THE INTERNATIONAL SPLASH caused by the New York Times story was both inspiring and threatening to other Cuban revolutionaries. Fidel was now the public face of opposition to Batista. But the 26th of July Movement remained only one small part of the rich pageant of Cuban subversive activity: the island was seething with underground organizations plotting to seize power. There were armed cadres around the universities; factions jockeying within the military (one group at the naval base of Cienfuegos planned mutiny); exile paramilitaries scheming in the United States. None of this was coordinated or even very consistent. In Miami Beach, the bitter ex-president Prío dipped into his millions to fund almost any conspirator who knocked at his penthouse door. The Cuban Communist Party, meanwhile, displayed an unexpected indifference to any form of violent insurrection; its officials regarded Fidel as a middle-class dilettante and snootily dismissed his revolt as “adventuresome.”
There was even a fissure within the ranks of M-26-7 itself. The members in Havana and the lowland cities formed a faction dubbed El Llano, “the plains,” and they had very different ideas on how to seize power than the guerrillas in the mountains (dubbed La Sierra). Nobody seriously believed that Fidel and his motley crew could overthrow Batista’s military machine by themselves. His impact on Cuban politics was still symbolic at best. A national strike seemed far more potent—but even that, from the viewpoint of Havana, was a stretch.
To the casual observer, the cosmopolitan capital was untouched by the discontent that was growing elsewhere in Cuba. American tourists flocked in record numbers to the “Pearl of the Antilles,” which had become shorthand for decadence and erotic pleasure, much as Berlin had been in the ’20s or Shanghai in the ’30s. To the rum-soaked partygoers, Fidel and his men might as well have been in the Himalayas. For $68.80, Americans could take “party flights” direct from Miami to Havana with live mambo bands and complimentary pink daiquiris on board; shuttles would then speed them from the airport to the buzzing Tropicana nightclub to admire the diosas de carne, “goddesses of flesh,” and luxury casinos owned by the likes of Meyer Lansky, “the Jewish godfather.” Even a normally astute observer like the English novelist Graham Greene found himself seduced by Havana’s louche sensuality. Greene was a particular fan of the raunchy Shanghai Theater in Chinatown, where long-legged dancers threw themselves at the audience “like a nudist camp gone berserk,” and the legendary Superman would line up twelve silver dollars to measure his impressive chorizo on stage, then perform live sex acts. Like most foreign visitors, Greene never lost sleep over Batista’s nightmarish terrorism or the distant sound of police sirens and bombs going off in the night.
Only occasionally did political violence intrude on the holiday idyll. Not long before Fidel landed in the Granma, a top SIM officer was gunned down while leaving a Mario Lanza concert in Havana, and some panicked tourists injured themselves when they ran into mirrors trying to flee. A month later, on New Year’s Eve, a bomb went off in the Tropicana cabaret and a Cuban teenage girl lost her arm. (The owners later alleged that she was carrying the explosive herself and it went off accidentally.) But the most dramatic act of revolution in Havana was brought about in late March by Fidel’s main political rival, a twenty-four-year-old architecture student named José Antonio Echeverría, who was head of the radical Directorio Revolucionario, “the Revolutionary Directorate,” or DR. Peeved by the Times article, Echeverría decided to steal Fidel’s thunder with a daring plan: he would stage an armed attack on the Presidential Palace in the center of the city and gun down the dictator. This would not only decapitate the regime, he reasoned, it would eliminate M-26-7’s very raison d’être.
JOSÉ ECHEVERRÍA RANKS high on the roster of Cuba’s unlikely revolutionaries. A plump, jovial figure, he stood out on campus for his devout Christian faith and refined fashion sense. He had such rosy cheeks that he was nicknamed La Manzanita, “Little Apple,” but to his student followers he was known more often, with great affection, as El Gordo, “Fatty.” Clever and charismatic, he had no problem luring conspirators—almost all of them students, with the odd artist thrown in—to his ambitious assault. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the result was as haphazard as if a bunch of Stanford PhD candidates decided to assassinate the US president today. On the afternoon of March 13, more than eighty armed DR members set off in cars for the Presidential Palace. One, Faure Chomón, recalled the world moving as if in slow motion as he drove in busy traffic down La Rampa, “the Ramp,” the boutique-lined stretch of 23rd Avenue that descends from the upscale Vedado district to the ocean. He was fascinated that the shoppers and tourists were going about their business entirely oblivious to the firestorm that was about to erupt in the city. Chomón and his friends were openly carrying rifles and grenades, but the pedestrians who saw them assumed they were secret policemen. Inside a red truck marked FAST DELIVERY, two dozen other students were squeezed together in suffocating heat. Echeverría, perspiring profusely, took off his favorite jacket and joked that he didn’t want to see it riddled with bullet holes.
Just after 3:00 p.m., Batista’s guards at the Palace—an over-the-top neoclassical pile from 1920 whose decorations were created by Tiffany’s of New York—were surprised by cries of “Long Live the Directorate!” followed by a barrage of wild gunfire. The students burst into the marble-lined interior and started shooting their way up the broad staircase. Things went awry from there. Many of the assailants’ guns proved faulty and jammed. Grenades failed to explode. One student had made bombs from seven sticks of dynamite, which “made a terrifying racket,” he recalled, but did little damage. Another lost his glasses but grabbed a machine gun anyway and started firing blindly. When a telephone rang, someone picked it up in the middle of the battle. “Yes, it’s true, the Palace has been taken, Batista is dead!” he yelled. “We Cubans are free!”
Chaotic though it was, the attack very nearly succeeded. The students fought their way into the Hall of Mirrors, a replica of the Grand Salon in Versailles, and then into Batista’s office. Sitting on the dictator’s desk was a cup of coffee, still warm. They had missed their target by seconds. On hearing the first shots, Batista had taken a private stairway to the fourth floor and barricaded himself with his bodyguards. The students tried to retreat, but by then tanks had rattled to the scene, and the army launched a counterattack. Many were cut down in the streets; Chomón was shot in the hip; only fifteen escaped. “All I could smell was gunpowder, blood and death,” a survivor recalled. “That terrible odor clung to me for two weeks.”
Echeverría himself was leading a second attack to seize a popular radio station. He estimated that he would have 180 seconds of air time before he was cut off, so had rehearsed a speech of exactly that length. “People of Havana!” Echeverría boomed. “The Revolution is in progress! . . . The dictator has been executed in his lair!” He finished the delivery on second 181—a feat of timing that the Soviet Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko would later eulogize in his poem “Three Minutes of Truth.” But Echeverría was speeding away from the studio in a Ford when the police intercepted him. He was killed in a shoot-out. In total, more than thirty-five of his followers also perished that day, and SIM took the opportunity to arrest, torture, and execute dozens more suspects. One respected politician was simply gunned down, gangland-style, outside his house.
The March 13 attack was yet another bloody fiasco to add to Cuba’s list of failed uprisings and elevated the Little Apple into its crowded pantheon of martyrs. It was also a major dent in Havana’s reputation as a carefree vacation getaway. In the pitched battle outside the Palace, several bystanders were wounded, and an American tourist—a thirty-eight-year-old office worker from New Jersey named Peter Korinda—was killed by a stray bullet on his hotel balcony. The New York Times covered the assault on the front page, reporting that flights to Havana had been canceled, nightclubs were closed, and sidewalks ran red with blood. Life magazine published a photo spread showing civilians cowering in doorways as wounded soldiers were carried past Sloppy Joe’s bar.
Fidel heard news of the attack on his little transistor radio. He denounced it in a statement as “a useless spilling of blood” and declared that he was against assassination and all forms of terrorism. The life of the dictator did not matter. He was just one man; it was the system M-26-7 was fighting. Still, capitalizing on the bad publicity, supporters in the US printed a leaflet demanding tourists to boycott the island. They reported that the luckless Peter Korinda had not been killed by “a stray bullet” but an armored car that had deliberately pumped two hundred rounds into his room. “Thousands [of Cubans] are being imprisoned and shot daily without benefit of trial,” the leaflet summed up. “This regime of terror will have to come to an end soon.”
SIX WEEKS LATER, Batista gave a triumphant interview to an Associated Press journalist in his bullet-pocked palace. Sitting behind a new desk in a chamber hung with red and gold drapes, he declared in excellent English that he was no despot. “I think the only dictatorship around here is that which my beloved wife and four sons exert upon me,” he chortled. He had only suspended the constitution “to protect the people,” he explained, and dismissed Fidel as a “natural criminal” who led only a handful of men. (“I do not understand why he has been compared to Robin Hood as he has been in some newspapers.”) When the reporter asked if Batista kept a gun handy after the attack, he laughed, “Why not?” He then pulled a pistol from his drawer and squeezed off four shots. When an alarmed attaché rushed in, Batista revealed that it was a cap gun.
“Just practicing,” he giggled.