CHRISTMAS

One of the greatest joys of my childhood was to hear my grandfather say the word Christmas. He pronounced that word with such resonance that Christmas seemed almost there. He would say it with a laugh, something most unusual in him, and that word contained all the happiness in the world.

When Christmas came in 1957, my grandfather did not even mention the word; there was no Christmas. It was only “the Bloody Christmas,” as Bohemia magazine described it, because of the numerous political murders that the government committed that month. We could hear shootings every day; terror was now commonplace. Most of Oriente province was against Batista, and there were rebels in the mountains. Sometimes, from a distance, they would attack Batista’s army, which fled because the soldiers were mostly very poor and hungry people who did not want to die for such a trivial cause. But no one can really speak of a battlefront between Fidel Castro’s guerrillas and Batista’s troops. Most of the dead were those killed by Batista’s henchmen—students; members of Castro’s partisan group, the 26th of July Movement; or simply Castro sympathizers who were captured in the towns and then tortured, murdered, and thrown into the gutter in order to intimidate the people, especially the conspirators. But among Castro’s troops there were not many casualties, nor were there in Batista’s army. After the Revolution took power, Castro talked about twenty thousand dead, and that became a sort of mythical, symbolic number. The names of those twenty thousand casualties were never published and never will be, because that many deaths just did not occur in the war. Really there was no war, rather a widespread discontent between the people and their dictator. The people committed acts of sabotage and were especially successful in spreading rumors that there were thousands of rebels and that they were everywhere; the only thing that was everywhere was contempt for the Batista regime, and thus flags of the 26th of July Movement sprang up all over. Even I once posted one of those flags. Batista was, moreover, a clumsy dictator who was not in control of the situation, and whose power continued to erode due to the pervasive corruption of his closest allies and the flight of the more honest ones. One must admit there was also a popular campaign against Batista, and it sometimes reached the media. Bohemia magazine published photos and interviews with the rebels in the Sierra Maestra as well as photos of the young men killed by Batista. The New York Times openly supported Fidel Castro from the beginning, and in general, the United States was where Castro and most of his agents could conspire openly. Besides, the Cuban middle class also hated Batista, who was black, and supported Castro, the white son of a Spanish sugar mill owner and the product of a Jesuit school. It was none other than Cuba’s most prominent bishop who, on one occasion, saved Castro’s life. Before resigning and leaving the country for good, Batista was already demoralized. He had been living high, and what he most wanted to save was his millions. On the eve of fleeing the country, he threw a party at the Tropicana, the most lavish nightclub in Havana. Some years later, in Paris, it was said that Batista had made some profoundly cynical comments referring to his last years in power in Cuba. He was reported to have said, “Yo entré por la posta, salí por la pista y dejé la peste.” [“I came in through the guardhouse, exited from the tarmac, and left the plague behind.”]