Agonizing Reappraisal

Fidel Castro's rebels reeled back in bitter confusion last week, but Cuba's civil war was not yet ended--and both sides knew it.

Emerging victorious from the biggest battle of the war, Strongman Fulgencio Batista prepared his positions for the next round. As shoppers once more filled peaceful Havana streets, the Cabinet decreed all public-service employees subject to military draft. That meant that if the rebels again threatened a general strike, President Batista could order some 250,000 workers in transport, communications, power, banks, hotels, government offices to stay on the job and, if need be, shoot them for desertion. Another decree stiffened penalties for censorship violations; for newsmen, foreign as well as Cuban, up to one year's imprisonment; for newspapers and TV stations, heavy fines and suspension for up to one year. For the first time since World War II, "ham" radio operators got orders to turn in their sets for the duration.

Batista's police continued their savage repression. In Cotorro they hanged captured rebels; along Havana's Rancho Boyeros Road they broke into an apartment house, hauled out two suspects, a father and son, machine-gunned the older man in a nearby garage, then mowed down the hysterical son as he ran to his father.

Riddled by police raids and command indecision, Fidel Castro's rebels more than ever lacked arms and bombs, but still showed plenty of bombast. In an interview with U.S. newsmen, dyspeptic Havana Rebel Chieftain Dr. Faustino Perez alibied the "minor setback" in the capital as caused mostly by "delayed public reaction," insisted: "Our units are intact." Broadcasting from the clandestine rebel station, Castro unleashed a farrago of nonsensical victory claims, e.g., "There is no rebel patrol that has not scored a resounding success." He added an unlikely atrocity tale: "In the Sierra Maestra peasants' huts are being bombed with napalm that came from the United States."

There was no doubt that the rebels were hurt, and they showed it. From the chief himself came a summons to his six top provincial lieutenants to head back to the Sierra Maestra, presumably for an agonizing reappraisal. The total failure of Castro's touted "total war" had highlighted 1) his weakness in practical organizing ability, and 2) the movement's lack of a social program to attract Cuba's labor and its Negroes (25% of the total population, some 40% of Oriente's). Said a wealthy, aging Havana rebel last week: "From now on, if Castro wants our money he'll have to take our advice along with it. The days of blind Fidelismo are over."

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