The Scolding Hero

"Announcement!" shouted Rebel Major Humberto Sori Marin from the concrete arena of the Havana Sports Palace. "This man is being tried for murder and robbery." The crowd of 15,000 roared its approval. "And he is an assassin," added Sori Marin, chief of the three-man panel charged with deciding guilt or innocence. "You know what the sentiments of Fidel Castro are about this trial," he said, and thoughtfully told the spectators: "Do not throw pop bottles."

Thus one night last week began Fidel Castro's showpiece trial, first of a planned 1,000 trials in the Havana area, for a captured underling of exiled Dictator Fulgencio Batista. The defendant was Captain Jesus Sosa Blanco, 51, a brutal killer who commanded the Batista garrison at Holguin. Charged by Rebel Prosecutor Jorge Serguera with 56 murders, he faced certain conviction. He faced it with flair.

"Kill Him! Kill Him!" Dressed in a blue denim prison jacket, Sosa Blanco grinned at the crowd. He raised his manacled hands, postured like the villain of a rigged wrestling match. The mob yelled, "Kill him! Kill him!" "This is the Colosseum in Rome," jeered Sosa Blanco, when he got a turn at the microphone. "I met brave rebels in the mountains, not types like you here. All you do is talk."

All night long the trial went on; 45 witnesses offered facts, hearsay, gossip. "This is the worst criminal in the world!" screamed Maria Jacinta Galvez Martinez. "He killed every member of the Argote family -my neighbors." Argelio Argote, 12, confirmed that Sosa Blanco "came and took my father away." A wrinkled woman named Tomasa Batista Castillo fought to get at the prisoner: "I begged you not to kill my husband, because of our eleven children. You said the rebels could raise them." A soldier of Sosa Blanco's said calmly that he had seen the prisoner shoot 17 defenseless farmers.

Sosa Blanco's lawyer, a regular army attorney who had been cleared by the rebels of any Batista ties and appointed just before the trial began, pleaded eloquently for calm justice. He argued that there was no death penalty in Cuba when the crimes took place, that Captain Sosa Blanco was a soldier serving under orders in a civil war. He had not a single witness to call. At dawn, after 13 hours and when the crowd had thinned to 500, the tribunal returned the verdict: death. But the court agreed to hear an appeal, and the execution was put off until this week.

Bad Notices. Most of the 350 foreign newsmen, brought to Cuba by Castro for the show, filed shocked reports. They were unaccustomed to the normal standards of Cuban jurisprudence, which permits trials by a panel of judges instead of a jury, admission of hearsay evidence. But they indignantly faulted the trials for the open prejudice of the judges, the popcorn-munching atmosphere, the haste, the catering to the mob's thirst for blood. Cracked one reporter: "Where do the lions come in?" Castro's bad press notices mounted, from Buenos Aires, Rio, Lima, Bogota, Mexico City. "The laurels have been soiled by blood," said Bogota's respected El Tiempo. U.S. opinion was sharply critical, with the notable exceptions of Democratic Congressmen Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (N.Y.) and Charles Porter (Ore.) who journeyed to Cuba at Castro's urging and proclaimed that they "saw no evidence of injustice."

Stream of Consciousness. The man behind the show executions reacted with petulance, incomprehension, irrelevancies, inept concessions. Red-eyed from a cold and plain fatigue, Fidel Castro still tried to run the country from Floor 23 of the Havana Hilton Hotel; he roamed through crushing mobs of sycophants in his $100-a-day suite. The hero's soft, high-pitched voice ran on for 20 hours a day, scolding, demanding, refusing, laughing.

The stream of consciousness was mainly concerned with the unfriendly face of the world. "Criticism hurts," Castro admitted, "when coming from Mexico, which once gave me asylum" (TIME Cover, Jan. 26). But "if 20 people make a good jury, why don't thousands of people make a good jury?"

The bedroom oratory, and a speech to a mass rally of 600,000 Cubans, reached wide to justify the summary trials and executions: "They are much fairer than Niirnberg." For the present, Castro said, only Batista henchmen with more than six murders to their credit would be dealt with -"The criminals that we shoot will not number more than 400. That is more or less one criminal for each 1,000 men, women and children assassinated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

The executions did not stop, and in the canebrakes many another score was settled. In Santiago, five more losers were shot, in Matanzas five, in Cardenas six. So far at least 258 have died.

Snarled Government. While Castro was concentrating his energies on vengeance, government business got badly snarled. At the presidential palace, crowds of job-seekers and well-wishers milled about; their weapons had been methodically checked at the door with numbered metal tags. Devoid of political experience, President Manuel Urrutia, onetime judge, kept the Cabinet in all-night sessions, quibbling over petty details. "He might make a President in normal times," said one of his own assistants, "but these are not normal times." The treasury was still running on a hand-to-mouth basis, collecting $2,500,000 a day in taxes, much of it in advance. One unexpected windfall: $3,270,170 in bonds and cash, left behind in a strongbox by Batista.

Irritation grew as Castro's freewheeling ways came into the open. "What can you do with a man who disclaims responsibility and actually has all of it?" demanded a Cabinet member. "I can't even have a private interview with him. Pretty soon he's going to be really running this government or not running it at all. Privately, Prime Minister Jose Miro Cardona submitted his resignation, demanding that Castro join the Cabinet or stop dictating the show. Castro drove to Miro's home and patched things up. Castro's choice as successor "if I am killed": his brother Raul, 28, chill-eyed commander in Santiago, where 100 have been shot.

"Leader of America." At week's end, with an entourage of 35 bearded bodyguards, Castro flew off to Caracas for another spell of the mass worship he adores. Roaring over the city at 500 ft. in a Super Constellation, Castro broadcast his excited impressions over a hookup linking the plane's transmitter to Radio Continente in Caracas: "I am speechless from the panorama. As we fly over the mountains I get the impression that I am in the Sierra Maestra." Venezuelans, who loyally supported the Castro cause during the long fight against the tyrant Batista, yelled their cheers.

His eyes glazed and happy, Castro found 100,000 people waiting in the main plaza, received the title "Illustrious Son of Caracas." "If you call yourself the leader of America," said Wolfgang Larrazabal, who was Venezuela's President all last year, "I am ready to recognize you as such." Castro, whose ego is easily big enough to include the hemisphere, said that Cuba, unlike Venezuela, had won a "true revolution," disintegrating the army and punishing the guilty. He seemed ready to play spiritual leader to similar upheavals all over Latin America.

He pulled out all the old crowd-pleasers that were growing a bit jaded back home. He called the world press coverage of the executions "the most criminal, vile and cowardly campaign ever conducted against any people." At the Havana Hilton, Floor 23 emptied, the elevators and switchboards began running smoothly again. For a few hours there was peace in Cuba.

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