Word: batista
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Putting torches to Cuban cane fields and tossing bombs in Havana, a romantic rebel band, backed by many of the country's most conservative professional men, fights Dictator Fulgencio Batista. After a year, the battle is still no better than a stalemate. For reasons, see HEMISPHERE'S The First Year of Rebellion...
...eastern Sierra Maestra range, along trails they know well, Rebel Fidel Castro, 31, and his band of 600 guerrilla fighters this week mark an anniversary. It is one year since Castro landed 81 seasick adventurers from Mexico in an invasion that drew only derision from President Fulgencio Batista, 56. The dictator is no longer derisive. Last week, in Colon Cemetery in Havana, he dropped his broad face in his hands and wept as a guard of honor buried Colonel Fermin Cowley, 47, one of his top commanders, who was gunned down by a carload of Castro men on a downtown...
...Batista is angry as well as sad. Though the army and most of organized labor are still his, he cannot put down the revolt, has managed only to spur it with clumsy counterterrorism. Risking shoot-on-sight orders, Castro partisans are putting the torch to the budding sugar-cane crop on which the Cuban economy depends. The army said it shot four rebels in the cane fields last week. "Criminals!" shouts Batista now. "Communists...
...Despite Batista's attacks, Castro, his army grown from a ragtag band of less than 100 to 600 wily sharpshooters, claimed victory in recent skirmishes. Guerrillas raided an army convoy, capturing Garand rifles and .30-cal. machine guns. The rebels reported the loss of 40 dead in the nine clashes but claimed to have killed five times that many government troops. For his next move Castro called for wide-scale sabotage, through his underground, of Cuba's all-important sugar-cane harvest, which traditionally starts in January. His slogan: "Batista without harvest or harvest without Batista...
Outside Cuba, more trouble piled up for Batista. In Miami his exiled foes last week formed a united front, at a meeting that joined Castro's fanatic student worshipers to Old-pro politicOS such as ex-President Carlos Prio Socarras in a "Cuban Liberation Council." The council's first demand: formation of a provisional government that "will call general elections as quickly as possible...