Strongman's Round

Cuba's fanatic, poorly armed rebels last week tried to smash President Fulgencio Batista with the ultimate weapon of civilian revolutions: the general strike. But Batista, a tough, wilier strongman than such fallen dictators as Argentina's Peron or Venezuela's Perez Jimenez, saw the blow coming, prepared well, warded it off with hardly a bruise.

Fulgencio Batista got ready for the strike by offering immunity to anyone who killed a striker and by threatening to jail any employer who closed shop. He marshaled 4,000 soldiers. His labor lieutenant, Eusebio Mujal, Hoffa-style boss of the 1,200,000-member Cuban Labor Federation, ordered workers to stay on their jobs or lose them for good. Playing the genial host to U.S. newsmen (see PRESS) at a party three days before the strike, Batista said, half in joke and half in earnest: "We'll soon see how hard it is to make this dictator fall!"

When Rebel Fidel Castro's men called the strike, it turned out to be a classic of disorganization. Batista easily quelled it with units of the crack, 7,000-man National Police alone, and the cops went on to a brutal and exemplary mop-up. The effect was to cripple, perhaps for a long time, the general-strike psychology--the emotional willingness of soft-hooded amateurs to go up against the hardhanded professionals.

On the Waterfront. Batista, 57, who customarily works until 5 a.m., had just awakened at 11 a.m. on the day of the strike. At that moment, rebels grabbed a pair of Havana radio stations long enough to put out the call. "This is the final blow against the dictatorship," said the rebels' Communique No. 1.

Rebels in a truck looted a waterfront gunshop; police attacked, and the day's main battle, an hour-long fire fight, followed. At noon an explosion blasted a hole on the famed, tree-lined Prado, setting a gas-main fire that burned with 30-ft. flames until late at night. Youths in cars threw bombs; power and phones went out in parts of the city. Some workers walked off their jobs in banks and stores. But by 12:30 an eerie silence hinted that the strike was failing.

Failing it was. The rebels' vaunted, 5,000-man Havana underground stayed mostly underground; at week's end one disgruntled group of rebel commanders denounced Castro's Havana lieutenant, Faustino Perez, 35, as a "traitor" who refused to order the terrorist attack that was vital to make the strike work.

With the upper hand, Batista drove boldly around the city while his cops proceeded to make their supremacy complete. When a patrol car radioed that it had clashed with rebels and had "a dead man and a prisoner," the dispatcher ordered: "Shoot him." At midafternoon, cops burst into a boardinghouse, grabbed three young men who were leaders of Cuba's lay Catholic Action movement, which sympathizes with Castro. Two hours later their stripped, tortured and bullet-torn bodies were turned over to relatives. Total dead: 43.

Next day at noon Batista, dressed in a bathrobe, sipped weak coffee, kissed off the suppression as "a police action." Later he said: "I have enemies, of course, but I am sure the masses are with me. I am a man of deep faith; I believe in God."

In Rebel Country. At the other end of the island, in Santiago, the strike, though more effective, was suppressed with equal resolution and bloodshed; 38 were killed. But even as the strike was failing, Castro's irregulars in the rugged Sierra Maestra were fighting on. Nipping down to El Cobre the day after the frustrated strike, Castro men grabbed the town, ranged the streets, and upon pulling out touched off the 30-ton dynamite stock of a construction-supply company. The thunderous explosion shattered windows in Santiago ten miles away.

Batista is wary of heavy casualties in moving against these raiders in their mountain fortress, so far plans a "longterm" campaign to keep them surrounded and wear them down when they come into the open. He has also offered $100,000 for the "head of Fidel Castro." But though he must face a nagging stalemate, in winning last week's round Batista cost the rebels heavily in dynamism and morale. A new general-strike attempt will be harder to mount than the foiled try--particularly bucking the prosperity of Cuba's current $2 billion-a-year national income. And Castro, never well armed, is suffering so badly from shortage of guns and ammunition that last week he denounced his principal backer, rich ex-President Carlos Prio, for "living in luxury in Miami" while the rebels eat roots and wait in vain for arms.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.