“CUBA HAS THE SAME EFFECT ON AMERICAN ADMINISTRATIONS THAT THE FULL MOON USED TO HAVE ON WEREWOLVES.”1

—FORMER STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICER IN HAVANA

It was 2:00 a.m. on New Year's Day, 1959, and Cuban president Fulgencio Batista had a decision to make. As celebrants still roamed the cobblestone streets of Old Havana, the glowing bulbs of the situation board at army headquarters in Camp Columbia showed that hope was rapidly vanishing. Castro and his barbudos had spilled out of the Sierra Maestra range and consolidated their positions in Oriente Province to the east. Its principal city, Santiago de Cuba, was under siege. In central Cuba, Raul Castro and the Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara threatened to cut the central highway traversing the island. Rebel columns had captured Sancti Spiritus and Santa Clara, closer to Havana. Until now, Batista believed that his brutal, corrupt regime could somehow survive, or at least he could cut a deal to participate in a rump government that would take over before Castro's forces arrived. But it was too late. In a matter of hours, a rebel advance guard would enter the city.

Only five hours earlier, Batista had been driven in his limousine through the gates of Camp Columbia, the country's military headquarters in the outskirts of Havana, to the salutes of two sentries in natty khaki uniforms and white helmets. For the stubby dictator, who resembled a mestizo J. Edgar Hoover, it must have evoked memories of the day in 1933 when at this same army base he led a sergeants’ revolt that propelled him into his first term as president. The limousine had proceeded to the airfield where it passed a row of biplanes—the Cuban Army's outdated air force—and halted on the apron where two DC-4s of Aerovías Q, a civilian carrier, were parked with engines running. For two days they had stood by at a remote corner of the field with engines running and the pilots sleeping on board. Now Batista waited while forty-four relatives and aides boarded the lead plane. Into the president's plane soldiers loaded personal effects and satchels full of cash and jewelry, estimated to be worth more than $300 million.2 Time had been too short to bring along the sixteen suitcases of silverware from the president's baronial mansion. Some critics charged that over the years Batista had looted as much as $700 million from Cuba's coffers.³

Since his arrival at Camp Columbia, Batista had attended a muted New Year's party in the officers’ mess. But he must have been reminded of what might have been when he passed the obsolete biplanes. He had ordered fifteen Hawker Siddeley jets from Great Britain that might have made a difference if they had been delivered in time. The same might be said for the Staghound tanks that had been badly needed to blunt a major offensive by Fidel Castro's rebel guerillas, except that the tanks were unavailable because the United States and several Latin countries had slapped an arms embargo on Cuba due to egregious human-rights violations. The designation didn't make Cuba a leper colony, but it put on the brakes in more ways than one. Tourism slowed and exports were flat. Most important, international relations were affected.

An erstwhile army sergeant, Batista had been in control of the Cuban armed forces since the early 1930s. He became the strongman behind a succession of puppet presidents until he was himself elected to the presidency in 1940. At this stage in his career, he was the type of socially conscious ruler later exemplified by Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. In fact, he had legitimately won the 1940 election by campaigning on a platform quaintly similar to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, and he stitched together a coalition that mixed bankers and financiers with communists. But as his term progressed, Batista became more authoritarian, which eroded his popular support. As the State Department saw it, Batista's dalliance with communists might open the door to a communist takeover.

In 1944, after Batista ignored warnings through diplomatic channels, State turned to Meyer Lansky to deliver the message in blunter fashion.4 The collaboration of the Syndicate with the US government was already an established fact, due to the negotiations between the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) and Lucky Luciano during the war. Roosevelt knew that Lansky was on intimate terms with the Cuban leader, whom he viewed as a gangster anyway. So the president ordered naval intelligence to dispatch Lansky to meet eyeball to eyeball with Batista. The crime boss lectured the Cuban that the United States was engaged in a global conflict and would not hesitate to use military force to maintain stability in its own backyard.⁵

Batista got the message. He handpicked his successor for the 1944 elections, who unexpectedly lost to Ramon Grau. He went into “voluntary exile” in Florida, reportedly with millions of dollars in booty bulging out of his suitcases. Batista remained in the background of Cuban politics despite his election to the Cuban Senate in absentia in 1948. Returning to Cuba in 1952, Batista decided to run for president again. Three months before the elections, he staged a coup and began his reign as the country's iron man. Batista gradually shed his populist image and became a full-fledged dictator, establishing the Bureau for the Repression of Atheism and Communism (BRAC). By this time, he was on a glasses-clinking level with Dick Nixon, raising the question of what influence, if any, the Red-baiting member of Congress had on him.

Batista's reputation became so blighted by the BRAC excesses that it can be said his downfall started with “the BRAC thing” as a throttled press referred to it. Batista didn't think of himself as a dictator, especially when compared with Rafael Trujillo. In contrast, Batista only cracked down on those who threatened the state's security, while Trujillo was considered more promiscuous in his use of torture. In one instance in 1957, Batista was frustrated by his inability to defeat Castro's dug-in guerillas. His card-playing crony, US ambassador Arthur Gardner, proposed that he dispatch an FBI or CIA assassin to kill Castro. “No, no, we can't do that. We're Cubans,” he said.⁶ But the fact was that whether or not he realized it, he had grown tyrannical and more corrupt. Despite his chumminess with Nixon and other heavy hitters from north of the border, it was time for him to go.

Batista had considered the decision to go on December 9th when an American initiative to ease him into exile was handled by an old friend well connected in Cuba, in fact raised there.⁷ He was William D. Pawley, a Truman ambassador to Peru. President Truman had been in awe of Pawley's leadership in forming the vaunted Flying Tigers to contest Japanese Zeros attacking supply routes. At war's end, Truman sent Pawley to Spain to negotiate the construction of Strategic Air Command sites with Francisco Franco. The soft-spoken Carolinian made his fortune during the Florida land boom of the 1920s. He founded Cubana (now the state carrier), the Havana transit system, and the bus line in Miami. In Florida, he owned Talisman Sugar Company, where he hired field laborers from Jamaica.

Pawley was key in the planning of the overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1956. I interviewed Bill Pawley on November 27, 1974, in his Coral Gables office. He was reluctant to see me, saying he was doing his own book. But when I pointed out his historical significance in Latin America and his footprints in the sands of the Caribbean, “Come on over,” he said, “We can at least shake hands.” Although he was a lanky, sandy-haired man, impeccably dressed with a Carolina accent, I felt as if I was engaged with a stern, didactic headmaster of a private school. At the end of the two-hour session, there was no doubt that he was a master of intrigue, operating behind the scenes to spur Ike to action against Cuba. At the same time, Pawley was a Daddy Warbucks using his yacht to carry out private missions. One was a bizarre plan in 1963 to kidnap two Russian missile technicians and spirit them off to Eisenhower's Gettysburg retirement farm to embarrass President Kennedy.8

In the course of his business and sub-rosa activities, Pawley came to know Batista well. It was because of this relationship that he was selected by the Eisenhower White House for a special mission to negotiate with Batista. Fidel Castro had become of concern even before he achieved a military victory. For one thing, Nixon was thick with Batista, as were other officials such as George Smathers, dubbed the Senator from Cuba because of his partiality for the Cuban dictator.

But there was a strong ideological pull as well. In 1957, when Castro issued an agrarian reform manifesto from his mountain base, it was a red alert. Bill Pawley had fits (colloquially), wrongly assuming Castro had in mind a Chinese version of reform. In the early spring of 1958, when everyone concerned agreed that the Batista presidency was doomed—it was only a matter of time—the question arose about the post-Batista future. In a lively caucus, Pawley voiced the notion that “everything we were doing was wrong. I told King that we should now, to try and save the peace, see if we can go down there to get Batista to capitulate to a caretaker government, unfriendly to him but satisfactory to us, which we could immediately recognize and give military assistance to in order that Fidel Castro not come to power.”9

The reference to King was to a crusty ex–West Pointer, Colonel J. C. King, with whom Pawley walked in political lockstep. Like his compatriot, King was quite a story. The colonel was a classic Cold War mixture of relentless anti-communist and buccaneer capitalist. As an entrepreneur, King built a condom factory in Brazil against the common wisdom that the predominantly Catholic country would obey the church's ban on birth control. The gamble paid off—King eventually sold out to the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson for millions of dollars. Now he was head of the CIA's Latin American Division.

In a series of conferences with CIA director Allen Dulles and State Department officials, Pawley and King presented this course of action in which Pawley would call on his friendship with Batista to persuade him to step down in favor of a five-man junta with one civilian, Jose “Pepin” Bosch of the Bacardi rum family.¹⁰ The junta would immediately be recognized as the legitimate government of Cuba by the United States and be supplied with $10 million in weapons with which to fend off Castro.

Standing fast against intervention that they saw as naked aggression, Roy Rubottom and William Wieland, both senior State officials, favored the option of a political settlement.¹¹ Pawley was adamant, “If you permit Castro to come to power, you are going to have more trouble than you have ever seen in your life.”¹² It was an argument that Wieland had heard before. A few months earlier, the American ambassador to Cuba, Earl T. Smith, braced Wieland with the claim that Fidel's younger brother, Raul, was a communist and that his partner, Che Guevara, was a Marxist. In fact, Raul had belonged to the Young Communist League, but his membership had expired; and Che was a straight revolutionary. Wieland gave Smith, a Palm Beach socialite, a lesson in political reality based on his own experience as a reporter in Cuba. “We know all that, of course,” he told Smith, “but that doesn't make it a communist-dominated movement. There are plenty of moderates in it as well. Far more moderates than radicals.”13 To State's careerists, the revolution was not beyond redemption.

Refusing to take no for an answer, Pawley sought a meeting with Undersecretary of State Douglas Dillon, an erudite Wall Streeter. President Eisenhower arranged it.¹⁴ Pawley brought along the Senate's playboy, George Smathers. They complained bitterly about Wieland leaning to the left and urged Dillon to replace him with someone more amenable to blocking Castro. Wieland's superior, who was unexpectedly present, voiced resentment at the “outside pressure,” and Dillon announced that he was unconcerned about Castro but greatly concerned about the right-wing dictator of the Dominican Republic.

Rafael Trujillo was regarded as a psychopath in some quarters and cut off by some Latin American states. Yet he was a friend of Pawley, Smathers, and Nixon. Pawley called for another caucus, this one with Assistant Secretary of State Henry Holland, whom he considered an ally, present with an aide. An agreement was reached in which Pawley would talk to Batista about stepping down. But at the insistence of Rubottom and Wieland, a stipulation was added. Pawley was to tell his old friend that the plan was his own idea and he was not speaking officially. He believed he could get Washington to agree.

“If he falls flat on his face,” Rubottom told Wieland out of earshot of Pawley, “he won't embarrass anyone in government.”¹⁵

Pawley did fall flat on his face. On the night of December 9, 1958, Pawley, after reviewing details with the Havana CIA station chief Jim Noel, met in the Presidential Palace with Batista for three hours. The American began by explaining the junta scenario and promising to “try to persuade the US government to back it to the fullest extent.”¹⁶ He guaranteed there would be no reprisals. Castro would have no place in the new government, elections would be held within eighteen months, and Batista could return to his Daytona Beach, Florida, ranch. By this time, however, the dictator had entered a depressive stage, turning moody and morose. He was given to such solitary pursuits as listening to recordings of telephone conversations made by his secret police. He angrily rejected his old friend's proposal, threatening to kick him out, so Pawley hurriedly departed.17

In Washington the right hand didn't know what the left was doing. Eight nights after Pawley's nocturnal visit, Ambassador Earl Smith appeared at Batista's door. He was unaware of Pawley's earlier visit, kept in the dark by Rubottom and Wieland due to his passionate partiality toward Batista. Smith had received a telegram from Rubottom that was not good news. It instructed him to tell Batista that, although the United States appreciated his past friendship, it was withdrawing its support for humanitarian reasons.¹⁸ Batista spoke of setting up his own military junta, but Smith said it was too late. The dictator then asked if he could retire to his ranch in Florida. No, said Smith, he would have to go to another country first.

Here was Batista in effect saying he would leave Cuba if he could go to his own ranch in Florida. Smith didn't seize the opportunity; he stuck to the letter of his instructions. For his part, Batista still didn't know whether the offer bore the full marque of the US government. He realized that he was now a political leper, and he was bitter. “Your country has intervened in behalf of the Castros,” he remonstrated.¹⁹

So instead of being blocked off by a powerful opposition junta, Castro took advantage of the lengthy stalemate and gained military strength. In the end, it was Castro who forced Batista to flee.

The bulbs of the situation board at Camp Columbia showed units of the rebel forces advancing through the Havana suburbs. Batista gave his last order, and the twin planes took off and banked to the northeast. There were murmurs of surprise among his entourage when Batista informed them they were bound for the Dominican Republic instead of the United States. The Dom Rep had been the only country to offer sanctuary to the fallen dictator.

Around 5:30 in the morning of New Year's Day, 1959, the phone rang in the Ciudad Trujillo (now Ciudad Domingo) home of Arturo Espaillat, aide to Rafael Trujillo. Groggy from a New Year's Eve celebration, he was jarred into sobriety by the raspy voice of his boss. According to Espaillat in his Trujillo memoir, Trujillo was confrontational, which was the case more often than not. “Remember that report you gave me yesterday regarding the Cuban situation?” he asked.20 “You told me Batista was strong enough to remain in power another six weeks.” The day before, Espaillat had returned from Cuba after evaluating Batista's position. He acknowledged his prediction. “Yes, I know you told me that,” Trujillo said. “Now I want you to tell Batista that. He's at the airport now.” When Batista's DC-4 had been only a few miles out, it had radioed for permission to land. Espaillat rushed to the San Ysidro Air Base to greet Batista and his entourage of uninvited guests, and put them up at the luxurious Hotel Jaragua. Trujillo was furious because Batista had allowed his regime to crater so precipitously that Castro, whom the dictator viewed as a communist, was practically invited into Havana. Trujillo received Batista icily, insisting that Dominican military aid to Cuba for fighting the rebels be recompensed. Batista dispatched his wife to the United States, where much of his fortune was deposited, to arrange the transfer of funds.

Batista simmered in Ciudad Trujillo for two weeks before calling Bill Pawley in Florida. He had to know the answer to a nagging question. When they met on December 9th in the Presidential Palace, it was clear to everyone concerned that the US government initiated the move for him to voluntarily go into exile in his Florida ranch. Pawley had claimed that it was not the government but he himself and several of his prominent business associates who were behind it as the most workable solution.

The deposed dictator had a pointed question for Pawley: did the initiative for him to go into exile have the full backing of the American government despite Pawley's story about himself and several other prominent businessmen?²¹ Pawley admitted that the US government was fully behind the plan from the start. “In that case,” Batista said, “I would have gone at once.”

The upshot of this convoluted exercise in statecraft was that Pawley “fell flat on his face,” as Rubottom and Wieland had set it up. But the consequence of their bureaucratic coup was down the line: the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which ended in disaster, and the 1962 missile crisis, which came within a Cohiba cigar of nuclear warfare.

In Miami, early on New Year's Eve 1958, Carlos Prío's brother Francisco (Paco) Prío, a former Cuban senator, took a phone call from Havana. “Paco!” the caller was fairly bursting with news, “Batista's getting ready to leave right now!” Paco was dubious, but Carlos was inclined to believe it. In my 1974 interview with Carlos Prío in Miami, he was indeed dapper and cordial in dispensing information. “In early December Batista had put through an $80 million military appropriation,” Carlos told me. “I suspected that it wasn't for the military at all, but that he was preparing to flee.”

When the news was confirmed early the next morning, Carlos Prío chartered a plane and flew from Miami, with seven armed Autenticos, to Havana's Rancho-Boyeros Airport, but the runways were strewn with obstacles. The ex-president got on the radio and identified himself to the control tower, but the operator was under strict orders not to permit takeoffs or landings. The situation was the same at the Camp Columbia airfield where Batista had departed only hours before. Prío reluctantly returned to Miami. But early that evening Rancho-Boyeros reopened and Prío was able to charter a Cubana plane capable of transporting his entire entourage. As he entered the terminal, soldiers with red-and-black 26th of July armbands accosted him, then broke into salutes as they recognized the “Cordiality President.” Prío dragooned several to accompany him to his La Chata estate, for he knew Batista sentries would be posted. The sentries did not know that their commander-in-chief had flown the coop but, when told, meekly surrendered their arms. The opulent surroundings at La Chata contrasted with the scraggly appearance of the young 26th of July soldiers.

During Prío's presidency that began in 1948, the sprawling grounds were a kind of Camp David retreat where much of the business of Cuba was conducted. There was an Olympic-size swimming pool into which spilled an artificial waterfall. Around it, guests gathered to sip daiquiris. The stable of horses was blue-ribbon, as was the herd of cattle, and Prío often wore a Texas cowboy's hat.22 There was a barber shop where the president and his cronies discussed politics and appointments while being shaved and manicured. Prío encouraged artists and writers, whom he invited to La Chata, and categorized his political philosophy as “democratic left.”

Prío had taken full advantage of his tenure as president to become filthy rich. He helped finance the initial stage of the revolution and had kept watch for an opportunity to sneak back into the presidency. At least, Fidel had promised him a “top post” in his administration.

Ensconced at La Chata, Prío awaited the summons that he was sure would restore him to power. In fact, Prío was a prominent figure in the Autentico Party, which was one of two mainstream parties. I asked Prío what his arrangement was with Castro. “Simple,” he said, “we agreed to stay in touch and notify one another of developments.”23 At this point he still hoped that Castro might allow him to finish out his presidency before taking over. Prío started doing his own thing, but he didn't rule out a higher post as promised. But after he sat in the parliament for weeks and nothing happened, he knew he was through. He had attracted notice during Castro's inaugural speech by being seated next to Hiocida March, a heroine of the revolution, and the second seat from Che Guevara. Prío looked out of place with a receding hairline and an off-the-rack suit, appearing dated among the casually dressed youth.

At the moment that Batista fled, Castro, stranded by cheering throngs in Oriente Province, ordered Che Guevara in Las Villas Province to race to the capital to secure it. They took over Camp Columbia, which had strategic importance, as well as the La Cabaña Fortress. But there was no governing Cuba without the Presidential Palace. When Che and his men of the 26th of July arrived at the ornate structure, they found it “occupied” by Major Rolando Cubela, who headed a group of hotspurs called the Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE). Cubela belonged to the Senoritos of Cuban politics, dapperly dressed youth with white skin and slick black hair. But Cubela did not resist when Che showed up with his 26th of July Movement battalion. His patron was Carlos Prío, who expected a top job in the Castro administration. No slacker in the vanity department, Cubela saw himself as a rising star. But he didn't go anywhere, just as his patron Prío never got the call.

At this point in the Sugar Spring of the new regime, politics integral to the growing and marketing of the sweet commodity took over. The redistribution measure allowed over 200,000 Cuban families to buy land for the first time, but it was mostly the big American sugar companies that were forced to sell. On June 5, 1959, in the US Senate, George Smathers introduced legislation to reduce the Cuban sugar quota. Six days later, the Eisenhower administration complained that the compensation paid to the corporate landholders was based on tax-assessment rolls that were decades old, therefore not reflecting the current value (the complaint failed to mention that the landholders had enjoyed these artificially low tax rates for decades). The European landholders did not complain about Castro's compensation.

Prío admitted to a certain nostalgia for the presidency, but he felt the contingency in the position would bring about a feeling of stability in the country. He would've liked a longer talk with Castro, who was limited by the need to catch his flight to Washington. He left without ever hinting at a top post for Prío. After returning from the trip, Castro again stopped by La Chata, this time to brief Prío on his meeting with Nixon. According to Prío, the session ended with Nixon bracing Castro on the subject of elections. Castro retorted rather sarcastically that he got the “message” that he was imposing a contingency on him that he didn't on his friend Batista.

Prío got the “message” as well. Fidel's long silence meant he had no intention of promoting him to a top post in his government. Prío left La Chata for the last time. In Miami he assumed a prominent role in the counterrevolution, a “top post.”