TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT0285> <link 93HT0449> <link 93HT0330> <link 93AM0046> <link 89TT1797> <title> 1950s: Latin America & The Cuban Revolution </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1950s Highlights </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> The Cuban Revolution </hdr> <body> [In Latin America in the 1950s, dictators came and went in bewildering profusion. They, and their predecessors and successors, provided varying degrees of authoritarianism and democracy, but little change in the overall appalling economic and social conditions in most places. But one development appeared ominous: increasing Communist influence in the Guatemalan government of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz. With help from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, another colonel, Carlos Castillo Armas, organized, trained and led a guerrilla invasion of his country to end the supposed Communist threat.] (June 28, 1954) The first actual shooting came as insurgent aircraft strafed fuel tanks and airfields and dropped a few homemade bombs. Days later, two infantry task forces of a few hundred men each fumbled their way toward each other in the bush near a sleepy town called Zacapa and opened the ground fighting. The battle picture was obscure, but the government claimed that it had 3,000 men in "a general offensive" against 2,000 rebels along a line north and south of Zacapa. Neither side had rushed headlong into combat. Both knew that the outcome would almost certainly depend on whether the regular Guatemalan army, some 6,000 strong and not at all Communist, stuck by the government or swung over to the anti-Communist cause. But whether the Guatemalan clash swelled into bitter and prolonged civil bloodshed or petered out in anticlimax and frustration, the issue was nonetheless clearly drawn. Guatemala, in its special way, was a small-scale sequel to Korea and Indo-China, and the world knew it. Even the United Nations Security Council stirred into action; it held its first Sunday emergency meeting since the June 1950 session on Korea. The invading anti-Communist rebels were mainly Guatemalans who had been driven into exile in recent years. Their leader, emerging from almost total obscurity, was Carlos Castillo Armas, 40, sometime colonel in the Guatemalan army, who had been jailed in Guatemala City in 1950 after an attempted revolt, but tunneled spectacularly out of prison and fled. Living in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, he made himself a symbol of the exiled right-wing opposition to Guatemala's Communists. He also began quietly collecting arms, money and men. "Somewhere over the border" Castillo Armas this week proclaimed a "provisional government" and issued his first fiery statement. "The dawn of liberation illuminates our land," it said. "The glorious struggle has begun against tyranny, treason, deceit and shame...Assault the garrisons of the Communists and capture them. They are cowards!" A certain amount of hyperbole is doubtless permissible in a manifesto issued on such an emotional occasion; Castillo Armas probably knows quite well that some Communists are cowards and some are nothing of the sort. And while he may regard Fellow Traveler Arbenz as a tyrant or a traitor, he could scarcely consider him a coward. On the contrary, military attaches, diplomats and journalists who have met the Guatemalan President are in striking agreement that the main-spring of his character is dogged, stubborn, self-willed courage. If there is any kind of bravery he lacks, it is perhaps the higher degree of courage that could enable a man to look into his own heart and see what his reckless flirtation with Communism had done--and may yet do--to his country and his people. (July 12, 1954) How much did the U.S. have to do with the turn of events? No matter who furnished the arms to Castillo Armas, it was abundantly clear that U.S. Ambassador John E. Peurifoy masterminded most of the changes once Castillo Armas began his revolt. It was he who helped spot the phoniness of the first palace change, and it was he who saw to it that the new government was solidly anti-Communist. [In 1956, another invasion by a guerrilla force was launched, this one a tiny, ragtag band of Cubans led by a 29-year-old named Fidel Castro. Attacked by the troops of Dictator Fulgencio Batista, only a dozen escaped to the Sierra Maestra mountains, where they holed up, honed their guerrilla tactics and carefully collected arms, recruits and press notices. By January 1959, they had conquered their country.] (January 12, 1959) The face of dictatorship in Cuba was the padlock on Havana University, the bodies dumped on street corners by casual police terrorists, the arrogant functionaries gathering fortunes from gambling, prostitution and a leaky public till. In disgust and shame, a nervy band of rural guerrillas, aided by angry Havana professional men (plus opportunists with assorted motives), started a bloody civil war that cost more than $100 million and took 8,000 lives. Last week they smashed General Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship. At the end, Batista, who dominated Cuba off and on since 1933, looked like any tin-pot dictator funking out to save his health and--especially--his chips. The 1956 invasion of just 81 men under Rebel Chieftain Fidel Castro, 32, had grown to take over an island of 6,500,000 with a yearly national income of more than $2 billion from sugar, cattle, tobacco, minerals, tourists. When Castro's seasick invaders fought past army patrols from a marshy beachhead to mountain hideouts two years ago, their extinction seemed certain. All that was needed from Batista's army, 21,000 strong and well armed, was the simple nerve required to go in and flush them out. The army tried terror instead of courage; it tortured suspects, shipped the dismembered bodies of students home to their mothers. Result: a flood of arms and recruits for Castro. The peasant and student army crept from the Sierra Maestra on the southeastern coast to the Sierra del Cristal 100 miles east, then to the foothills, avoiding decisive battle while the muscle grew. Three weeks ago, with rebels holding most of rural Oriente province and total rebel strength up to 8,500, Major Ernesto ("Che") Guevara launched the offensive in Las Villas, 150 miles from Havana. Seldom had a government been so thoroughly housecleaned between midnight and dawn. But to Castro, flushed with victory, the exodus was a bitter cheat. Arriving in Santiago, he took the big (5,000-man) Moncada fortress from the surrendering army without firing a shot, declared Santiago the provisional capital of Cuba as a reward for its support. In Las Villas, ruthless Red-loving Che Guevara executed the last Batista holdouts. From Santiago, Castro proclaimed Judge Manuel Urrutia President of Cuba. Urrutia in turn named Castro head of the armed forces and appointed a Cabinet of rebel professors, doctors and lawyers, including one man called the Minister in Charge of Recovering Stolen Government Property. Castro will doubtless be the biggest voice in the land for some time to come, and he gave signs of a capricious temper. On his orders, Havana was closed down until early this week in a pointless general strike that cut food supplies and kept nerve on edge. This week bearded Fidel Castro was moving at the head of his irregulars toward Havana, getting tumultuous welcomes from every town. His movement will have to reorganize Cuba and try to run its government; he promised that the rebels would permit the harvesting of the vital sugar crop and restore constitutional rights. But he would not personally run the show, he said. "Power does not interest me, and I will not take it," he vowed. "From now on, the people are entirely free, and our people know how to comport themselves properly." (January 12, 1959) Cuba's Batista is the fifth major Latin American dictator deposed in the last four years. The others: -- Argentina's General Juan Peron, kicked out by an army revolt in September 1955, after ten years in power. -- Nicaragua's General Anastasio ("Tacho") Somoza, assassinated in September 1956, after 25 years in power. -- Colombia's General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, ejected by an army-civilian uprising in May 1957, after four years in office. -- Venezuela's General Marcos Perez Jimenez, tossed out of office by an army-civilian revolt last January after nine years of despotic power. (January 19, 1959) 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 out-thrust 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 feelings." 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." 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 benefits of trial at all. (February 23, 1959) Somewhat sooner than expected, Fidel Castro last week took over direct control of the Cuban government. Premier Jose Miro Cardona resigned, along with his Cabinet. Assuming the premiership, Castro quit as commander of the armed forces, giving that job to his ice-eyed brother Raul, 27. The move, said Fidel Castro, "distressed" him, but it was "necessary for the good of the revolution." It put him only a step away from the presidency, now held by his hand-picked choice, Manuel Urrutia. There were signs that Castro, who is 32, might move up to Urrutia's job before too long. Under the Cuban constitution, the President cannot be younger than 35. Last week news got out that the constitution had been quietly changed by a mere vote of the Cabinet a fortnight ago--and the new minimum fixed at 30. In the premiership, Castro can take his time about calling elections, about which his government, unlike the revolutionary juntas of Argentina, Colombia and Venezuela, has said very little. [Then Castro moved against U.S. companies in Cuba, tipping his hand about the Communist intentions that would become obvious a year later.] (June 1, 1959) Though it has never been enforced, Article 90 of Cuba's constitution says that "large landholdings are proscribed," and "the acquisition and possession of land by foreign persons and companies shall be restrictively limited." Last week Prime Minister Fidel Castro enforced Article 90 with a vengeance. His agrarian-reform decree, signed in the six-hut eastern village of La Plata, scene of one of the first guerrilla attacks in Castro's revolution, outlawed the $300 million U.S. investment in Cuban sugar. As Latin America's rudest slap at capital since Mexico expropriated the oil industry in 1938, the new law is likely to end the steady flow of U.S. private investment to Cuba (total: $850 million) and slow the country's development. U.S. Ambassador Philip Bonsal flew to Washington to confer with sugarmen this week, but there was no talk of retaliatory moves; Cuba still gets a $370 million annual income from sugar admitted to the high-price U.S. quota. </body> </article> </text>