End of a War

The face of dictatorship in Cuba was the padlock on Havana University, the bodies dumped on street corners by casual police terrorists, the arrogant functionaries gathering fortunes from gambling, prostitution and a leaky public till. In disgust and shame, a nervy band of rural guerrillas, aided by angry Havana professional men (plus opportunists with assorted motives), started a bloody civil war that cost more than $100 million and took 8,000 lives. Last week they smashed General Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship.

Batista's end came on New Year's Eve. As he and his fellow crooks rode in a line of black Cadillacs to the army's Camp Columbia, outside Havana, for the usual New Year's Eve dinner, they did not smile. They knew that the jig, as well as the year, was up. "For the salvation of the republic," announced General Eulogio Cantillo at the end of a gloomy meal, "the military forces have decided that it is necessary for General Batista to withdraw from power."

For the record, Batista protested: "I will not leave without handing over power." A suitable stand-in President was hastily found. Then Batista and his bemedaled generals and Cabinet ministers abandoned manners and moved to airplanes drawn up at Camp Columbia field. The regime and its followers thereupon bugged out, some 500 strong, as fast as planes and ships would bear them.

Batista himself wound up in the Dominican Republic with his wife and one son, his other seven children in New Orleans, Jacksonville and New York. As the news broke across Havana in the early dawn, citizens put on the arm bands of the rebel 26th of July movement and tumbled into the streets, firing pistols and Tommy guns in riotous joy.

To Start, 81. At the end, Batista, who dominated Cuba off and on since 1933, looked like any tin-pot dictator funking out to save his health and--especially--his chips. The 1956 invasion of just 81 men under Rebel Chieftain Fidel Castro. 32, had grown to take over an island of 6,500,000 with a yearly national income of more than $2 billion from sugar, cattle, tobacco, minerals, tourists.

When Castro's seasick invaders fought past army patrols from a marshy beachhead to mountain hideouts two years ago, their extinction seemed certain. All that was needed from Batista's army, 21,000 strong and well armed, was the simple nerve required to go in and flush them out. The army tried terror instead of courage; it tortured suspects, shipped the dismembered bodies of students home to their mothers. Result: a flood of arms and recruits for Castro.

The peasant and student army crept from the Sierra Maestra on the southeastern coast to the Sierra del Cristal 100 miles east, then to the foothills, avoiding decisive battle while the muscle grew. Three weeks ago, with rebels holding most of rural Oriente province and total rebel strength up to 8,500, Major Ernesto ("Che") Guevara launched the offensive in Las Villas, 150 miles from Havana.

At that point, Cuban Prime Minister Gonzalo Guell dropped in secretly on Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, got ready promises of a refuge for Batista and his cohorts. In fierce street fighting that killed 60, Guevara whipped a dispirited army garrison of 3,000 men and took Santa Clara (pop. 150,000), the rebels' first big city. A trainload of 150 troops sent by Batista refused even to get out of the railroad cars. Batista was through.

The Scramble. In the dictator's final scramble for safety, ferries, yachts, airliners and private planes were jammed. One Cubana Airlines pilot, at gunpoint, flew 92 refugees to New York just before armed civilians seized the Havana airport. To the Dominican Republic, besides Batista, went Andres Rivero Aguero, Batista's puppet President-elect, who was supposed to take office Feb. 24. (Another Ciudad Trujillo resident: Argentina's exiled Dictator Juan Peron.) The Jacksonville club included national Police Chief Pilar Garcia, worst of the terrorists, and Army Chief of Staff Francisco Tabernilla, whose unseemly wealth from import privileges led Cubans to dub Scotch whisky "Old Tabernilla." U.S. Gambler Meyer Lansky, who ran the casinos in several big resort hotels in a deal with Batista, caught a chartered plane to Florida with a clutch of his top mobsters. Wherever the Batista supporters descended in the U.S., Cuban exiles turned out to hoot and jeer. Other exiles hired planes for the happy trip back home.

Seldom had a government been so thoroughly housecleaned between midnight and dawn. But to Castro, flushed with victory, the exodus was a bitter cheat. Arriving in Santiago, he took the big (5,000-man) Moncada fortress from the surrendering army without firing a shot, declared Santiago the provisional capital of Cuba as reward for its support. In Las Villas, ruthless, Red-loving Che Guevara executed the last Batista holdouts.

In Havana, the celebration was on. Thousands of girls paraded about dressed in red and black, the rebel colors; cheering students roamed through Havana University; rioters wrecked two newspaper offices, sacked gambling casinos and dozens of homes of Batista supporters.

Holdouts. Batista's lesser cops, in no position to flee, fought on. Radio and television stations chattered out the prowl-car numbers of known killer cops, and the rebels tracked them down. By the next dawn, rebel blockaders had trapped at least four police cars and gunned the occupants dead. Rebels besieged police snipers, fought confused night battles among themselves. For three days and nights, bullets whined in Central Park, in downtown office buildings, in suburban Vedado. An estimated 40 persons died.

Gradually, order returned. Surviving policemen joined forces with the rebels, and rebel guards took over at Camp Columbia. Prisons in Havana and on the Isle of Pines were emptied of hundreds of political prisoners. Some 500 U.S. vacationers made their way out safely aboard the ferry, City of Havana, with rebels carrying their luggage. Other tourists slept in hotel lobbies, guarded by armed bellhops wearing July 26 arm bands. Che Guevara led 600 of his bearded mountain warriors into Havana and bedded them down on the parquet floors of the ballroom of the Havana Hilton Hotel.

New Government. From Santiago, Castro proclaimed Judge Manuel Urrutia President of Cuba. Urrutia in turn named Castro head of the armed forces and appointed a Cabinet of rebel professors, doctors and lawyers, including one man called the Minister in Charge of Recovering Stolen Government Property. Castro will doubtless be the biggest voice in the land for some time to come, and he gave signs of capricious temper. On his orders, Havana was closed down until early this week by a pointless general strike that cut food supplies and kept nerves on edge.

This week bearded Fidel Castro was moving at the head of his irregulars toward Havana, getting tumultuous welcomes from every town. His movement would have to reorganize Cuba and try to run its government; he promised that the rebels would permit the harvesting of the vital sugar crop and restore constitutional rights. But he would not personally run the show, he said. "Power does not interest me, and I will not take it," he vowed. "From now on, the people are entirely free, and our people know how to comport themselves properly."

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