Free Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant by Humberto Fontova Page A

or Peron. (Had he been, had he extinguished Castro’s rebels like a true dictator, Miami jukeboxes today would feature more Tanya Tucker than Gloria Estefan.)
    The first two presidents I mentioned above (Franco and Pinochet) were professional military men. Batista, though a “general” (self-appointed), is said to have disliked military trappings. He’d made it legitimately to sergeant in Cuba’s pre-1933 professional military. He merited that. Chances are he’d have made colonel, perhaps even general, on genuine merit. But his heart wasn’t in it.
    Batista joined the military, like so many others of his humble social stratum in Cuba, as a means to get ahead in life, to get an education, and to have a job. But Batista’s true calling was politics. “I think you’ll find him a likable individual despite what others may have told you,” Eisenhower told Earl Smith upon his appointment to ambassador in the summer of 1957. 7
    Batista’s first coup in 1933, known as the “Sergeants’ Revolt,” disbanded and demoralized Cuba’s professional military, replacing much of the professional officer corps with a new crop of self-appointed “colonels” and “generals.” This bunch was much better versed in political guile, corruption, and the third degree for political enemies than in any of the military basics and virtues. A professional military would have come in handy in 1958, but Cuba didn’t have one.
    President Batista always went out of his way to be photographed in civilian clothes in a family setting. He was scrupulous in keeping his uncouth military and police operatives well behind the scenes, and was rarely seen with them in public. “Batista never wanted to be a black soldier,” wrote Cuban journalist Gastón Baquero, himself black and employed by Cuba’s oldest and most aristocratic newspaper, El Diario de la Marina . “Instead, Batista always longed to be a white caballero [gentleman].”
    The mulatto sergeant-become-president Fulgencio Batista always studiously avoided the “caudillo” image. That was for President Trujillo in the neighboring Dominican Republic, for President Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela, for President Rojas Pinillas in Colombia, and all the rest. Cuba was different from the rest of Latin America. It was more North American culturally, commercially, and—as Batista was desperate to prove—politically. Batista wanted to put up a respectable, democratic image.
    Batista was mostly self-educated. He read voraciously and was always boning up on his English. He kept a bust of Abraham Lincoln in his office and a home in Daytona Beach. When Ike refused him exile in the United States he was hurt, but—as a shrewd and seasoned politician himself—he “understood the reasoning.” All who knew Fulgencio Batista say he genuinely yearned to be a popular, democratically elected leader, which he’d actually been from 1940 to 1944.
    Batista, de facto head of Cuba after his coup in 1933, voluntarily relinquished his post in 1940 and presented himself as a candidate in Cuba’s presidential election that year. He won handily in what American observers described as scrupulously clean elections.
    Another interesting fact: In 1940, at a time when Cuba’s population was almost 70 percent white, Cuba’s people elected a black president, one who’d been born to former slaves in a palm-leaf shack with dirt floors. Cuba’s aristocracy still scorned Batista. As president, he was denied entry into the exclusive Havana Yacht Club.
    Race was a factor in Cuba’s revolution. When Batista’s soldiers captured some of Castro’s men who tried to invade Cuba from Mexico in 1956, they exclaimed “ Son blancos ! ” (Hey, they’re whites!) “Get them!” Many or most of Batista’s soldiers were black and practically all of Castro’s rebels were white.
    “You’re from the Georgia? Good! I really like your treatment of blacks up there. Down here all blacks are marijuaneros [marijuana smokers, dope