Fulgencio Batista

Fulgencio Batista was married twice. Elisa Godínez y Gómez, his first wife (married July 10, 1926), bore him three children, Mirta Caridad, Elisa Aleida, and Fulgencio Rubén. They divorced in October 1945 after almost 20 years of marriage.

He started a relationship with Marta Fernández Miranda before his divorce from Elisa was formalised. They married on November 28, 1945. They had five children together, four sons, Jorge Luis, Roberto Francisco, Carlos Manuel, and Fulgencio José, and a daughter, Marta María.

He spent the later years of his life in exile in Spain. He suffered a heart attack and passed away on August 6, 1973. He was 72.

He was born as Ruben Zaldivar on January 16, 1901, in Veguita, a small rural community in Banes municipality in Holguín province, Cuba. He grew up alongside his three younger brothers, Hermelindo, Francisco, and Juan. He came from an impoverished background.

His father, Belisario Batista Palermo, was a freedom fighter under General José Maceo in the ‘Cuban War of Independence’, and his mother was Carmela Zaldívar González, who had her first child at the age of 15. He had Spanish, African, Chinese, and according to some scholars, native Caribbean ancestry.

He received his early education at a public school in Banes. Following that, he enrolled at an American Friends school. Besides earning his wages as a labourer, he worked as a tailor, mechanic, charcoal vendor, and fruit peddler.

During his two years of service in the Cuban army from 1921 to 1923, Fulgencio Batista learned typing and shorthand. After brief stints as a teacher, and with the rural police, he transferred back to the army and swiftly rose through the ranks to become a sergeant stenographer. In 1933, he was the secretary of a powerful, non-commissioned officers’ group which was at the forefront of a ‘sergeant’s conspiracy’.

Under his leadership, the 1933 coup was a success. With five leaders from different rebel factions, a coalition named ‘Pentarchy of 1933’ was formed to run the country. It drafted a proclamation written by Sergio Carbo. Batista was the only military representative who signed the document.

He was promoted to the rank of a colonel and became the Army Chief of Staff under the presidency of Ramón Grau San Martín, who had come to power replacing the Pentarchy.

In the ensuing years, he accumulated the support of the civil service and organized labour, on top of the absolute control he had over the military. He also developed a relationship with the US government, with the American State Department’s Sumner Welles acting as a mediator.

Batista forced Grau to resign on January 15, 1934, after just over hundred days of his presidency. For the next six years, Cuba was ruled by a series of puppet presidents, with Batista pulling the strings from the back.

By establishing a business relationship with the organised crime sector, Fulgencio Batista made millions. The early years of his dictatorship appeared prosperous on surface, with new casinos coming up every other day and the streets being full of Cadillacs. The reality was more severe—15% to 20% of the Cuban workforce was chronically unemployed; an average family earned only $6 a week.

As the years went by, the situation only worsened and the new graduates entering the workforce could not get employment. There were slums all over Havana right near towering high-rises.

In the mid-1950s, Batista suspended constitutional rights once more and applied stringent censorship on the media. His ruthless reprisal for the failed assassination attempt not only completely eradicated the student bodies responsible, ‘Federation of University Students’ (FEU) and the ‘Directorio’ (DR), but also targeted the political opponents who had nothing to do with it.

Castro was originally hiding in the Sierra Maestra Mountains with only 300 supporters. The number grew exponentially due to Batista’s police torturing innocent people. Youths, rebels or not, were publicly executed to serve as a cautionary warning for others not to join the insurgency. In a grotesque emulation of the Spanish colonial practice of public execution, hundreds of defiled corpses were hanged from lamp posts or discarded on open streets.