Fulgencio Batista
Fulgencio Batista ran Cuba for a quarter of a century, twice, and lost it to eighty-two men in a yacht. Born in 1901 to a poor family of mixed race in Oriente province, the son of a cane cutter who had fought in the war of independence, he worked on the railways and joined the army as a private, becoming a stenographer, which is how he came to know the officer corps. He organised the sergeants' revolt of September 1933 that overthrew the government installed after Machado's fall, and from then to 1940 he ruled through a series of presidents he appointed and removed. He then had himself elected in 1940, on a genuinely progressive constitution, with communist support and two communists in his cabinet, served a term, lost the next election, and retired to Florida. He came back in 1952, three months before an election he was going to lose, in a coup that met no resistance, and governed as a straightforward dictator: the constitution suspended, the press censored, the police torturing and killing opponents in numbers estimated in the thousands, and Havana's casinos run in partnership with American organised crime. Castro's attack on the Moncada barracks in 1953 failed, and Batista released him in an amnesty two years later. The Granma landed in December 1956 with eighty-two men, of whom about twenty survived the first week. By 1958 the army would not fight and the Americans had cut off arms. Batista flew out on New Year's Eve with a fortune, and died in Spain in 1973. His second period is the standard case study in how a dictatorship loses. He had the army, the police, the money and Washington, and he had made himself so generally detestable that when a few hundred guerrillas came down from the Sierra Maestra nobody was willing to die for him.
- Lived: 1901 CE – 1973 CE
- Nationality: Cuban
- Roles: dictator, general, head_of_state
