CUBA: Winner Take All

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Three days after his lightning army coup (TIME, March 17), Strong Man Fulgencio Batista moved last week from his Camp Columbia headquarters to the presidential palace in downtown Havana. His white linen suit soaked with sweat, his voice hoarse with fatigue, the "Chief of the Revolution" sat at his old presidential desk for the first time in seven years, greeting job seekers, delegations of sugar planters, union leaders and the press. Tired as he was, he grinned a big victor's smile.

Double Talk. "I am a dictator, with the people," he explained. "My destiny is to carry out revolutions without bloodshed. The only blood that will be spilled will be that of those who oppose us. No one will be persecuted. We ask only cooperation." Batista charged again that deposed President Carlos Prío had planned to stage a coup of his own in April to make sure that his candidate, Carlos Hevia, would win the June presidential election over Batista and the Orthodox Party's Roberto Agramonte. Said Batista of the ex-President: "He was protecting gangsters. Anarchy and chaos were sweeping the nation."

The percentage of truth in the Strong Man's charges seemed to make little difference. Seven years of government by President Prío's Auténtico Party had clearly left the average citizen a little cynical about democracy. Few Cubans doubted that administration politicos had taken lavish liberties with the public purse. Last week, egged on by Batista's hastily reorganized propaganda department, the Havana press reported that men around Prío made off with $30 million from last year's $300 million budget. Batista men also charged, without documenting the claims, that the President himself had acquired 16 estates and made himself $40 million richer in his 3½ years in office.

Double Defeat. The only citizens willing to take a stand against the Batista revolt were a small band of students who shut themselves up in the university, living off cookies from the canteen and shouting ineffectual defiance of Batista's coup. Police calmly ringed the area, allowing anyone to leave but none to enter; the demonstration soon petered out.

Prío himself learned the bitter facts on the morning of Batista's coup, when he fled Havana to organize resistance in eastern Cuba. Arriving by back roads at Matanzas, 100 miles east of Havana, he found Batista's captains and lieutenants already in command. On learning by telephone that garrisons further east were also in Batista's hands, he gave up and drove back to asylum in Mexico's Havana embassy. As he posed for photographers before taking off for exile in Mexico the next day, there were tears in his eyes.