(
bohio) dwellings in Havana, Cuba, in 1954, just outside Havana baseball stadium. In the background is advertising for a nearby casino. In 1952, Batista again ran for president. In a three-way race,
Roberto Agramonte of the
Orthodox Party led in all the polls, followed by
Carlos Hevia of the
Authentic Party. Batista's United Action coalition was running a distant third. On March 10, 1952, three months before the elections, Batista, with army backing,
staged a coup and seized power. He ousted outgoing President
Carlos Prío Socarrás, canceled the elections and took control of the government as a provisional president. The United States recognized his government on March 27. When asked by the U.S. government to analyze Batista's Cuba,
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. said: The corruption of the Government, the brutality of the police, the government's indifference to the needs of the people for education, medical care, housing, for social justice and economic justice ... is an open invitation to revolution.
Economy of Cuba Upon his seizure of power, Batista inherited a country that was relatively prosperous for Latin America. According to Batista's government, although a third of Cubans still lived in poverty, Cuba was one of the five most developed countries in the region. In the 1950s, Cuba's
gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was roughly equal to that of Italy at the time, although still only a sixth of that of the United States. Moreover, although corruption and inequality were rife under Batista, Cuban industrial workers' wages rose significantly. In 1953, the average Cuban family only had an income of $6.00 a week, 15% to 20% of the labor force was chronically unemployed, and only a third of the homes had running water. Not like in his first term, where he advocated for
Corporatism, he began to advocate for
Economic liberalism.
Relationship with organized crime Throughout the 1950s, Havana served as "a hedonistic playground for the world's elite", producing sizable gambling, prostitution and drug profits for the
American mafia, corrupt law-enforcement officials, and their politically elected
cronies. In the assessment of the Cuban-American historian Louis Perez, "Havana was then what
Las Vegas has become." In addition, drugs, be it marijuana or cocaine, were so plentiful at the time that one American magazine in 1950 proclaimed "Narcotics are hardly more difficult to obtain in Cuba than a shot of rum. And only slightly more expensive." In a bid to profit from such an environment, Batista established lasting relationships with
organized crime, notably with American mobsters
Meyer Lansky and
Lucky Luciano, and under his rule Havana became known as "the Latin
Las Vegas". Batista and Lansky formed a friendship and business relationship that flourished for a decade. During a stay at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York in the late 1940s, it was mutually agreed that, in return for kickbacks, Batista would give Lansky and the
Mafia control of Havana's racetracks and casinos. After World War II, Luciano was paroled from prison on the condition that he permanently return to Sicily. Luciano secretly moved to Cuba, where he worked to resume control over American Mafia operations. Luciano also ran a number of casinos in Cuba with the sanction of Batista, though the American government eventually succeeded in pressuring the Batista government to deport him. Batista encouraged large-scale gambling in Havana. In 1955, he announced that Cuba would grant a gaming license to anyone who invested US$1 million in a hotel or $200,000 in a new nightclub—and that the government would provide matching public funds for construction, a 10-year tax exemption, and waive duties on imported equipment and furnishings for new hotels. Each casino would pay the government $250,000 for the license, plus a percentage of the profits. The policy omitted background checks, as required for casino operations in the United States, which opened the door for casino investors with illegally obtained funds. Cuban contractors with the right connections made windfalls by importing, duty-free, more materials than needed for new hotels and selling the surplus to others. It was rumored that, besides the $250,000 to obtain a license, an additional "under the table" fee was sometimes required. Lansky became a prominent figure in Cuba's gambling operations, As the new hotels, nightclubs, and casinos opened, Batista collected his share of the profits. Nightly, the "bagman" for his wife collected 10% of the profits at
Santo Trafficante's casinos, the Sans Souci cabaret, and the casinos in the hotels Sevilla-Biltmore, Commodoro, Deauville, and Capri (partly owned by the actor
George Raft). His take from the Lansky casinos—his prized
Habana Riviera, the Hotel Nacional, the Montmartre Club, and others—was said to be 30%. Lansky was said to have personally contributed millions of dollars per year to Batista's Swiss bank accounts.
Support of U.S. business and government is now in Havana's
Museum of the Revolution as a symbol of Batista era corruption. In a manner that antagonized the Cuban people, the U.S. government used its influence to advance the interests of and increase the profits of the private American companies, which "dominated the island's economy". According to historian Louis A. Pérez Jr., author of the book
On Becoming Cuban, "Daily life had developed into a relentless degradation, with the complicity of political leaders and public officials who operated at the behest of American interests." By 1957, U.S. private investments made since the military coup totaled in excess of $350 million, aided by a series of measures introduced by Batista meant to encourage foreign investment through tax and customs duty exemptions in a mutually beneficial deal, wherein U.S. companies were able to hold monopolies in public utilities and consumer goods in exchange for financial aid and rebuilding of infrastructure. As a symbol of this relationship,
ITT Corporation, an American-owned multinational telephone company, presented Batista with a Gold Plated Telephone, as an "expression of gratitude" for the "excessive telephone rate increase", at least according to Senator John F. Kennedy, that Batista granted at the urging of the U.S. government. In addition, nearly "all aid" from the U.S. to Batista's government was in the "form of weapons assistance", which "merely strengthened the Batista dictatorship" and "completely failed to advance the economic welfare of the Cuban people". The U.S. Department of Defense provided equipment and arms valued over $16 million and organized officer training for over 500 Cuban officers during the Batista period. Such actions later "enabled Castro and the Communists to encourage the growing belief that America was indifferent to Cuban aspirations for a decent life." The U.S. subsequently suspended the shipment of combat arms to the Cuban government in March 1958, with the Acting Secretary of State Christian A. Herter asserting that "in our best judgement, we could not continue to supply weapons to a government which was resorting to such repressive measures of internal security as to have alienated some 80 percent of the Cuban people."
Batista, Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution Malin Craig in Washington, D.C., riding in an
Armistice Day parade, 1938 On July 26, 1953, just over a year after Batista's second coup, a small group of revolutionaries attacked the
Moncada Barracks in
Santiago. Government forces easily defeated the assault and jailed its leaders, while many others fled the country. The primary leader of the attack,
Fidel Castro, was a young attorney who had run for parliament in the canceled 1952 elections. Although Castro was never officially nominated, he felt that Batista's coup had sidetracked what would have been a promising political career for him. In the wake of the Moncada assault, Batista suspended constitutional guarantees and increasingly relied on police tactics in an attempt to "frighten the population through open displays of brutality." The opposition divided into abstentionists and electoralists. The abstentionists favored boycotting the elections regardless of the circumstances in which they were held, whereas the electoralists sought certain rights and guarantees to participate. The CIA had predicted that Batista would use any means necessary to ensure he won the election. Batista lived up to their expectations, utilizing fraud and intimidation to secure his presidency. This led most of the other parties to boycott the elections. Former President
Ramón Grau San Martín, leading the electoralist factions of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, participated through the political campaign but withdrew from the campaign days before election day, charging that his supporters had been terrorized. Thus Batista was elected president with the support of 45.6% of registered voters. Despite the boycott, Grau received the support of 6.8% of those who voted. The remaining voters abstained. By late 1955, student riots and anti-Batista demonstrations had become frequent, and unemployment became a problem as graduates entering the workforce could not find jobs. These were dealt with through increasing repression. All youth were seen as suspected revolutionaries. mountains where
Fidel Castro's rebels were based In April 1956, Batista called popular military leader Col.
Ramón Barquín back to Cuba from his post as military attaché to the United States. Believing Barquín would support his rule, Batista promoted him to General. However, Barquín's
Conspiración de los Puros (Conspiracy of the Pure) was already underway and had already progressed too far. On April 6, 1956, Barquín led hundreds of career officers in a coup attempt, but was frustrated by Lieutenant Ríos Morejón, who betrayed the plan. Barquín was sentenced to solitary confinement for eight years on the
Isle of Pines, while some officers were sentenced to death for treason. The purge of the officer corps contributed to the inability of the Cuban army to successfully combat Castro and his guerrillas. Batista's police responded to increasing popular unrest by torturing and killing young men in the cities. However, his army was ineffective against the rebels based in the
Sierra Maestra and
Escambray Mountains. Some of Batista's generals also criticized him in later years, saying that Batista's excessive interference in his generals' military plans to defeat the rebels hampered Army morale and rendered all operations ineffective. The brutal behavior backfired and increased support for the guerrillas. In 1958, 45 organizations signed an open letter supporting July 26 Movement, among them national bodies representing lawyers, architects, dentists, accountants, and social workers. The United States supplied Batista with planes, ships, tanks and the latest technology, such as
napalm, which he used against the insurgency. However, in March 1958, the U.S. announced it would stop selling arms to the Cuban government. Soon after, the U.S. imposed an arms embargo, further weakening the government's position, although landowners and others who benefited from the government continued to support Batista. Elections were scheduled for June 1958, as required by the Constitution, but were delayed until November 1958, when Castro and the revolutionaries called for a general strike and placed several bombs in several areas of the country. Three main candidates ran in the elections:
Carlos Márquez Sterling of the Party of the Free People, former President Ramón Grau San Martín of the Cuban Revolutionary Party-Authentic, and
Andrés Rivero Agüero of the government coalition. According to Carlos Márquez Sterling, all three were threatened by Castro, and several assassination attempts were made on both Ramón Grau San Martín and Carlos Márquez Sterling. On Election Day, estimates on the turnout range from 30 to 50% in the areas where voting took place, which did not include parts of
Las Villas and
Oriente, which were controlled by Castro. Márquez Sterling also stated that the initial results were favorable to him, but the military ordered the counting to stop as they changed the actual ballots for fraudulent ones. Cantillo also agreed that his new government would merge with the
26th of July Movement to create a new united government. On December 30, 1958, Cantillo notified Castro that coup plans had changed. Cantillo privately advised Batista that he should flee the country. Around midnight on January 1, 1959, during the
Triumph of the Revolution, Batista, realizing that his presidency could not continue, informed his cabinet and top officials at
Camp Columbia, the Havana headquarters of the
Cuban Constitutional Army, that he was resigning and would leave the country. At about 3:00 a.m., Batista boarded a plane in the Camp Columbia airfield with 40 of his supporters and immediate family members and flew to
Ciudad Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. A second plane flew out of Havana later in the night, carrying ministers, officers, and the Governor of Havana, and a third plane followed. Batista took along a personal fortune of more than $300 million that he had amassed through bribery and corruption. Critics accused Batista and his supporters of taking as much as $700 million in fine art and cash with them as they fled into exile. As news of the fall of Batista's government spread through Havana,
The New York Times described jubilant crowds pouring into the streets and automobile horns honking. The black and red flag of the July 26 Movement waved on cars and buildings. The atmosphere was chaotic. On January 8, 1959, Castro and his army rolled victoriously into Havana. Already denied entry to the United States, Batista sought asylum in Mexico, which also refused him. Portugal's dictator
António Salazar allowed him to settle there on the condition that he completely abstain from politics. Historians and primary documents estimate between hundreds and 20,000 Cubans were killed under the Batista regime. However, the 20,000 number is disputed by several historians, which considered it as 'propaganda'. According to French historian Jeannine Verdès-Leroux: == Disputed death count ==