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CUBANOW: The Secret Weapons Posted by: "Susana Hurlich" delfines@enet.cu Wed Apr 1, 2009 9:38 pm (PDT)
The Secret Weapons By Ciro Bianchi Ross * Translated for CubaNow by Susana Hurlich
The last weapons that Fulgencio Batista received for propping up his already tottering dictatorship came from the Dominican Republic and Somoza's Nicaragua. The former is well known: they were those San Cristóbal carbines which, in the heat of battle, sometimes worked and other times didn't. The latter was known not long ago, when documents were revealed that are in the Cuban Heritage Collection fund, of the University of Miami.
The former dictator was outraged. The rumor had reached his ears that General Francisco Tabernilla Palmero (Silito) who he had seen born and who acted, until December 31, 1958, as his private secretary and head of the Infantry Division stationed at Camp Columbia, had rashly written to Anastasio Somoza Debayle, head of the National Guard of Nicaragua, to advise him about what stance to take towards the invasion of Olama and Mejillones led by Pedro Joaquín Chamorro in front of about one hundred men, in June 1959. Batista had been informed that Tabernilla Palmero suggested to Somoza that he cut the flow of supplies, clothing and medicines to the rebel zone and had told him, as if Somoza had need that they tell him, that "the repression against those involved in conspiratorial acts must be as impartial and as harsh as the circumstances require."
It was not, however, a rumor that the former Cuban head of state arrived in far-away Funchal, in the Madeira Islands. The same Tabernilla Palmero took care to rectify it. "The letter to Somoza is not rumor. I enclose the copy. I did it thinking of his country invaded, so that he wouldn't incur the same errors that we made," the secretary clarifies answering back to Batista in a missive dated November 8, 1959. He also says: "You know that I remained friends with him and couldn't forget that he strongly cooperated with our Army."
Tabernilla Palmero refreshes the memory of his former chief: He says that, when already in the final months of the Batista government, only two thousand rounds of 37 mm bullets remained, he called Somoza Debayle and "the next day a plane from NICA landed in Ciudad Militar with four thousand bullets for the tanks." He adds: By the way you gave a credit of 40 thousand pesos for that order, but it wasn't paid at the appropriate time."
In summary, Somoza, who was defeated by the Sandinistas in July 1979, sent his unlucky colleague 30 T-17 tanks with 90 machine guns, 16 thousand 37 mm cannonballs, a million rounds of .30 caliber bullets, napalm bombs and fragmentation bombs of 500 and one thousand pounds. A beautiful consignment.
Silito was one of the most illustrious members of the Tabernilla clan. His father was head of the Joint General Staff of the Cuban Armed Forces. One of his brothers commanded the Army's Air Force, while the other also held an important post. His uncle by marriage was General Alberto Ríos Chaviano, the butcher of the Moncada barracks, in 1953. When the assault of the Presidential Palace occurred on March 13, 1957, he was at the head of the Joint Tank Regiment at Columbia, and came to the aid of the dictator, earning himself the promotion to Brigadier General and leadership of the Infantry Division, although on that day the armored vehicles, spinning around their own axes from Columbia, came long after the fighting had ceased. In the middle of 1959 the times were different. Batista and the Tabernillas were in exile and the former dictator accused them of treason and held them responsible to a large extent for the military defeat against the guerrillas. And they, in turn, accused Batista and, to prove it, they asked (and paid) journalist José Suárez Núñez, a Batista supporter until the day before, to write the book El gran culpable.
Hence Batista sends, from Funchal, a letter about Tabernilla Palmer's attitude to two mysterious "R and P" (Irenaldo García Báez y Orlando Piedra?). He describes it as interference in Nicaragua's internal affairs. "The expressions and what he tries to state, such as the letter sent to Somoza, contains such degeneration, that it is best to completely ignore it," he recommends in the letter to his former collaborators and tells them that he has news that Silito's document was received with "disgust" by its addressees.
"I HAD TO SWEEP MY ROOM"
It is unknown whether Batista ever settled the debt with Somoza. To Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, the Dominican satrap, yes he had to pay him his debt. That was one of his biggest setbacks in the Dominican Republic.
Batista arrived in Santo Domingo on the morning of January 1st. In the military base where his plane landed, waiting to give him the official welcome was Ranfis Trujillo, Generalissimo's favorite son (although gossip said that he was the son of a Cuban) to whom his father granted the rank of colonel when he was three years of age and promoted him to general at nine. Batista was declared a Guest of Honor of the Dominican Republic and they lodged him in a mansion, near the National Palace, that was intended for distinguished visitors. He thought that the Benefactor would receive him immediately, but he had to wait more than 48 hours to be granted an audience. That same day, January 3rd, the boasting finished when Trujillo told him that he would put at his disposal 25 thousand men and the necessary ships and planes to head an expedition to Cuba. Batista refused, but offered to promote and finance an attack against the Chief of the Cuban Revolution.
Months later Trujillo called him again to the Palace. In the previous interview he had appealed to his courage and manliness. Now he appealed to his pocket. Batista had an outstanding account with the Dominican State: he had not paid the last shipment of weapons and the balance of the debt, nearly 90 thousand dollars, was demanded.
Batista responded that it was not a personal matter, but that those weapons were a debt of the Cuban State. Trujillo looked at him with sarcasm.
-You cannot claim that I charge Castro for some weapons that were used against him - he said. He added: Think about it, General Batista. I have to collect. They are weapons from the Dominican Army and that money is from the Republic. They were sent to help you...
-I don't have that money. I have hardly enough to live on. I am a poor man ...- stammered Batista.
The Generalissimo, of course, did not believe him and the next day sent to his suite in Hotel Jaragua, where he had installed himself after the first interview, the head of his aides, an Army colonel who, with respect and always at attention, conveyed the greetings of the Benefactor and reminded him of the debt. Batista returned to brandish the same arguments put forward and repeated in each one of the soldier's visits, visits that arrived at being made daily until the unexpected happened:
Another colonel presented himself in Hotel Jaragua along with two soldiers and ordered Batista to follow them. Trujillo wanted to see him immediately. Batista acceded. The Colonel's tone of voice and rough gestures and the grim gaze of the two soldiers left no alternative to the former dictator. Upon leaving, he asked Admiral Rodríguez Calderón to accompany him. The former head of the Cuban Navy spent almost the entire time with Batista since his wife Martha travelled to New York.
Batista and Calderón were "taken for a drive" through Trujillo City and it was already getting dark when the car in which they were traveling left the capital. In short, they were going to La 40 jail.
There, in separate cells, they spent the night and part of the next day and, Batista would say in a letter months later, and already in Funchal, that he sent to Rivero Agüero and signed with the pseudonym Mateo, "they forced me to sweep my room."
The head of Trujillo's aids, he who always spoke to him with respect and standing to attention, went to La 40 to free him. He apologized. He told him that it was an abuse of authority for failing to register Batista as a foreigner and that the Generalissimo was very embarrassed. But that little outing and the brief stay in prison softened him forever and in the hotel, bathed and cleanly dressed, he paid the amount of the debt. The former strong man of Cuba, the once favorite son of Washington, the dictator whom, in the Pan-American Conference of 1956, President Eisenhower called "my friend", had been made a fool for good. Days later Trujillo called him again. He wanted one million dollars to defray the costs of anti-Cuban activities. Batista extended him the check without saying a word.
His future in the Dominican Republic was uncertain. At the end of June '59, the influential North American journalist Drew Pearson, closely linked to the State Department, wrote in his column: "(.) What will happen at the hands of his former Army officers or Trujillo, remains to be seen."
On July 17th a dispatch from the AP wire service reported that the former dictator had been arrested at the airport when trying to leave Trujillo City aboard a private plane. The same day, another press release, dated in Washington, said that Batista came to the U.S. Consulate in Santo Domingo to finally request entry into the United States. The information did not specify if permission was granted.
The U.S. government seemed to have abandoned him to his fate. The wife of the former dictator didn't succeed in being received by Mrs. Eisenhower and appealed to her through a public letter. Meanwhile, Gonzalo Güell, former Minister of State of Cuba, traveled to European chanceries trying to get some country to grant asylum to the dictator. His New York lawyer screamed blue murder: the life of the former General was in danger in the Dominican Republic.
At last, the State Department decided to act and asked the Brazilian Foreign Ministry to negotiate asylum in Portugal. Before leaving the Dominican Republic, Batista had to hand over another two million dollars to Trujillo for permission to leave. It was the month of October 1959 and a photo caught him upon his arrival in the Barajas airport in Madrid. He had lost his hair in the Dominican Republic.
It should be said that what the months spent in the Benefactor's Santo Domingo cost Batista, is a matter not fully clarified and for which different figures are offered. Two men, Orlando Piedra and Roberto Fernandez Miranda, very close to the former head of state, maintain that what he turned over didn't exceed one million dollars of the three that Trujillo demanded, a quantity that evidently doesn't include payment for the San Cristóbal carbines. But in the already referred to letter to Rivero Agüero and that he signed as Mateo, Batista complains of his stay in the Dominican Republic, where Trujillo "robbed me of four million dollars and I had to sweep my room."
THE CHINAMAN MYSTERY
Now we roll back the time machine. It is December 31, 1958 and in Columbia a Dominican delegation waits for Batista. Trujillo sends it to coordinate the dispatch of troops to shore up an army incapable of winning even a skirmish against the rebels. The group is composed of Colonel Johnny Abbes García, head of Trujillo's sinister Intelligence, and senior Army and Navy officers. Accompanying the delegation is a Yugoslav and a Chinaman who come to resolve the problem of the San Cristóbal carbines that sometimes fired and other times didn't. Batista refused to receive them and left them hoodwinked in Cuba. Orlando Piedra writes in his memoirs that they searched for the men under their command throughout Havana to remove them from the Island, and that it wasn't possible to come up with them, but that Abbes García did not forgive what happened and from there the treatment that he gave to Batista supporters who arrived in Santo Domingo. He held one of them, Captain Juan Castellanos from the Bureau of Investigations, hostage for a couple of days and subjected him to torture with electric shocks after having kept him submerged in tanks of foul water.
How those Trujillo supporters left Cuba is something that isn't entirely clear. He says only that the Chinaman couldn't do it and that arrested, he spent his time in a Cuban prison where he killed time by teaching his language to other inmates. There is another version. At seven o'clock in the morning of January 1st, Porfirio Rubirosa, play boy becoming Generalissimo's ambassador in Havana, knocked on the door of a distinguished lawyer, his neighbor in the Biltmore suburb. He asked that he get him a light aircraft to take Colonel Abbes García, the Yugoslav and the Chinaman out of Cuba, with a destination for Miami. Abbes and the Yugoslav could enter the United States; the other, no. It was, however, a surmountable obstacle and they achieved it when, from the light aircraft in flight, they flung out the Chinamen into the Straits of Florida.
Two dictatorships, that of Trujillo and that of Somoza, tried, in the final months of 1958, to save another dictatorship. The three fell.
*Translated by Susana Hurlich
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