Word: batista
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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NEWS, Webster might have added, is also reflection-clear second thoughts on current history. A chapter of Cuban history ended the day Dictator Batista fled. Were the facts for an appraisal at hand? Could the course of the new government be predicted? To TIME, Fidel Castro's triumph was a story followed closely from the start. A month after Castro's invasion, TIME reported that "Batista's troops sent to kill the rebels lacked the heart or the ability to do so." In November 1957 a TIME correspondent interviewed Dictator Batista in Havana, met the next...
...popular revolution for old ideals-for democracy, justice and honest government-themselves picked up the arrogant tools of dictatorship. As its public urged them on, the Cuban rebel army shot more than 200 men, summarily convicted in drumhead courts, as torturers and mass murderers for the fallen Batista dictatorship. The constitution, a humanitarian document forbidding capital punishment, was overridden...
Bodies were left in sun-speckled streets as police warnings. One Santiago cop of the Batista regime, trying to break down a rebel woman, brought one of her brother's eyeballs on a platter to her cell. Other rebels were forced to watch their wives raped by cops. A U.S. resident of Santiago, who chanced upon Police Chief Rafael Salas Canizares shooting four young rebels dead in the street, reported: "He was in a state of maniacal ecstasy-face flushed, eyes bright, breathing hard...
...reporters trying to run down atrocity stories often found them to be rumors or plants. And Batista had streaks of mercy: most of today's rebel leaders, including the Castros, once jailed, were freed by Batista and lived to fight him again...
Habitual Corruption. Political morality under Batista, while conforming to a half-century of practice, hardly lived up to the idealistic constitution. During his seven years the gross national product soared from $2 billion to $2.6 billion, but the public debt rose from $200 million to $1.5 billion. Corruption ranged all the way from army sergeants who stole chickens to Batista himself, who shared with his cronies a 30% kickback on public-works contracts. Potbellied Chief of Staff Francisco Tabernilla and his family made off with the entire army retirement fund of $40 million. Havana storekeepers who wanted to attract crowds...