regime twenty years earlier, he and his wife also spent time in Spain. Interviews were given by Batista to various news outlets throughout the mid-1960s in which he roundly critiqued Cuba’s ties to the Soviet Union and the subtext of which was that Batista had not entirely given up on a possible return to Cuba if the Castro regime were toppled. Perhaps it was owing to residual fears that he might be used by the

US in an effort to do so that Castro initiated fresh efforts to have Batista assassinated again in the early 1970s. Two days before the killers were to strike Batista died aged 72 from a heart attack on the 6th of August 1973 in the coastal resort of Marbella in southern Spain. Fulgencio Batista was an enigmatic and contradictory character. All too often he is dismissed as a paragon of corruption, a military strongman who was kept in power in Havana throughout much of the quarter of a century between 1933 and 1958 by the United States as someone who

would continue to support Washington and sell commodities like sugar to the US cheaply. His ties to the Italian Mafia and its ambitious project to turn Havana into a Caribbean Las Vegas run by the mob are also focused on. And there is considerable truth to this depiction of Batista, particularly so in the 1950s. He was clearly kept in power by agents that had vested interests in Cuba and he was astonishingly corrupt, embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars between the 1930s and 1950s. But there are overlooked aspects to his career. For one, Batista was seemingly a reluctant

dictator in the early days, shying away from public awareness of his power in the 1930s and then when he did finally become president in 1940 agreeing to relinquish the office in 1944 according to the strictures of the Cuban constitution. Moreover, while his regime was a kleptocracy that stole huge sums of public money, it also tried to introduce major reforms designed to benefit the poorer sections of Cuban society in the late 1930s. In doing so, it even agreed to work with Cuba’s Communist and socialist parties and organisations, a fact often overlooked in popular accounts of the

Cuban Revolution. Ultimately what one is presented with when trying to appraise Batista is a classic example of power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely. The Batista of the 1930s was in some ways a reluctant military strongman and one who was willing to relinquish power when the time came in 1944, but as the years went by he realised he wanted to reacquire that power and when he did the dictatorship of the 1950s became one of utter corruption and brutal repression. What do you think of Fulgencio Batista? Was he a fundamentally different kind of military strongman in

the 1930s and early 1940s to the dictator he became in the 1950s? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.