Word: batista
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...purified was government graft. Purification also drove the bearded conquerors to set aside more and more of the constitution in order to purge the losers by firing squad. Castro's men, immune to such worldly blandishments as alcohol and money, found their grim satisfactions in rows of executed Batista henchmen...
...antivice campaign suspended the crooked government lottery (costing 4,000 ticket vendors their jobs). The government also closed a giant private numbers game, kept locks on the big gambling casinos, employing 10,000. Castro wiped out the Botellas,*the workless government jobs given minor flunkies by the Batista and previous regimes, whacking off 6,000 names at a saving of $15 million a year. The notoriously corrupt Havana newsmen, who for decades had been drawing up to $1,000,000 a month in government bribes, were rudely reduced to their salaries, some as low as $22.50 a week. Cold morality...
...Cuban peso, on a par with the dollar for 44 years, turned soft; the foreign-money markets knocked it down to 75? or worse. Reason: nobody knew how many fresh green millions Dictator Fulgencio Batista and his cronies had lugged away. Castro's government ordered all $500 and $1,000 bills turned in, decreed that visitors to Cuba could bring in no more than 50 pesos. Canadian Gold Broker John Rogers (TIME, Dec. 15) reported that a Miami lawyer, acting for a pro-Batista exile, was trying to convert 500,000 pesos into bullion...
Empty Rights. Just as Batista had done time and again, the rebels casually whacked away at the Cuban constitution. They denied the right of habeas corpus to Batista underlings awaiting trial for "war crimes" (thus permitting unlimited detention without the posting of charges), repealed a ban on the creation of special courts...
...prisoners were shot, raising the four-week execution total to 264. In Victoria de las Tunas eight more were condemned. Havana rebels will organize six more courts to speed the trial of 1,500 candidates for "revolutionary justice." The rebels indicted Batista and 24 top officers in absentia for "treason, rebellion, sedition, desertion, malfeasance, robbery and fraud." Foreign embassies in Havana were crowded with 74 exiles who still have not got safe-conduct permits to leave the country...