It happened on the morning of October 2.

First a few shots were fired by officers inside the hotel, then the shooting became general. Within a few seconds the Battle of the Hotel Nacional, one of the bloodiest and most spectacular of the whole revolutionary period, was in full swing.

The firing started about six o'clock in the morning and it came from all four sides of the hotel.

There are a number of versions as to what precipitated the battle, the most common one being that an officer opened fire on a group of enlisted men unloading a truck of food at the hotel. Certainly the most authentic story ought to be that of Batista himself. Here is his version, in his own words.

"Very early on the morning of October 2, 1 decided to send two messengers into the hotel to invite the officers to leave the place, guaranteeing them the full protection of a regiment of cavalry under the command of Captain Ignacio Galíndez. I had formed the troops in a semicircle around the hotel. The circle would be completed with the installation of the Staff Command (Batista's headquarters), which was in the Alfaro Garage, about five hundred meters from the building. When sending our messengers to the hotel, we presumed that the officers would reply, either with an acceptance of the invitation or by sending us a counterproposal. The messengers moved along the shrubbery and rocks surrounding the hotel, but, as they neared the main porch, the officers opened fire on them and they had to flee for their lives. The war was on. We were caught by surprise. At the time, I was making an inspection of the troops with my aides, Captains Ferrer and García Pedroso. We were inspecting a machine-gun nest in front of, and just east of, the hotel when the outbreak came. The men in this post were exposed to the fire from the hotel and they were soon to become casualties."

That is Batista's own story as to how the fighting started at the Hotel Nacional.

At the time of the battle I lived in the center of Havana. We bad worked late in the AP office the night before and I was a bit disturbed when the phone at my bedside rang at six o'clock in the morning. It was an employee of the apartment hotel in which I lived, telling me that shots were being fired near the Hotel Nacional, some fifteen blocks away. I went to the roof immediately and saw the Cuban gunboat, Patria, steaming along in the gulf, directly toward the open sea in front of the Hotel Nacional. The firing was becoming heavier, and, after calling the AP staff members by telephone, I set out for the battleground. We had heard before that when the Battle of the Hotel Nacional started, it would be the beginning of a general revolution. The rumors said that the hotel battle would be geared to a schedule, and that once the fighting started, a group of ABC revolutionaries would move into the area and attack the Batista forces from the rear. It would have been a nice military maneuver bad it materialized, but it didn't come off. The ABC forces failed to show up.

It was a misty morning, in contrast to the usual sunny days in Havana, and it seemed a bit unrealistic. Havana is one of the most beautiful cities in the Western Hemisphere, and the Malecón, the sea drive along the Gulf of Mexico, is one of the prettiest avenues in the world. How could such a thing happen in such beautiful surroundings? Wars are fought on battlefields, I told myself--this couldn't happen in Havana. But as I neared the hotel, I changed my mind. The bodies of a half-dozen soldiers were sprawled in the street near the famous monument to the United States battleship Maine, and litter-bearers were running through gunfire, picking up the wounded. An emergency station had been set up in an office building a half block from the hotel and white-uniformed nurses were giving aid to the first victims of the battle. As I moved out of the emergency station in the direction of the hotel, I was stopped by soldiers and told to take shelter. The fire from the hotel was increasing and the marksmanship of the officers was deadly. I stood behind a pillar in front of the office building and watched the battle. It was a real fight, with real bullets, and men were falling all along the street in front of the hotel. In a vacant lot just east of the hotel, some thirty machine gunners had established a position. Within minutes, half of them were dead. This was the emplacement Batista was inspecting when the firing started, and as his car moved back toward staff headquarters, it was pierced from end to end by 30-caliber bullets. Batista and his aides miraculously escaped injury.

After about an hour I returned to the center of Havana to check with the American Embassy but found no one on duty there save a couple of Cuban police guards. They were trying to answer the telephone calls from excited Americans. I answered one telephone and was told by the caller that an American residing in the López Serrano Apartments, near the Hotel Nacional, had been killed. I checked for details and filed the story. The dead American was Robert Lotspicht, manager of the Swift & Company plant in Havana. He had stepped out on his balcony to watch the battle and was hit by a stray bullet. He was the only American banned during the conflict. After assigning reporters to cover the fighting on the four sides of the hotel, I returned to my post on the Malecón, accompanied by José Villalta, one of the stars of the AP staff. By this time, the enlisted men's army, led by Batista, had drawn up the light artillery. Shells were whizzing through the hotel building and dropping into the sea in front of the hotel. Artillerymen had established their base on the land side of the hotel on a high bluff and were firing point-blank at the hotel. The little gunboat Patria, wallowing in rough seas, was having trouble with her aim. From his hillside headquarters Batista, in his shirt sleeves, directed the fight against the officers. He was calm and seemed quite distressed by the whole thing. I thought, when I saw him, that he would have gone to almost any end to avoid fighting the officers, the men who until recently had been his commanding officers. But he had no choice, and he directed the campaign like a man who had a job to do-and was doing it well. He has told me on several later occasions that that bloody October 2 was one of the saddest days he has ever lived.

Shortly after the firing started, a group of men of the Corps of Engineers started toward the hotel in an armored truck in an effort to reach the porch. They had little protection other than the armor on the trucks, and they ran into heavy fire from the officers inside the hotel. Several were killed and most of the others wounded. The officers were fighting in earnest. Batista tried once more to bring the battle to an end. He ordered his men to hold their fire and then told his aide, Captain García Pedroso, to flourish a white flag and proceed on foot toward the hotel in an attempt to arrange a peaceful settlement. But as the Captain neared the hotel, the officers shot at him and be was forced to retreat.

Firing increased with each passing minute and it seemed that the whole area around the hotel would be blasted into bits. The officers, barricaded behind the shuttered windows of the hotel, had a distinct advantage over the enlisted men, who were compelled to expose themselves in order to fire back at the officers. Now and then an officer would step in front of an open window and the enlisted men's machine(run fire would cut him down. Meanwhile, the whole neighborhood, one of the most important residential areas of flavana, was in an uproar. The outbreak had come without warning and the civilian residents were trapped in their homes and apartments. Bullets peppered the outside walls of their homes and the panic heightened. Red Cross officials and members of the United States Embassy Staff were desperately trying to arrange a truce, a cease-fire order which would allow the Red Cross to evacuate the civilians in the area. Finally, about noon, a one-hour truce was arranged and Red Cross ambulances and other vehicles, some sent by the American Embassy, started the work of removing the civilians. It was a welcome break, although the quiet period seemed awfully short. Most of the newspapermen took time out for coffee and for filing fresh stories to their New York offices. Ambulances and buses hurried in and out of the area as though the end of the world were only an hour away.

When the truce was agreed upon, two representatives of the Red Cross came to Batista's headquarters and asked permission to go into the hotel to attend the wounded. Batista agreed and thanked them. As they prepared to go into the hotel, Batista took a piece of paper from his shirt pocket, scribbled a note, and handed it to one of the Red Cross representatives. It was addressed to Colonels Sanguily and Ferrer, ranking officers inside the hotel. The note read: "We have declared a truce, which will continue until the return of Victor Mendoza of the Red Cross, who has gone to the hotel on an errand of mercy. We propose the following basis for the terminating of the war declared this morning by the occupants of the hotel.

"One: Immediate cessation of the warlike attitude. Exit of the officers in groups of five, at ten-minute intervals, completely unarmed and in the status of men under arrest.

"Two: On our part, we will guarantee respect for the lives of the officers in order to end this deplorable situation, in the name of the Republic of Cuba."

The letter was signed: "Fulgencio Batista, Chief of the Revolutionary Army."

The Red Cross representative brought word that the officers wanted an extension of the truce until three o'clock in order to give Batista's offer further consideration. Batista agreed. But shortly before three o'clock the officers opened fire again and the shooting seemed to be more intense. Perhaps the comparative quiet of the truce made it seem that way. The artillery, the 3-inch guns, opened up again and gaping holes appeared in the stuccoed walls of the hotel. The aim was good. Windows, frames and all, were blown out of the hotel by shellfire and the bodies of dead men were everywhere. American correspondents in the midst of the fighting were having trouble. Dick Armstrong of the International News Service was nicked by a piece of cement which had been shot from the pillar of a nearby building he was using as a shelter. Tom Pettey of the New York Herald Tribune made the mistake of establishing his observation post in an abandoned apartment building near the hotel. He had hardly settled down to his job of watching the battle when officers in the hotel opened fire on the building. Great chunks of plaster dropped on Pettey's head, and he spent the rest of the time flat on his stomach, just out of the range of the bullets.

At about four o'clock in the afternoon, with more than a hundred dead in the streets around the hotel, the officers inside decided to call it off. At least they indicated that desire by hoisting a white bed sheet on the hotel roof. This was the moment all the newspapermen had been waiting for. Now they could get inside the hotel and count the dead and wounded. Villalta, my companion, and I decided to go into the hotel from the ocean side. We moved along the Malecón afoot and almost succeeded in reaching the entrance to the hotel grounds. But a group of excited cavalrymen had different plans for us. Riding up on horses, swinging machetes, they ordered us out of the area. They warned us that the white flag on the hotel roof was a trick, not a truce. The officers, these soldiers said, would open fire again once the soldiers moved in closer to the hotel. And they were right, as it turned out.

Villalta and I returned to the office building where we had been stationed, found a young lieutenant, and asked him for a pass to let us get into the hotel. He told us that we could take the chance if we wanted to but that we'd have to have an infantryman accompany us. We made a quick deal with a soldier and started back to the hotel, accompanied by the soldier. After we had gone a short distance a civilian, well dressed and quite agitated, came up to us and pleaded with us to take him along with us. He said his brother was among the officers in the hotel and he had to get in. We agreed to take him, and the three of us, as well as the soldier started up the hill toward the hotel. Suddenly, an officer armed with a submachine gun jumped out on a balcony of the hotel and started shooting. Whether he meant to kill only the soldier who was with us or whether he thought we were part of the enemy force we never knew. His fire struck the civilian we had helped, and he fell dead at our feet.

This was the signal for renewed firing on all sides, and the area was thrown into the wildest kind of panic. Villalta and I managed to escape to safer ground but some of those around us failed to make it. It was the sort of experience one never forgets. The second outbreak lasted only a few minutes. Apparently a few die-hard officers had decided to break the rules of truce and kill a few more enlisted men. But the majority of the officers were ready to quit. Enlisted men led small groups of captured officers out of the hotel and lined them up to await transportation to La Cabana Fortress.

A few minutes after the firing ceased, Lieutenant Belisario Hernández, who had been charged by Batista with the responsibility of protecting Colonels Sanguily and Ferrer, brought the two officers out of the hotel. Sanguily, who had served as Chief of Staff of the Army prior to the Revolt of the Sergeants, saw Batista and shouted to him: "We want to talk to you." These were the officers who for weeks had refused to discuss anything with Batista because, they said, he was a mutinous sergeant. Batista was in no mood for conferences. "This is no time for discussion," he replied, "this is a dangerous moment. Lieutenant, take the officers to La Cabaña without delay." It was the first time Batista had ever refused to talk to his former superiors, and we asked him why he had answered so sharply. "I wanted to spare them from possible reprisals," he told us. "Excitement was rampant at the moment, and these two officers obviously were the leaders of the action which turned the white revolution of September 4 into the blood-red revolution of October 2. When Sanguily called to me he was only a few feet from a number of enlisted men, who were understandably angry and upset. They had seen their comrades shot like pigeons. That was not the moment for a conference with Sanguily and I sent him to a safer place."

Later on, several persons claimed they had seen several officers shot after they were captured and lined up outside the hotel. There was a great deal of confusion at that time, and I doubt that anyone could say exactly what happened. I am sure, however, that several enlisted men and one or two officers were killed by the fire from both sides after the officers had violated the white flag of surrender. I am sure because I saw them killed.

A few small disturbances occurred in other sections of the city during the hour following the surrender, and terrorists kept Havana awake with sporadic shooting all during the night. But the Battle of the Hotel Nacional was over. It had been a violent, thoroughly unnecessary battle in which neither side was the victor. More than two hundred Cubans, most of them enlisted men of the Army, had died to prove nothing at all. It made some five hundred foolish officers look even more foolish and eliminated forever their chance of returning to their careers as military men. From that day on, the deposed officers were never a factor in Cuban life. They became the forgotten men of the revolution. A few of them were tried for their misconduct, but most of them were scolded, told to behave themselves, and sent home.

It is difficult to realize now, as I sit in the shadow of the Hotel Nacional and write these lines, that this beautiful spot was once a bloody battleground. Today the hotel gardens are a mass of tropical flowers. One day twenty years ago they were littered with dead men. The holes in the hotel's walls-torn out by screaming artillery shells two decades ago-have been patched and painted, and a new generation of Cubans has grown up. Time has removed all visible marks. But those who lived through the misty morning of October 2, 1933, will never forget the deadly fury of the Battle of the Hotel Nacional de Cuba.