Cuba - Lonely Planet [17]
The postwar economic growth was nothing short of astounding. By the 1920s US companies owned two-thirds of Cuba’s farmland and most of its mineral resources. The sugar industry was booming and, with the US gripped by prohibition from 1919 to 1933, the Mafia moved into Havana and gangsters such as Al Capone began to set up a lucrative tourist sector based on drinking, gambling and prostitution. When commodity prices collapsed following the Great Depression, Cuba, like most other Western countries, was plunged into chaos and president-turned-dictator Gerardo Machado y Morales (1925–33) went on a terror campaign to root out detractors. Hoist by his own petard, Machado was toppled during a spontaneous general strike in August 1933 that left a seemingly innocuous army sergeant named Fulgencio Batista (who took no part in Machado’s overthrow) to step into the power vacuum.
Batista was a wily and shrewd negotiator who presided over Cuba’s best and worst attempts to establish an embryonic democracy in the ʼ40s and ʼ50s. From 1934 onwards he served as the army’s chief of staff, and in 1940 in a relatively free and fair election he was duly elected president. Given an official mandate, Batista began to enact a wide variety of social reforms and set about drafting Cuba’s most liberal and democratic constitution to date. But neither the liberal honeymoon nor Batista’s good humor were to last. Stepping down after the 1944 election, the former army sergeant handed over power to the politically inept President Ramón Grau San Martín, and corruption and inefficiency soon reigned like never before.
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In December 1946 the Mafia convened the biggest ever get-together of the North American mobsters in Havana’s Hotel Nacional under the pretence that they were going to see a Frank Sinatra concert.
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Aware of his underlying popularity and sensing an easy opportunity to line his pockets with one last big paycheck, Batista cut a deal with the American Mafia in Daytona Beach, Florida, promising to give them carte blanche in Cuba in return for a cut in their gambling profits, and positioned himself for a comeback. On March 10, 1952, three months before scheduled elections that he looked like losing, Batista staged a military coup. Wildly condemned by opposition politicians inside Cuba but recognized by the US government two weeks later, Batista quickly let it be known that his second incarnation wasn’t going to be quite as enlightened as his first by suspending various constitutional guarantees including the right to strike.
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THE CUBAN REVOLUTION
After Batista’s coup, a revolutionary circle formed in Havana around the charismatic figure of Fidel Castro, a lawyer by profession and gifted orator who had been due to stand in the cancelled 1952 elections. Supported by his younger brother Raúl and aided intellectually by his trusty lieutenant Abel Santamaría (later tortured to death by Batista’s thugs), Castro saw no alternative to the use of force in ridding Cuba of its detestable dictator. Low on numbers but adamant to make a political statement, Castro led 119 rebels in an attack on the strategically important Moncada army barracks in Santiago de Cuba on July 26, 1953 (see boxed text,). The audacious and poorly planned assault failed dramatically when the rebel’s driver (who was from Havana) took the wrong turning in Santiago’s badly signposted streets and the alarm was raised.
Fooled, flailing and hopelessly outnumbered, 64 of the Moncada conspirators were rounded up by Batista’s army and brutally tortured and executed. Castro and a handful of others managed to escape into the nearby mountains, where they were found a few days later by a sympathetic army lieutenant named Sarría, who had been given instructions to kill them. ‘Don’t shoot, you can’t kill ideas!’ Sarría is alleged to have shouted on finding Castro and his exhausted colleagues. By taking him to jail instead of doing away