Word: batista
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Hotelkeepers all over the Caribbean last week raised their rates to winter levels, officially opening what promised to be the rum-punch belt's splashiest sin-and-sun season yet. Wide-open Havana, nonchalantly bent on pleasure despite a running revolution against Dictator Fulgencio Batista, offered visitors the biggest hotel built there since 1930. Jamaica also welcomed tourists to a new hotel, the island's biggest...
Paying Back. When the rebels tried to extend the strike to Havana, they bumped squarely into two pillars of the Batista regime-solid prosperity and a tough, bull-necked labor leader named Eusebio Mujal, 44. As secretary-general of the Confederation of Cuban Workers (C.T.C.), Mujal bosses 1,200,000 workers, half the total labor force, and he bosses them for Batista. Guarded by a cordon of bully boys in open-necked shirts, Mujal explained his stand bluntly last week: "People who treat labor well deserve well of labor...
...Among Batista's concessions to Mujal: an obligatory dues checkoff that puts $20 million a year in the union cashbox, gradually rising wage minimums set by the government wage board. New industrial investment during the past four years totals $612 million. The civic struggle has caused the tourist business to slump, but four luxury hotels are going up-including the 20-story Havana Riviera and the $22 million Havana Hilton (of which Mujal's Restaurant Workers' Union owns a $9,000,000 chunk). "Without a general strike in Havana," says Mujal, "Castro has no chance. As long...
...rebel leaders admit bafflement at how to win friends with dirty collars. Moreover, after failure of an anti-Batista navy uprising in Cienfuegos (TIME, Sept. 16), once dissident officers are for the moment behaving themselves. Uncertain how to turn the stalemate into a victory, the rebels demand that the U.S. cut off arms to Batista-a move which they think would be a powerful enough blow to the army's morale to bring the dictator down...
...alternative is cooperating with Batista in the election that he has set for June1. To this idea, rebels of every coloring snap one answer: "We will not deal with a gangster for our country." They will stick with Castro, who may become the brilliant liberator that his young followers see, or only, as one older rebel worried last week, "a man on horseback." It was not lost on thoughtful Cubans last week that Colonel Fermin Cowley, murdered by the rebels and mourned by Batista, was an idealistic young rebel himself 25 years...