It is, perhaps, difficult for foreigners, particularly North Americans, to understand and appraise objectively the political problems of Cuba. Maybe it is because North Americans, wise in the way of self-government, lack the patience required to comprehend the problems of a young, growing republic. Or perhaps this lack of understanding is due to the fact that relatively few Anglo-Saxons ever take the time and trouble to make a serious study of the history and customs of the Latin American nations.

For generations-at least for generations prior to the conception of the Good Neighbor Policy-North Americans, for example, regarded the nations of Latin America rather disdainfully. North American interest in the sister republics of the hemisphere was limited largely to reading newspaper accounts of revolutions. Another hindrance to better understanding among the American nations is the North American tendency to apply American standards to everything. That is true as far as forms of government is concerned, and it is also true in such small matters as the way the Latin Americans drive automobiles. The average North American believes that his form of government is the perfect one and that anything even slightly different is not a true democracy. Latin Americans, even Latin Americans who are great admirers of the United States, have never understood why North Americans feel that they, and only they, have found the pure form of democratic government. What North Americans seem not to understand is that what may be the perfect form of government for the United States may not do at all in another part of the world.

North Americans, generally, do not realize that the differences between their own people and the people of Cuba and other Latin American countries are very basic ones and that it is as unreasonable to expect a Cuban to think and act like a North American as it is to expect a North American to think and act like a Cuban. Close neighbors, yes, but in many ways Cubans and North Americans are as far apart as two peoples can be.

Cubans, like most of the other peoples of Latin America, are direct descendants of Spaniards. The conglomerate mixture of bloods so typical of the people of the United States is not to be found in Cuba. The blood of Cubans is predominantly the blood of Spaniards.

The Cuban is an individualist, much more so than the North American. The Cuban is always conscious of his individual rights and be will not willingly allow his rights to be restricted. In most cases he thinks and acts as an individual. This does not necessarily mean that he is selfish. It does mean that the Cuban people, as a whole, seldom act as a community. If a common action is taken it is usually by coincidence and not by design. If enough opinions, individually formed, happen to coincide, then a kind of community action may result. But such actions seldom are inspired by the kind of civic spirit known in the United States. This same individualism
may have its virtues in a democracy, but it contributes considerably to the problem of government. In recent years there have been indications that this individualism is being overcome.

When North Americans draw comparisons between their own way of doing things and the Cuban way of doing things, they ignore the basic differences in the two people. Besides the racial differences, it should be remembered that the historic differences of the two peoples is just as pronounced. The Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock were quite different from the Conquistadores who landed on the shores of Cuba. The Pilgrims came to a new land to make their homes, to create new communities, and all were inspired by a common desire to find freedom in a new society to be built by their own joint efforts. The Conquistadores were simply
the transient representatives of a European power seeking new territory for the monarch, more gold for the vaults of the kings. They were inspired by no desire to settle in new lands, no desire to build communities which would offer freedom and liberty to an oppressed people. The Conquistadores were men on a mission, out to serve the king, and, incidentally, to add to their own as well as their sovereign's wealth in worldly goods. There was no community spirit among the Conquistadores. They were not seeking a life of freedom and happiness in a great new world. They were inspired by something much more material than the desire for freedom.

It would be entirely inaccurate to say that the people of the Cuba of today still take their inspiration from the Conquistadores of the sixteenth century. It would be just as inaccurate to say that the people of the United States of today are always motivated by the community spirit which was a principle and a practice with the North American Pilgrims of the seventeenth century. But in making comparisons between two peoples or in judging the actions of one or the other, it is well to consider the antecedents of the two peoples.

North Americans are not easily convinced that there are certain virtues in revolutionary changes in government in Latin America. Although it is true that revolutions are a perfectly normal process in almost all the Hispanic-American countries, a revolution to the average North American is simply a form of violence to which politicians resort in order to get rid of their opponents. To North Americans, the very word "revolution" carries a bad connotation. But it is a fact that when a people are denied the right of free elections, a revolution offers the only means of combating corruption and tyranny in government.

The difference in viewpoints between the North Americans and the Cubans as far as the word revolution is concerned, can be seen in the fact that many of the political leaders of Cuba make a special effort to get the word into the name of their party. In Cuba it is admirable to be considered a member of a revolutionary party because the word revolution indicates progress.

Few North Americans seem to remember that the United States of America was born of a revolution and that another uprising of considerable proportions occurred in 1860, when the South rebelled against the North. Abraham Lincoln had a perfectly clear conception of the value of revolution as a means of changing governments. A little over a hundred years ago he made this statement on the subject: "Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right-a right which we hope and
believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with or near about them, who may oppose this movement. Such minority was precisely the case of the Tories of our own revolution. It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines or old laws; but to break up both, and make new ones."

Certainly the right to cry out in revolt against an intolerable government did not end on July 4, 1776.

Cubans are, without doubt, a revolutionary people. They have been a revolutionary people for centuries and they probably will go on being revolutionary for some time to come.

In the early part of the present century, during the growing-up days of Fulgencio Batista, revolution was a very real thing in Cuba. It was more than a philosophy, more than a few chapters in the history books. It was a way of life in Cuba, a current event, a thing you talked about and lived with every day.

Maybe Batista's latter-life tendencies toward revolution were natural ones, the result of an inheritance and of an environment. He was born in Oriente Province, long known as "the cradle of revolutions," during one of the most violent periods of Cuba's war against Spain. When little Fulgencio arrived on earth his father was just back from the war, from fighting the Spaniards, and his mother had not forgotten the home-front sufferings of a people at war. No human being in Oriente Province, or in all Cuba for that matter, escaped the effects of revolution in the latter part of the nineteenth century or the early part of the twentieth century. Oriente Province, scene of Teddy Roosevelt's charge up San Juan Hill, bad been a bloody battleground just before Batista was born, and during his early childhood all his parents' friends were revolutionaries, most of them veterans of the campaign against Spain. His playmates were the children of fighting men and women who had contributed to the defeat of tyrannical Spain. People like that don't fight revolutions one day and forget them the next.

So it is quite possible that his constant exposure to talk of revolution, of battles won and lost, of forays against the enemy, might have had something to do with the forging of a character which, later in life, led Fulgencio Batista to revolt against what he considered corrupt, inept governments and governors, against fraudulent administrations, against stagnancy. All through his early life, - from the day he was born to the day he headed his first insurrection, Batista lived in an atmosphere of national tension which frequently developed into open revolution.

As early as 1717, nearly two hundred years before they ended Spanish rule on the island, Cubans took up arms against the Spaniards in protest against the mother country's plan to establish a tobacco monopoly in Cuba. Another revolutionary movement was started in 1823, but Spain suppressed it before it became an important outbreak. In the mid-1830's, Cubans revolted again and this time they established revolutionary juntas in the United States for the purpose of winning the sympathy and support of the Americans. Twenty years later another revolution, unsuccessful to be sure, broke out in the north coast town of Cardenas, and among the belligerents were several hundred American sympathizers.

The following year, in 1851, the people of Cuba declared their independence from Spain and engaged in two quick, violent, but unsuccessful attempts to overthrow the Spanish regime. Throughout the years from 1851 to 1868, Cubans schemed and plotted and fought for their freedom.

One of the great revolutions against Spain was inaugurated on October 10, 1868, and it developed into the now famous Ten Years' War. The movement was born on the Yara Plantation, in Oriente Province, and although the Cubans fought valiantly, they were greatly outnumbered by better-equipped fighting men, and they finally gave up the fight in 1878. The Ten Years' War produced some brilliant Cuban military leaders, and it was these same heroes who came back to the battlefields in 1895, finally to defeat Spain and set the Cuban people free.

Even after they attained their independence and became a free nation, Cubans continued to revolt whenever the cause seemed sufficiently important to them. The first revolutionary disturbance of record after the establishment of the Republic, came in November, 1902, a few months after the first President, Don Tomás Estrada Palma, had taken office.

The following year Cuba experienced a series of revolutionary disturbances which perturbed the island for months. A rebel plot against the government was uncovered in the town of Guanabacoa in July, 1903; there was an uprising in the village of Vicana, in Oriente Province, in which several persons were killed, and another outbreak at Sevilla, in the same province, two months later. The Sevilla uprising was staged by a group which planned to kidnap the President of the Republic and force him to pay back-war pay to veterans of the War of Liberation, who had been waiting since the end of the war for their compensation. About the same time, a band of malcontents attempted to dynamite the President's train on a trip through Oriente.

In August, 1906, the first revolutionary movement of major proportions broke over the island, and it finally led to American intervention in Cuba. The revolution was directed against the government of President Estrada Palma, who had been re-elected to serve a second term in a grossly fraudulent election in 1905. The outbreak was led by General Faustino Guerra, a leader of the Estrada Palma opposition, and it might have succeeded had the American government not been forced to take over the country.

When the Guerra forces took to the field they met little resistance from the government forces, which appeared to be inadequate and uninspired. When Estrada Palma realized the weak position of his government, he petitioned the United States government to come in and take over. When the American State Department hesitated, Estrada Palma and his government resigned, leaving Cuba without a government. This action forced the United States to intervene and restore order, and the Americans remained in charge for the next three years.

In 1917, when the United States was preparing for war with Germany, political upheavals in Cuba precipitated another revolutionary outbreak, the like of which the young Republic had never before experienced. The fight was over elections, as usual, and the principal combatants were the forces of President Mario G. Menocal, seeking re-election for a second term in the Presidency, and his opponent Alfredo Zayas. The elections were held on November 1, 1916, but they were so openly fraudulent that the Supreme Court ordered new elections in several provinces. Certain that they would not get a fair chance in the new elections, the opposition party, headed by Zayas, resorted to revolution. Troops were put in the field by both parties and the fighting started. But the United States, alarmed by a back yard quarrel at such a dangerous period in international affairs, let it be known that it would support the Menocal party. The Zayas group gave up the fight, even though there was strong and convincing evidence that Zayas had been elected in the 1916 elections.

All these disturbances and revolutionary activities happened while Batista was growing up, during the first sixteen years of his life, and they made a profound impression on him. Fulgencio Batista and the Republic of Cuba grew up together, under influences which were violently revolutionary, although typical, perhaps, of the problems of a young nation struggling toward political maturity.

In order better to understand the political problems of the Cuba of today, it is necessary to consider the fact that Cuba came out of the darkness of colonialism into the light of independence just a short fifty years ago. In the year of 1902, less than four years from the day she defeated Spain, Cuba became an independent republic. There had been little time for apprenticeship in the science of government and few Cubans were trained for the responsibilities which go with independence. Certainly the Spanish rulers had not set any high standards in government which the Cubans could emulate.

For the most part the Spanish Captains General who had ruled Cuba for so many years were a corrupt lot. With one or two exceptions they grafted, blackmailed, bullied, and became wealthy in their posts at the expense of the Cubans.

Perhaps this lack of experience in self-government, this political immaturity, has been responsible, to some degree for the Cuban tendency to resort to revolution to rid the country of undesirable governments. Or maybe it is just that nations, like men, must crawl before they walk.

But whatever the reasons for the revolutionary spirit of the Cuban, it is an incontestable fact that when Fulgencio Batista staged his bloodless revolution of September, 1933, and when he repeated the action in 1952, he was following a thoroughly Cuban pattern, and be was well supported by precedent.

The revolutionary methods of Fulgencio Batista differed from the others only in that they were superbly planned and executed, and they achieved success without bloodshed.