Unfortunately, the Revolt of the Sergeants and the establishment of a provisional government did not solve all Cuba's political problems. There was a lessening in the public disorders, but the island was still in trouble in the fall of 1933. The road back to peace was a long one, and outside of the Army, Batista had only a handful of civilians willing to follow him.

On September 10, the five-man civilian junta, which had been directing affairs of the government, named Dr. Grau San Martín to the post of Provisional President of the Republic. The junta itself was established a few hours after the Revolt of the Sergeants had triumphed on September 4. But after trying the junta system for a few days, it was decided to go to the presidential form of government. Grau San Martín, a politically inexperienced professor at the University of Havana, had the support of the Student Directorate, which purported to represent the student body at the university. But the Student Directorate did not have the support of the old-line politicians, who regarded the youngsters as hitchhikers, who had just managed to get on the Batista band wagon at the very last minute.

In general, however, the situation throughout the island was somewhat improved. The odd combination of Batista and Grau San Martín-the backwoods Sergeant and the erudite professor-was making some progress in its efforts to set the country on a course toward political stability. But the terrorists were still around. Groups of youths who called themselves revolutionaries carried on a campaign of terror that kept the people of Cuba upset for many months. The favorite weapon of the terrorists was the bomb, and they were exploded by the dozens, night after night, resulting in many deaths and injuries and great property damage.

These days were among the most trying ones Fulgencio Batista had ever lived through. The circumstances which placed him in complete control of the island came without warning. He had never, during all the days of his life, even during the days and nights he planned the revolution, thought that he would suddenly find himself in complete command of his country. As a matter of fact, his whole plan of insurrection was based on the delivery of the power to a civilian group once the revolt succeeded. Batista had even believed he would be able to return to the ranks as a sergeant after the revolution. But it didn't turn out that way. When the commissioned officers of the Army refused to reenter the service and undertake the task of reorganizing the Armed Forces, the responsibility fell to Batista. And when the civilians who had supported Batista could not get the backing of the various political factions in forming a solid government, Batista had to take the responsibility for most of the functions of government.

Sumner Welles in his book, The Time for Decision, acknowledged the fact that the Revolt of the Sergeants in September, 1933, "was not intended primarily to overthrow the Céspedes government." Welles, whose book was published in 1944, evidently bad changed his opinion of Batista in the eleven years following the Revolt of the Sergeants, because he described Batista as an "extraordinarily brilliant figure." Welles said that a "handful of political figures of secondary importance" associated themselves with the movement "in the last stages of the conspiracy."

But even though the task of taking over the administration of his country's government must have caused Batista a great deal of concern, he assumed the responsibilities with a determination to do the best he could. He knew be would have to resort to improvisation at times, but he had improvised before, in the planning and directing of the revolution, and he went to work. For weeks on end he put in twenty-hour days, studying each problem as it came up, making decisions and hoping they were good ones. He had little help and be must have felt very, very lonely at times. Most Cuban statesmen and politicians had withheld assistance to Batista and the government which was created after the revolution. This snobbishness was carried to a ridiculous point just after Batista came into power in 1933. The Colonel, after many days and nights of hard work, went one night if a few friends to have dinner at Sans Souci Restaurant, on the outskirts of Havana. The place was a favorite of Havana society and they were there in great numbers on the night of Batista's visit. When Batista's party was recognized, the society folk committed one of the greatest acts of mass bad manners ever seen in Cuba or anywhere else. They walked out of the restaurant as a protest against the presence of Batista. But it did no harm to Batista. Cubans, as a whole, detest bad manners, and the good people of Havana were outspoken in their censure of the small group of misguided compatriots who had participated in the stupid demonstration. Not long after the Sans Souci incident a great many of Havana's "best people" were delighted to be known as friends of Batista.

Meanwhile, Batista knew that sooner or later the problem at Hotel Nacional would have to be solved. Here was a serious threat to Batista's efforts to restore public order and it worried him. Several hundred disgruntled former officers of the Army had moved into the hotel on September 8. They were in an angry mood because they had been ousted from their jobs four days before by the Batista coup d'etat. They had ignored Batista's request that they go to their homes to await reorganization of the Army and they apparently meant to stage a sit-down strike against the Batista-Grau regime. it was not a very soldierly protest from a group of men who were supposed to be the class of the officer corps.

The conduct of the officers during and after the Revolt of the Sergeants was indeed strange. They had done nothing to defend their cause when they might have had a chance to defeat the sergeants, they refused to take command when Batista offered it to them, and they had now locked themselves in a hotel, apparently to do nothing more than commiserate with themselves. The conduct of the officers worried Batista. Many of them were his old chiefs and he had a soldier's respect for them. He had hoped the worthy ones among them would offer their services to the country and assist in the reorganization of the Armed Forces. But out of a total of around a thousand officers in the Armed Services, less than thirty supported Batista after the Revolt of the Sergeants, and all of them were officers who had risen from the enlisted ranks.

We talked to Batista during the early days of the officers' sit-down strike in the hotel and he outlined the situation which prevailed in the Army prior to the revolution, a situation to which some of those very officers had contributed.

"The system of life for an enlisted man in the Army prior to September 4 was deplorable, he said. "The laws, the regulations, and the orders were, of themselves, extremely Severe, but we accepted them because their fundamental purpose was to maintain discipline. But the application of the laws and regulations by the officers was rigorous to the extreme. The personal treatment the soldier received was crude, to say the least, and he was inadequately housed, fed, and clothed. The fear in which these men lived created a mass inferiority complex among them and they moved in a miserable little world of their own. Prior to September 4, an enlisted man could not sit in a box or in the orchestra in a theater. Nor could an enlisted man travel first class on a train or remain in a public place if a commissioned officer appeared. These depressing conditions caused the enlisted man to feel like the 'forgotten man, the last card in the deck,' and the feeling finally crept into the ranks of the junior commissioned officers, who had regular contact with the soldiers."

Batista said that as early as 1928, when the resentment against Machado reached its peak, some of the high officers, including Colonels Julio Sanguily and Horacio Ferrer, had considered using the discontent among the junior officers and the enlisted men as a means of inciting rebellion against Machado. But the plan never got off the ground. Neither the junior officers nor the enlisted men were interested in risking their lives for the high-ranking officers with no guarantees that their own conditions would be improved. Speaking of the Sanguily-Ferrer plan for revolt, Batista said: "If a revolution among enlisted men is to triumph, the leaders must merit the faith of the men, and they must inspire them. They must also make firm promises to the soldier that there will be new policies in government and in the armed forces. The high officers in the Army in the days before September 4 were, with a few notable exceptions, completely indifferent to the lot of the lower echelon officers and the men of the line."

What the officers had hoped to accomplish by the maneuver which sent them into the Hotel Nacional on September 8 was not very evident. They even apologized, in a way, for taking such a stand by claiming that they had been invited by Ambassador Welles to take refuge in the place. Welles made his residence in the hotel at the time and apparently the officers felt that the whole building would enjoy some sort of extraterritorial rights because of Welles' presence there. Welles had not invited the officers into the hotel, and what extraterritorial rights the hotel enjoyed applied only to the apartment occupied by the Ambassador. When Welles moved out of the place, four days after the officers had moved in, the cry went up that Welles had abandoned the officers. These claims angered Welles because they were entirely false. Welles had nothing to do with the officers' decision to go into the Nacional, and he moved out only because all the employees of the place went on strike, thus cutting off all services. There was no reason why these officers should have felt they had to take refuge in the first place. No one had tried to harm them after they were relieved of their army posts, and Batista himself bad provided protection for them. A number of the officers who made their stand in the Hotel Nacional were friends of Batista. He had served under them as an enlisted man and he bad no desire to hurt them. Nevertheless, some five hundred of them settled down in the hotel, pretty much like little boys pouting over an act of parental discipline. When all employees of the hotel moved out, the officers were forced to look after themselves. This must have come hard to some of them. The sight of colonels and majors peeling potatoes and washing dishes was not a very pretty spectacle.

A few days after the officers moved in, and after it became known that friends and relatives were smuggling arms and munitions into the hotel, Batista posted an army guard around the property. He then invited the officers to leave the hotel in small groups and return to their homes. He promised them safe-conduct and assured them that the worthy officers among them would be restored to their positions in the reorganized Army. The officers rejected the invitation. They would not, they said, negotiate or treat in any way with a mutinous sergeant. Batista, still trying to avoid trouble, allowed friends of the officers to send food into the hotel.

As the days passed, and the arms smuggling continued, the whole Hotel Nacional affair became somewhat of a public nuisance. Tension increased inside and outside the hotel, and it became necessary to divert all traffic from the area. Residents of the thickly populated Miramar and Vedado residential areas were compelled to detour around the hotel in going to and from Havana. Almost everyone grew tired of this unglamorous sit-down protest, and some elements urged Batista to cut off the water supply in order to force the officers to leave the building. Batista refused, on the grounds that it would be inhuman to deny the officers water and food.

Batista had tried, through the good offices of several prominent foreign diplomats, to solve the problem of the Hotel Nacional by conciliatory methods, but the officers rejected all suggested solutions. One commission which spent considerable effort trying to persuade the officers to leave the hotel was headed by the Spanish Ambassador, Don Luciano López Ferrer, dean of the Diplomatic Corps. Another group of negotiators, including Dr. Carlos Saladrigas, Dr. Domingo Ramos, Lucilo de la Peña, and Aurelio Alvarez, met with rebuff when they tried to negotiate with the officers. Still later, a committee of Rotarians, composed of Dr. Luis Machado, Dr. Félix Granados, and Dr. José Pérez Cubillas, all outstanding civic leaders, tried and failed to impress the officers with the importance of avoiding open warfare.

Batista told me later that when all these efforts failed and when it became more and more apparent that nothing good could result from the absurd protest by the officers, his patience was near the breaking point. On September 30, Batista received word that the officers had made a pact with the ABC revolutionary society for a military movement against the Grau government, and this added to the feeling again, the officers in the hotel. Furthermore, the enlisted men who had been placed as a guard around the hotel had been insulted and actually pushed around by some of the officers. The only reason the enlisted men did not fight back was the fact that they were under orders from Batista to avoid provoking an outbreak. With each passing day the tension increased and it appeared obvious that Cuba was in for more trouble.