The political enemies of Batista are articulate. They have made much of the fact that in taking the power by coup d'etat he resorted to unconstitutional means. Batista himself deplores the fact that it became necessary to use revolutionary tactics, but he justifies the means employed by insisting that by taking his quick bloodless action, he thwarted President Prio's plans for violent disorder.

Batista claims, and he is corroborated by several of Cuba's leading citizens, that in 1952, Prio was prepared to precipitate public disorder and revolution in April in order to prevent the holding of general elections in June. Batista is convinced that Prio knew his candidates could not win in the elections and that Prio would have gone to any end to prevent the downfall of the dynasty of decadence which had been built up during the regimes of Prio and his predecessor Ramon Grau San Martín.

It is quite possible that the shouting of Batista's enemies against the unconstitutional methods of the former President was part of a plan to divert public attention from the colossal thefts of public funds by the Prio and Grau governments. The government of Grau, as I have noted, stands charged with the theft of nearly a hundred and seventy-five million dollars of public funds and there is ample evidence, some mention of which I made previously, to indicate that certain members of the Prio regime were no novices in the art of amassing huge private fortunes on small government salaries.

If the enemies of Batista shouted loud enough and long enough about unconstitutionality, the people of Cuba might not have time to ask what happened to the twenty million dollars in worn currency which the Prio regime is charged with salvaging from an incinerator after it had been condemned and written off the books of the national treasury. If there had not been so much shouting about "democratic processes" in the late summer of 1952, the people of Cuba might have asked Prio where he and his colleagues got the two hundred and forty-eight thousand dollars which two Prio associates lost in a holdup in Texas. The Prio emissaries admitted they
were taking this fortune to a rendezvous with bootleg arms dealers for the purpose of buying weapons with which to finance a revolution against Batista.

Commenting on this incident at the time, Batista declared: "I would be shocked, but not surprised, if it develops that the quarter of a million dollars stolen from two of Prio's henchmen in the United States were really dollars which had been appropriated to provide food for the mouths of hungry school children in Cuba."

Maybe the wholesale looting of the national treasury can be accepted by some as a democratic process. Perhaps it is not against the Constitution to stuff a large portion of the nation's wealth into cheap suitcases and haul it out of the country and into the private hide-outs of individuals. Possibly the capital sin is to resort to revolution to rid the country of a corrupt inept government. The people of Cuba will have to decide those things for themselves.

But it should be noted here that the deposition of unpopular or corrupt regimes by revolution is an old and honored custom in many parts of the world. And the method was popular in Cuba long before 1933, the year a sergeant named Batista staged the now famous Revolt of the Sergeants to begin a career which certainly has been the most colorful, the most spectacular, and, perhaps, one of the most useful of any man Cuba has produced in the fifty years of her independence.

Batista has managed to convince a great many contemporary Cubans that his contribution to his country's political I development and its social, cultural, and economic progress has been a substantial one. His contemporary enemies see no good in the man or in any of his achievements. What future generations of Cubans think about Fulgencio Batista will depend, I suppose, on what the historians of tomorrow write about him.

It is the writer's opinion that on the two occasions Fulgencio Batista came into power without going to elections, he was thrust into positions of high authority by Latin American circumstance. In a different, more tranquil political atmosphere, such as the political atmosphere in the United States, he might have been one of the greatest vote-winners in the history of his country. Batista did, of course, go to the voters twice in his political career and on both occasions he was elected by large majorities.

Batista doesn't allow himself to worry about what his present-day enemies think of him. As far as future generations are concerned, he is quite content to go along, doing the best job he can while he is still alive and young, and let the historians determine the place he is to occupy in Cuban history.

And no one can deny him that place, because when you write the history of the first fifty years of the Republic of Cuba you must, perforce, write the story of Fulgencio Batista.

Nor can anyone with even the slightest respect for fact, disregard the influence of Fulgencio Batista upon a people and a nation. Perhaps it was destiny, in the form of cane field poverty, which drove this restless little farm boy from a hut on a hillside in faraway Oriente Province and swept him into the pages of history.