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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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