Word: batista
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...rebels talk and bicker incessantly. But they dig deep to support the cause, and they constantly risk their lives and fortunes for a single, basic political goal: return of constitutional government, which Batista disrupted by his 1952 army coup, staged just 82 days before a presidentia1 election that he seemed certain to lose. "This," they insist, "is not a social revolution...
Nervy Foe. The well-heeled rebel leaders who are financing the bomb throwing like to draw a distinction between themselves and Cuba's political gangsters of the past 25 years. In Batista they have taken on the shrewdest and nerviest veteran of the gun-slinging school. A dirt-poor lad from Oriente province, he painfully acquired the rudiments of an education, carefully plotted and led the "sergeant's revolt" that won out in 1933. He voluntarily relinquished power, a rich man, eleven years later...
Under the succeeding regimes of the constitutionally elected Presidents Ramón Grau San Martin and Carlos Prio Socarrás, rival gangs polished off some 100 political victims. Both the Grau and Prio regimes milked the nation of millions in graft. After Batista came back, he rammed through a one-candidate election in 1954 and his administration set new records for corruption. The middle-class opposition groups began forming...
...bourgeois," recalls one, "and we used the materials we felt safe with. We worked through the Rotary Club, the bar association, the medical association." At first they held a long "civic dialogue" with Batista, aimed at persuading him to hold a fair election. That failed. "Then we tried military action, thinking that a few key leaders here and there would do the trick." Batista got wind of this plot, led by Lieut. Colonel Ramón Barquin, and squashed it handily (TIME, April...
...Batista unwittingly gave Castro his biggest boost: a brutal counter-terrorism campaign that drove thousands of Cubans from neutrality to opposition. Irresponsible police thugs in Havana blunderingly murdered Pelayo Cuervo Navarro, a respected, nonviolent leader of the anti-Batista Orthodox Party ("About like killing Lyndon Johnson," say the rebels). A 15-year-old boy, suspected of bomb tossing, was castrated in Santiago and shipped home dead to his mother. When Rebel Frank Pais, a young schoolteacher, was shot by cops in Santiago, 80,000 Cubans marched to his funeral and closed down the town for seven days with a general...