The First Year of Rebellion

Among the brambles and pine trees of Cuba's eastern Sierra Maestra range, along trails they know well, Rebel Fidel Castro, 31, and his band of 600 guerrilla fighters this week mark an anniversary. It is one year since Castro landed 81 seasick adventurers from Mexico in an invasion that drew only derision from President Fulgencio Batista, 56. The dictator is no longer derisive. Last week, in Colon Cemetery in Havana, he dropped his broad face in his hands and wept as a guard of honor buried Colonel Fermin Cowley, 47, one of his top commanders, who was gunned down by a carload of Castro men on a downtown street near his headquarters in Holguin (pop. 36,000) in rebel-ridden Oriente province.

Batista is angry as well as sad. Though the army and most of organized labor are still his, he cannot put down the revolt, has managed only to spur it with clumsy counterterrorism. Risking shoot-on-sight orders, Castro partisans are putting the torch to the budding sugar-cane crop on which the Cuban economy depends. The army said it shot four rebels in the cane fields last week. "Criminals!" shouts Batista now. "Communists!"

The Plotters. Actually, the top leadership of the running rebellion is so prosperous, conservative and respectable that amused Habaneros are calling it "the best-dressed revolution in history." Of the chief rebel plotters outside the Sierra, four are lawyers, three are physicians, two are financiers, one a millowner. Deftly combining rebellion with business-as-usual, each earns more than $20,000 a year. The rebels conspire behind brocade curtains in air-conditioned homes and offices. Wrote TIME'S Reporter Sam Halper after sitting in on one such meeting last week: "Silent servants opened the doors, poured the drinks and arranged the foam-cushioned armchairs in a neat plotters' circle. The only proletarians were the help."

The rebels talk and bicker incessantly. But they dig deep to support the cause, and they constantly risk their lives and fortunes for a single, basic political goal: return of constitutional government, which Batista disrupted by his 1952 army coup, staged just 82 days before a presidentia1 election that he seemed certain to lose. "This," they insist, "is not a social revolution."

Nervy Foe. The well-heeled rebel leaders who are financing the bomb throwing like to draw a distinction between themselves and Cuba's political gangsters of the past 25 years. In Batista they have taken on the shrewdest and nerviest veteran of the gun-slinging school. A dirt-poor lad from Oriente province, he painfully acquired the rudiments of an education, carefully plotted and led the "sergeant's revolt" that won out in 1933. He voluntarily relinquished power, a rich man, eleven years later.

Under the succeeding regimes of the constitutionally elected Presidents Ramon Grau San Martin and Carlos Prio Socarras, rival gangs polished off some 100 political victims. Both the Grau and Prio regimes milked the nation of millions in graft. After Batista came back, he rammed through a one-candidate election in 1954 and his administration set new records for corruption. The middle-class opposition groups began forming.

"We are bourgeois," recalls one, "and we used the materials we felt safe with. We worked through the Rotary Club, the bar association, the medical association." At first they held a long "civic dialogue" with Batista, aimed at persuading him to hold a fair election. That failed. "Then we tried military action, thinking that a few key leaders here and there would do the trick." Batista got wind of this plot, led by Lieut. Colonel Ramon Barquin, and squashed it handily (TIME, April 23, 1956).

In desperation, the rebels gave their support to the only rallying point available--Castro. Castro accepted the deal, saying: "Fighting the revolution is the job of our generation, but we will not be ready to govern. That will be your job." When Castro made it to the hills last December with the remnant of his invasion force, the wealthy, noncombatant rebels supplied guns and money.

But Batista unwittingly gave Castro his biggest boost: a brutal counter-terrorism campaign that drove thousands of Cubans from neutrality to opposition. Irresponsible police thugs in Havana blunderingly murdered Pelayo Cuervo Navarro, a respected, nonviolent leader of the anti-Batista Orthodox Party ("About like killing Lyndon Johnson," say the rebels). A 15-year-old boy, suspected of bomb tossing, was castrated in Santiago and shipped home dead to his mother. When Rebel Frank Pais, a young schoolteacher, was shot by cops in Santiago, 80,000 Cubans marched to his funeral and closed down the town for seven days with a general strike.

Paying Back. When the rebels tried to extend the strike to Havana, they bumped squarely into two pillars of the Batista regime--solid prosperity and a tough, bull-necked labor leader named Eusebio Mujal, 44. As secretary-general of the Confederation of Cuban Workers (C.T.C.), Mujal bosses 1,200,000 workers, half the total labor force, and he bosses them for Batista. Guarded by a cordon of bully boys in open-necked shirts, Mujal explained his stand bluntly last week: "People who treat labor well deserve well of labor."

Among Batista's concessions to Mujal: an obligatory dues checkoff that puts $20 million a year in the union cashbox, gradually rising wage minimums set by the government wage board. New industrial investment during the past four years totals $612 million. The civic struggle has caused the tourist business to slump, but four luxury hotels are going up--including the 20-story Havana Riviera and the $22 million Havana Hilton (of which Mujal's Restaurant Workers' Union owns a $9,000,000 chunk). "Without a general strike in Havana," says Mujal, "Castro has no chance. As long as I live, there will be no general strike."

The rebel leaders admit bafflement at how to win friends with dirty collars. Moreover, after failure of an anti-Batista navy uprising in Cienfuegos (TIME, Sept. 16), once dissident officers are for the moment behaving themselves. Uncertain how to turn the stalemate into a victory, the rebels demand that the U.S. cut off arms to Batista--a move which they think would be a powerful enough blow to the army's morale to bring the dictator down.

In the absence of an assist from the U.S., the rebels will keep up the bombing campaign, which they hope will tell public opinion that "there is a rebel organization." Most Havana citizens, once angry at bomb terror, now seem to enjoy seeing the strongman's authority flouted, and the rebels have become expert at producing the maximum bang with minimum injury. When 90 bombs exploded in Havana a month ago, only eight people were hurt, no one killed.

Dirty Money. While they harass and hope, the rebels are worrying plenty about the makeup of their movement. To help pay the bills, they take soiled money in Miami from ex-President Prio. Leadership is split between Castro himself, the Havana plotters and a shadow government of sympathetic exiles in Miami. The conservatives at the top fear that the longer they stay behind their desks while Castro is in the hills getting headlines, the smaller their influence on him will be. Recently he summoned five of the Havana brains to the hills for a conference, and they had to turn him down--they were too flabby for the trip.

They have to worry whether Castro has really discarded the socialistic beliefs that he held earlier, including drastic land reforms and nationalization of U.S.-owned power companies. Castro persists in the cane-burning campaign--a pointless waste of the country's wealth that may well anger many Cubans. Up in the hills, notes one conservative rebel with a mixture of admiration and fear, "he acts like a king before the Magna Carta, sitting under a tree and dispensing justice."

One alternative is cooperating with Batista in the election that he has set for June1. To this idea, rebels of every coloring snap one answer: "We will not deal with a gangster for our country." They will stick with Castro, who may become the brilliant liberator that his young followers see, or only, as one older rebel worried last week, "a man on horseback." It was not lost on thoughtful Cubans last week that Colonel Fermin Cowley, murdered by the rebels and mourned by Batista, was an idealistic young rebel himself 25 years ago.

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