A Sergeant Named Batista

Chapter 21

During the four years of Batista's first administration as President-from 1940 to 1944-he served the nation well, and he was particularly successful in his efforts to provide the nation with more and better health and school facilities.

Immediately after he was inaugurated, he took steps to guarantee the complete freedom of press, freedom of speech, freedom of religious worship, the right of free assembly, and all the other normal freedoms of a democratic people.

He was especially interested in public health, and once established in the Presidency, he was able to amplify and accelerate the health program he had inaugurated as Chief of the Armed Forces.

As a boy be had seen many cases of extreme suffering which had been brought about by the lack of adequate and appropriate medical attention. In some cases the result of this negligence was death. In his boyhood days in the cane fields of Oriente Province, the workers had had a difficult time fighting off diseases which were the result of malnutrition. The cane worker was certain of employment for about only five months of the year, and the problem of keeping his family and himself properly nourished during the remaining seven months was both formidable and real.

In many instances malnutrition led to tuberculosis, and Batista saw his own brother die of that disease. It is understandable, then, that upon reaching a position of power, Batista would think of doing something to improve the public health facilities of the nation.

With the help of American specialists, Batista had started an anti-tuberculosis program four years before becoming President. It was a national program, the scope of which had never been equaled in Latin America, and Batista himself aided in planning the fight against the dread disease. In 1936, be had created a National Council of Tuberculosis and made it the central body in a campaign against the disease. Funds were derived from the sale of special postage stamps and from the national lottery.

One of the first objectives was to convince the people that everyone in Cuba should submit to a chest and lung examination. Batista made a number of appeals to the public and his efforts were successful. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans appeared at hospitals and mobile clinics and had the examinations. The most spectacular feature of the campaign was the hospital building program. The plan called for the construction of a modern tuberculosis sanitarium in each of the nation's six provinces. The largest and most important of these units was to be built on Topes de Collantes, a high peak in Las Villas Province.

The first sanitarium completed and put into service was a hospital on San Juan Hill, in Oriente Province, and work was then started on the Topes de Collantes project and on similar sanitariums in the other provinces. The program moved along, and some of the buildings were completed before Batista left the Presidency. The Topes de Collantes building was almost, but not quite, completed when his term of office expired, and he had hoped his successor, President Grau San Martín, would complete the project. However, the Grau government did not complete it, and it stood abandoned for seven years, through the Grau and Prío regimes, until Batista returned to power in March of 1952. During those seven years, all of the equipment and even parts of the building were stolen. One of his first acts upon returning to the Presidency was to start the work of completing Topes de Collantes, and the work was finished in 1953.

From the very beginning of his first term, in 1940, Batista took to his presidential duties with the vigor and enthusiasm which had marked his activities since childhood. He had great hopes that the country would be able to go forward and that the turmoil and disorders of the past would never return. He had placed capable men in the key positions in the Armed Forces and he had great faith in his government. But shortly after he took the oath of office he began to hear stories of intrigue amongst his most trusted associates in the Armed Forces. The stories involved men who had moved up from the ranks of the enlisted men with him seven years before, and they sounded incredible. At first the President ignored the reports because it was difficult to believe that men who were so deeply obligated to him-men he counted among his closest friends-could be guilty of conspiring against him.

Throughout the seven years he bad been a dominant figure in Cuban life, Batista bad been honored with the hatred of some unremitting enemies. But at no time had any them been guilty of placing a low valuation on the special gifts with which he was endowed. Such an error of calculation was made, however, in the early part of 1941.

No tyrant ever invented a greater torment than envy. It first inflames the mind and then poisons the conscience. Worse than that, it also destroys, or at least distorts, the judgment of the person it afflicts, as these false friends soon found out to their utter confusion and subsequent regret.

At the beginning of 1941, a competent observer might have stated, with a great deal of justification, that after Batista, the three most important figures in the Batista regime were Colonel José E. Pedraza, Chief of the Army, Colonel Angel A. González, Chief of the Navy, and Colonel Bernardo García, Chief of the National Police Force, and therefore a subordinate of Pedraza, although a very powerful subordinate. Two of these men, Pedraza and Gonzalez, had been with Batista since the earliest days of his career. Pedraza was his closest collaborator in the days prior to September 4, 1933, when the Revolt of the Sergeants was being organized.

But this same competent observer might have failed to give sufficient weight to the fact that the Batista of 1941 was not the same as the Batista of 1933. This was no longer the emancipated Sergeant who had ridden into power on the crest of a revolutionary surge and had spent all his time trying to produce some form of order out of the chaos which followed the downfall of President Machado. The Batista of 1941 was a mature statesman who had been elected to the Presidency of the Republic, in a constitutional manner, in the fairest election that had taken place since Cuba attained its freedom. This was a former soldier living up to his promise to give the people a civilian government-a government in which the Armed Forces would be the servant rather than the master of the civilian state.

Up until that time certain departments, such as Ports, Maritime Police, and Lighthouses had been under the control of the Navy since the days of the 1933 revolution. Displeased with the way these departments were being administered, Batista ordered these functions returned to civilian hands, under the Ministry of the Treasury. A decree making provision for the changes was signed by the President, Prime Minister Carlos Saladrigas, and Defense Minister Domingo F. Ramos on January 23, 1941. His action did not, of course, please the Chief of the Navy. Meanwhile Batista had learned of certain outside "business" activities in which some of these officers were engaged and he did not like the situation.

On the night of January 31, Batista summoned the Chief of Police, Colonel García, to the Presidential Palace and called him severely to account for failure to find the persons guilty of several unsolved assassinations which had taken place in Havana. These killings had worried Batista, not only because failure to arrest the guilty parties resulted in a grave reflection being cast on his regime, but because there was an obvious indifference of the Police Chief to the commission of such crimes. In referring later to this situation, Batista said: "The Chief of Police was out of town every time the President of the Republic summoned him to ascertain what was going on. On those occasions the Chief of Police always was in Miami or Varadero (a seaside resort east of Havana) but be was not in his office." When he finally managed to catch up with García and force him to go to the Palace, Batista gave him a severe reprimand and told him be had the choice of resigning or being fired. A story was put into circulation that García had resigned because of ill health, but Batista later confirmed that he had been discharged for failure to do his duty.

This did not sit well with Colonel Pedraza, and he committed his first overt act of defiance of Batista. Although he seemed to accept the dismissal of García, Pedraza refused to allow Colonel Manuel Benítez, García's successor, to take command of the Police Force. Instead, Pedraza called all the high officers of the Police Force to headquarters and told them that from that minute on, he, Pedraza, would command the National Police as well as the Army. This action was in direct conflict with the Batista order naming Benítez to the post.

This defiance irked Batista, of course, but he was even more disturbed when he learned that Benítez, in order to avoid a conflict with Pedraza, had offered to resign to Pedraza, even though he had been named to the post by the President.

When Batista first heard of Pedraza's acts be thought it wise to remain in the Palace a day or two so that tempers could subside and thus reduce the chances of bloodshed. But shortly after talking to the police officials, Pedraza went to Camp Columbia, headquarters and seat of the greatest power of the Army. He called all high army officers before him and ordered them to sign a document in which it was charged that Batista had insulted the Armed Forces by returning certain governmental functions to the civil authorities. A group of the officers left the meeting and went straight to Batista with the document in their hands. Batista read it carefully, smiled, took a match from his desk, lighted the corner of the document, and burnt it on the tiled floor of his Palace office. As it burnt, the army officers came to attention, saluted Batista, and put themselves under his orders.

At this time the Chief of the Navy Colonel González, was having his own difficulties with Batista, not only because of the change in jurisdiction over the ports, and so forth, but because of the mysterious disappearance of a cargo of petroleum from a vessel called the Manuel Rionda. There was a great deal of contraband in Cuban ports and along the coast at that time, and Batista was particularly anxious to find out what had happened to the petroleum cargo. Attention had been directed to the Manuel Rionda when no report of it had been received for a period of twenty days. The master later declared that he had been in bad weather and had been obliged to jettison his cargo of petroleum, a story which was received with understandable incredulity.

On the night the Chief of Police was called to the Palace, Batista sent for the Chief of the Navy also. It was evident that González had not gone to this interview very willingly, because he was accompanied by two lieutenant colonels of the Army, and the general impression was that he was under arrest. When he left, after having been exposed to the scorching Batista ire, he was alone. Though he refused to make any statement, the newspapermen on duty at the Palace were certain that he had been removed from his post as Chief of the Navy and they believed that serious trouble would result.

When Pedraza went to the Palace on the afternoon of February 2, be was accompanied by several officers and thirty carloads of bodyguards, armed with submachine guns, who stationed themselves in strategic positions on the street outside the Palace. During the time Batista was talking with Pedraza, one of the officers who had accompanied the Chief of the Army remained on the balcony of the Palace and kept in touch with the man in charge of the machine gunners in the streets. It was clear that if Pedraza needed help the machine gunners were prepared to go to his aid.

Batista ordered the Palace Guard to do nothing to provoke conflict with Pedraza supporters and then prepared to receive his former comrade of the Army and hear his story. Batista spoke first: "How did you sleep last night?" There was more than a hint of sarcasm in the President's voice. "Not so well," Pedraza replied. "I was worried about all the things that have been happening these days."

The two old soldiers glared at each other. Pedraza resumed the conversation: “I want you to know," he said, "that I respect you as Chief of the State, but you must respect me as Chief of the Army." Batista's answer was brief but firm: "I will respect you if you will start behaving like a soldier." It was a case of each man trying to outmaneuver the other in this dangerous game of political poker.

Pedraza went on to say that it was his intention to command all the Armed Forces of Cuba, and he implied that it might be wise for Batista to confine his activities to the affairs of state. No one bad ever talked to Batista like that before, and it must have required all the self-restraint in his make-up to keep him from settling the difficulty with Pedraza then and there. But Pedraza was in a strong position at the moment, with his forces surrounding the Palace, ready to move on his signal.

It was Batista's turn to speak and he made the most of it. "Pedraza," be said, “I want you to think about what you've just said for twenty-four hours. Meanwhile, I'll sleep on your proposition." Pedraza fell into the trap and agreed to a twenty-four-hour delay. That was the biggest mistake he made in his plan to take over the country. He should have know that when you are playing for high stakes with Batista you may never get the chance to make the second mistake. Pedraza was defeated from the moment he agreed to the delay.

Commenting on this Pedraza-Batista interview shortly after it occurred, a high-ranking officer summed up the whole affair in one sentence: "Pedraza had the force and Batista had the brains."

Early on the morning of February 3, a large truck was driven into the Palace courtyard and soldiers were put to work filling sandbags. These were placed in position around the Palace, and machine-gun posts, protected by the sandbags, were established outside on the street comers covering the four approaches to the building. Additional arms were brought into the building, and while no statement was made as to the reason for these preparations, it was evident that a test of strength between Batista and Pedraza could be expected at any minute. In addition to the setting up of additional machine-gun posts on the Palace balconies, the antiaircraft guns on the roof also were manned. Batista was on the third floor of the building in the late afternoon and saw the gunboats Cuba and Yara, both of them stripped for action, pass through the harbor entrance and begin to maneuver some distance offshore. These vessels were waiting for orders from Colonel González, who was directing operations from La Punta, the stone fortress at the foot of Havana's famous Prado, which serves as headquarters for the Navy. The cannon of La Punta are usually trained on the harbor entrance, but now they were trained toward the Palace, only a few hundred yards away.

In the face of the inevitability of an armed clash, Batista telephoned his close friend, Colonel Francisco Tabernilla, at La Cabaña Fortress across the harbor from La Punta, and asked him for some reinforcements. Previously he had warned Tabernilla not to leave La Cabaña under any circumstances, because his enemies planned to capture and kill him on his way to the Palace. The guns of La Cabaña were now trained on La Punta and on the Police Headquarters directly across the bay. As night fell and the moment of the showdown between Batista and the revolting officers drew nearer, word was received at the Palace that the entire Police Force had been armed with machine guns and rifles and that it was this force which would attack the Palace after it had been bombarded from La Punta.

Police and soldiers on every corner stopped automobiles and questioned the passengers until finally word was around that something serious was occurring. Traffic then all but ceased. One lone pedestrian came walking down the street, whistling happily. Still whistling, he stopped to examine the sandbag structure at the comer. When he saw the soldiers and the machine guns, his merry tune was suddenly stilled and he hurried off into the night. On a bench in the park in front of the Palace sat a boy and a girl, holding hands. Since early evening they had been there, entirely ignorant of the preparations for revolt which were going on around them. They did not know that they were in the direct line of fire between La Punta and the Palace and that hostilities were expected to break out at any moment. All they knew was that it was a beautiful tropical evening and they were in love.

Final preparations having been made for the defense of the Palace, soldiers and newspapermen prepared to await developments. As they looked at the sandbags, the memories of some were stirred and they recalled the significance of sandbags at the Palace on previous occasions. There was the time on September 4, 1933, for instance, when President Céspedes was returning from the town of Sagua la Grande, which bad been flattened by a hurricane. Upon his arrival in Havana, it was the sandbags which gave Céspedes his first news of the fact that he was no longer President and that the most powerful man in the country at that moment was a young Sergeant named Batista, at Camp Columbia. Then there were sandbags of the eighth and ninth of November, 1933, when the government defeated the ABC revolutionary uprising.

Suddenly the sound of an automobile leaving the Palace put an end to all reminiscence. There in the back of the car, which was being driven by Colonel Benítez, was Batista. He was wearing a fisherman's cap, sun glasses, a white shirt with an open collar, and a leather jacket. He was armed with a 38-caliber pistol. The reporters sensed that Batista was prepared to take the initiative from the enemy, to attack, to impose his authority as Constitutional President of the Republic of Cuba-if necessary, by force of arms.

Batista left the Palace shortly after the traditional nine o'clock gun was fired at La Cabaña and went straight to Camp Columbia, the military headquarters. He arrived there shortly after nine-thirty at night, accompanied by Colonels Ignacio Galíndez and Benítez. Galíndez was chief of the Camp Columbia military post and Batista knew that the guards at the camp's gates would pass any car in which Galíndez was a passenger without examining it. When Batista called Galíndez and Benítez to the Presidential Palace they did not know what Batista had in mind. He had picked Benítez as the driver of the car so that he could keep him under surveillance. He had not forgotten that a day or two before Benítez had shown a willingness to submit to Pedraza's orders.

When they entered the automobile with Batista he told Galíndez and Benítez of the purpose of his mission. Neither of the men was very happy about the trip to Columbia, but they could not withdraw at that point.

There was little conversation between the men during the ride to Camp Columbia, on the outskirts of Havana. Once they reached the gates, Galíndez identified himself and the sentry allowed the car to enter the camp. The sentry had not, of course, recognized the President.

Once inside Camp Columbia, Batista acted quickly. With the two colonels at his side, he entered headquarters of Regiment Number Six and took charge. He dispatched friendly guards to the various gates of Camp Columbia, with orders to keep Pedraza out of the camp should he try to enter. Batista knew that Pedraza was in his home, a few blocks from the military post, and he felt sure he would come rushing to the camp once Batista started assembling the troops.

After giving his picked guards time to reach the gates, Batista ordered Corporal Marcos Perdomo to have the bugler sound General Assembly. The corporal complied, and as the sounds of the emergency call were amplified through the camp's loud-speaker system, soldiers ran out of their barracks to the armories, secured their weapons, and quickly assembled on the parade grounds.

Batista took a position in front of the soldiers and spoke. He told them that because of disaffections among a few of the officers, he, as Supreme Chief of the nation's Armed Forces, was taking over Camp Columbia immediately. His brief talk was received with cheers and vivas-vivas for el Presidente, vivas for Batista the soldier, and vivas for Cuba. The soldiers were with him. That was the end of the rebellion and three new chiefs stepped into key spots in the Armed Forces. The arrest of Pedraza, who had tried and failed to enter Camp Columbia at the height of the excitement, was an anticlimax. After being refused entry at Columbia, he had gone to the Motorized Division of the National Police but was unable to get support there. He then went to San Ambrosio Barracks, in the center of Havana, where he was arrested by the commandant Colonel Manuel López Migoya. When Batista heard that Pedraza had been detained be sent one of his aides, Captain Jorge Hernández Volta, to Pedraza's wife to assure her that she and the Pedraza family would be given protection.

Colonel Benítez took over the National Police, Colonel López Migoya was named Chief of the Army, and Colonel Jesús Gómez Casas became Chief of the Navy. González and García were quickly placed under arrest and hours later the three rebellious officers were put on board a plane bound for Miami. A fifteen-day period of suspension of constitutional guarantees was decreed by Batista, but the next day he informed Congress, which had been called to approve this extraordinary measure, that there was no further need for the suspension. Complete calm, he said, reigned throughout the country.

The “Three Seditious Chiefs” all returned to Cuba later on. Garcia died a few years after the frustrated revolution. An inveterate gambler, be spent the last days of his life playing poker with a few friends at his home on Varadero Beach. González is a quiet citizen of Havana, and nothing has been heard from him since those exciting days of 1941. Pedraza, who is not unfriendly to Batista, now operates a large cattle ranch in Santa Clara Province. None of the three ever figured prominently in political affairs after their abortive attempt against Batista.

Since 1941, the leather jacket worn by Batista on that eventful night of February 3, has come to be regarded in Cuba as the symbol of forceful authority and fast, effective action. Whenever Batista does anything of a spectacular character, such as staging of the coup d’ état of March 10, 1952, the people say that he "put on the jacket." This, however, can be done only in a figurative way, because the leather jacket which he wore during the Pedraza revolt bas been given to the Bacardi Museum in Santiago de Cuba.

There are still some who are tormented by envy, but the lesson of Pedraza, González, and García has been well learned. In Cuba today, the greatest deterrent to potential rebels and would-be disturbers of the peace is that Batista may become irritated to the point where he may again, even though metaphorically, "put on the jacket."