CUBA: Jubilation & Revenge

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With jubilation and bloody revenge, Cuba's new government stepped off toward its uncharted, uncertain future. Rebel Fidel Castro came to Havana, the age-old smile of the conqueror on his face. He pushed through screaming Havana mobs to Camp Columbia, stronghold of ex-Dictator Fulgencio Batista's army. The march of los barbudos, the bearded rebels who toppled Batista after two dogged years of guerrilla warfare, was complete.

Castro, who promoted an 82-man invasion into a popular rebellion against tyranny, savored every moment of his victory march. He built up the drama by lingering five days on the way from eastern Santiago, where the war began, to Havana. His 6,000-man column, moving in captured tanks, Jeeps, cars, trucks and buses, drew clusters of flag-waving Cubans along every road, was stopped in its tracks by crushing crowds in every city. Castro himself was folksy, eloquent and tireless. "How will we enter Havana?" he asked. "Let me see, we will go along the Malecon and then we will turn up that avenue—what is it called—General something?" The crowd roared "General Batista!" and Castro bent double laughing.

Cheers, Promises. By the time Castro reached the outskirts of Havana, every factory and shop was closed, and the streets, balconies and rooftops were packed with a clapping, shouting crowd. Marmon-Herrington tanks cleared a path for Castro's Jeep. Rebels with outthrust rifles finally forced the way through the throngs to the palace, where Castro got a warm abrazo from his hand-picked President, Manuel Urrutia. "I never did like this palace," Castro told the crowd, "and I know you do not either, but maybe the new government will change our feel ings." Later, at Camp Columbia, where 30,000 people waited, he spoke in his high-pitched voice, promising "peace with liberty, peace with justice, peace with individual rights." A white dove flew up from the crowd and settled on Fidel's right shoulder. After two nights of almost no sleep, he bedded down in the Continental Suite of the Havana Hilton, his rifle tossed on a dresser.

But before any perfect peace set in, the rebels were determined to allow themselves a wave of revenge against the conquered foe. Last week some 28 lesser Batista officials, left behind when the top dogs fled, were convicted in kangaroo courts and shot; another nine were executed without benefit of trial at all. Typical victims: Santiago's Maritime Police Chief Alejandro Garcia Olayón, Santa Clara's Police Chief Cornelio Rojas (see cuts). After one execution drew a crowd of 3,000, the rebels ruled that spectators would henceforth be barred—but allowed to inspect the bodies afterward.

In Matanzas, rebels grabbed one Juliana Muñoz Garcia, 42, the mother of two sons. The charge: that for $15 a week she had been a Batista informer, betraying at least two teen-age rebels to killer cops. When she screamed that she had only pointed out the house where the boys lived, the rebels hissed "Chivata!" (little goat that bleats, i.e., stool pigeon). Terrified, she awaited trial.