CUBA: The Revolution Spreads

Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar, a chubby man of 56, last week commemorated the day 24 years ago when, as a lowly army sergeant, he threw out a bumbling government and began his long career as off-and-on President and strongman of Cuba. But even as he pep-talked loyal troops at Camp Columbia, outside Havana. Batista warily shuffled guards at all military installations, held Havana cops on the alert in their barracks. Rumors were flying that the bearded young rebel, Fidel Castro, holed up in the Sierra Maestra, planned to celebrate Batista's 24th anniversary with an uprising. Next morning the revolt came, in the sugar port of Cienfuegos (pop. 99.000), Cuba's seventh city.

Mutiny. About 300 navy men, defectors to the Castro cause, mutinied at dawn and quickly seized control of the Cienfuegos naval station, built on a peninsula in the town's harbor. They clapped pro-Batista officers in the brig and swept out through town in jeeps, carrying arms from the post arsenal. A 60-man troop of maritime police and some 200 pro-Castro civilians were waiting to join them. The rebels swept into Marti Park in the center of town, surrounded the pro-Batista national police headquarters and demanded surrender. The police refused. While two rebel navy planes circled overhead, the rebels charged, and after a vicious fight that littered the street with dead, the building fell. By noon rebels controlled the city—the first such feat they have been able to pull off since last November, when they held the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba for a few hours in a badly timed prelude to Castro's seaborne invasion from Mexico. It was also the first big show of strength outside the Santiago area, where rebel sentiment is strongest. Most important, it was the first time that some of Batista's military forces had gone over to the rebel cause.

Defeat. But the uprising was doomed to short life. By early evening Batista's troops and tanks were rolling into Cienfuegos from nearby Santa Clara, while B-26s and F-47s from Camp Columbia pounded away. The battle roared through the night, and by morning the rebels had fled into the hills or had died defending their battered strongholds.

Estimates of the death toll ran from 75 to 200; the dead included two navy captains and the commandant of the maritime police. The army colonel in charge of mop-up operations was wounded. Three rebel navy officers, 13 enlisted men and three maritime police were captured and flown to Havana to face a rough round of questioning on how the revolt got started. Batista's troops began a house-to-house search for a reported 2,000 guns distributed to civilians from the arsenal.

As in other bloody episodes of the anti-Batista war, the Castro men had shown plenty of nerve but little coordination. But by proving he could subvert Batista's well-fed, well-trained military, Castro had punched a worrisome hole in the dictator's armor.