An old soc.history.what-if post of mine:
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You know, so much has been made about how Castro survived all kinds of brushes with death (I've gone through many of them in my "Killing Fidel Castro" series) that we sometimes forget that the "pretty mulatto" ("mulato lindo") Batista had similarly good luck. As Justo Carrillo put it (in *Cuba 1933: Students, Yankees and Soldiers*, pp. 355-6): "in sharp contrast with legendary Independence general Antonio Maceo, who died in battle with twenty-three combat scars on his body, Batista and Castro, who used violence in their quest for power, always managed to come through unscathed. Batista, after the attacks on the Hotel Nacional and Atares Castle, and two coups d'etat, died without a single scar. Castro, after Cayo Confites, Bogota, Moncada, and Sierra Maestra, has never been scratched."
I have already discussed one close brush of Batista with death: the attack on the Presidential Palace by the Revolutionary Directorate on March 13, 1957...Recently, I have learned that the Grau government had an excellent chance to kill Batista in 1933 when Batista's political career had just started. What happened was this:
By October 29, it looked as if Grau's revolutionary government was on its last legs. Batista had reached an agreement with the ABC and the Nationalists to force Grau's resignation and proclaim Mendieta as president. Sumner Welles wrote confidently that "The general public expects the fall of the government tonight or tomorrow, although the change will not in my opinion take place before the middle of next week." What happened, however, is that the students learned of Batista's plan, and decided to force the issue and take the offensive before Batista was ready. They convened an urgent meeting of the Revolutionary Junta, and sent some of the most loyal revolutionaries--Ruben de Leon, Carlos Prio, and Antonio Guiteras--to probe the loyalty of several military commanders of the Havana District. They soon discovered that Batista, in his conspiratorial haste, had neglected to inform many officers of his political plan. Consequently, those officers not only disassociated themselves from the conspiracy but offered their services to the revolutionary government. Two governmental decrees were prepared at once: One ordered the arrest and court-martial of Batista as a traitor. The other named Major (formerly Sergeant) Pablo Rodriguez (who had been the original organizer of the Enlisted Men's Club that had carried out the September Fourth "sergeant's revolt"), a man loyal to the government, as commander-in-chief of the army. On the evening of November 3, armed with these decrees and the decision to kill Batista if he offered any resistance, the students, Grau, Guiteras, certain other members of the government, the principal military commanders of Havana District, and the members of the Revolutionary Junta met at the house of junta member Sergio Carbo and waited for the arrival of Batista.
Unaware of the real purpose of the meeting, Batista came with only one military aide. As soon as he entered, he sensed the mortal danger he was facing. When Grau accused Batista of treason, Batista admitted his faults, recanted his political sins--which he attributed to "naivete"--and pledged his loyalty to the revolutionary government (more specifically to Grau, whom he praised to the skies). To the surprise and indignation of some of the revolutionaries, Grau not only accepted Batista's apologies but expressed confidence in Batista and agreed to let him remain chief of staff. With evident relief, Batista returned to his commanding position at Camp Columbia.
Why was Grau so forgiving? According to Prio, he claimed that Batista had been so scared that he would not create any more trouble, and that at any rate at least Batista was a known quality, and that his successor might be worse. (An alternative explanation is that Grau desired to free himself from the Student Directorate and assert his own independence.) In any event, as the historian Luis E. Aguilar, in *Cuba 1933: Prologue to Revolution*, pp. 191-2, has noted:
"Grau's move demoralized his allies. The military officers who had openly backed an anti-Batista movement now faced the prospect of continuing under Batista's command. Their survival would depend on their loyalty not to the government but to Batista. Angry and confused by Grau's attitude, the group of students that had been acting on his behalf had only two alternatives: either to denounce Grau and assume the initiative, or accept his action and follow a course which to them seemed disastrously
wrong. But to move against Grau--kill Batista on their own, as Guiteras proposed--they needed the consensus of the entire student body. An urgent meeting of the Student Directory was convened the following day at the Presidential Palace. The session was presided over by Ramon Miyar, who apparently belonged to the 'moderates.' The decision to act not only against Batista, but against Grau, was too much for the majority. In spite of the pleading of the minority of radicals, after a turbulent session the Student Directory decided to avoid censuring the government or taking a definite stand by dissolving itself....[T]heir excuse was that the revolutionary government was finally consolidated in power. Actually what was accomplished was to deprive the government of its last semblance of organized support." (pp. 191-2)
Batista temporarily suspended meetings with oppositionist groups and devoted his energies to strengthening his position in the army. This was only a strategic retreat, and Sumner Welles (with whom Batista was always in contact) explained the reason for it:
"Batista's own violent animosity to Grau San Martin, which is now growing due to his knowledge of a plot favored by Grau to seize Batista and replace him with another sergeant, makes it inevitable that Batista will move against Grau, *provided he can be reasonably confident of the loyalty of the soldiers in the various Havana barracks.*" (emphasis added; quoted in Aguilar, p. 193.)
Batista's momentary withdrawal from opposition left the ABC and the Nationalists alone to face the government. They (or rather some of their supporters) attempted a rebellion on the morning of November 8, but it failed. Grau and his supporters stood firm, and by the afternoon, Batista, pressed by his officers and by the inevitability of the situation, ordered the army to fight in favor the government By the next day, the rebels had surrendered (some of them were killed after their surrender at Atares fortress, just as happened with the pro-Cespedes officers at the Hotel Nacional in October [1])Yet the victory did not help the government survive very long. Welles was as determined as ever not to recognize the government--and since all its other opponents had failed, he had nobody to turn to but Batista. Batista assumed more and more authority over the army, increasing his contacts with and his promises to the officers (formerly enlisted men like himself). By January, Batista, with the help of Welles' successor, Jefferson Caffery, was able to force Grau's resignation. Batista became either de facto or de jure ruler of Cuba from 1933 to 1944 and then again from 1952 through 1958.
So: what if Batista had been summarily court-martialed and shot on November 3-4, 1933?
(1) Would it lead to US marines landing? I doubt it. Of course Welles would want this; he would be appalled by Batista being executed for a "treason" which after all consisted of Batista's conspiring not only with the Cuban opposition but with him. But whether he could get it is another matter; FDR and Hull did not want to send marines, and I doubt if they thought the shooting of one ex-sergeant and his replacement by another would be sufficient justification.
(2) Could the regime survive, enact needed reforms, and call the Constituent Assembly it promised? One big question mark here is whether the army would stay loyal, or whether Rodriguez would just turn out to be another Batista. I would doubt the latter, because from the little I know about him, Rodriguez simply lacked Batista's political skills and drive for power. Still, the US possessed enormous power even without landing the marines and it might eventually find someone in the Cuban military willing and able to bring down the Grau government. In any event, the loss of this opportunity to eliminate Batista once and for all still rankled with the revolutionaries decades later, Here is Justo Carrillo, a member of the Student Directory in the early 1930s
writing in the 1980s about the events of November 3, 1933 (*Cuba 1933: Students, Yankees and Soldiers*, pp. 249-50):
"And sure enough, not one of the district commanders failed us. They all agreed with the revolution, that their program was the Directorio's, that they supported Doctor Grau San Martin, and that Batista was not needed. Furthermore, they concurred that, his attitude being so offensive and his actions reflecting nothing less than military treason in connivance with a hostile foreign power to bring down his own government, there was not a Military Code in the world that did not demand that he be shot...
"The group moved to the Palace, met with Grau, and decided to carry out the following decisions: First, we had to prepare an order of arrest against Batista as a traitor; a Summary Court-Martial had to be called and the actions of that Court recorded along with its sentence ordering the immediate execution of Batista; the presidential decree ordering the execution would have to be prepared; and finally, we must immediately send delegates to the newspapers to hold publication of the morning edition for the report of Batista's execution. All that was completed in the brief hours between two in the afternoon and eight thirty in the evening...Juridically speaking, at eight thirty on the evening of the third of November, Mr. Batista was in the next world. That is to say that the members of the Directorio, who with Guiteras had visited the district commanders and who arrived at the Palace to go from there to Carbo's home to arrest Batista and conduct him to La Cabana Fortress for execution, did not have to worry about the paperwork because that bureaucratic labor was complete. Thus, the only thing left to accomplish was the physical act of carrying Mr. Batista to and placing him in front of the execution walls that already existed in the Laurels Moat, where so many people that did not merit it would be shot one year later..."
[1] Fidel Castro in his "History Will Absolve Me" speech, did not fail to mention both of these instances of *batistianos* killing opponents after the latter had surrendered, though he argued that the *batistiano* conduct at Moncada was much worse: "It is common knowledge that in 1933, at the end of the battle at the National Hotel, some officers were murdered after they surrendered. Bohemia Magazine protested energetically. It is also known that after the surrender of Fort Atarés the besiegers' machine guns cut down a row of prisoners. And that one soldier, after asking who Blas Hernández was, blasted him with a bullet directly in the face, and for this cowardly act was promoted to the rank of officer. It is well-known in Cuban history that assassination of prisoners was fatally linked with Batista's name. How naive we were not to foresee this! However, unjustifiable as those killings of 1933 were, they took place in a matter of minutes, in no more time than it took for a round of machine gun fire. What is more, they took place while tempers were still on edge. This was not the case in Santiago de Cuba [in 1953]..."
http://www.marxists.org/history/cuba/archive/castro/1953/10/16.htm