Fulgencio Batista

Biography

Fulgencio Batista was born in 1901 in the Banes area of eastern Cuba to a poor family and was registered at birth as Rubén Zaldívar. He left home at fourteen and worked as a labourer and at other trades before joining the army as a private in 1921. Having learned shorthand, he served as a sergeant stenographer, and in September 1933 he emerged as the leader of the Sergeants' Revolt, which toppled the provisional government of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes.

As army chief of staff with the rank of colonel, Batista dominated Cuban politics through a series of short-lived presidents for the rest of the 1930s. He won the 1940 presidential election, put the new 1940 Constitution into effect, and aligned Cuba with the Allies in the Second World War. After his term ended in 1944 he lived in Florida, and he was elected to the Cuban Senate in absentia in 1948.

Running third in the 1952 presidential race, Batista seized power in a military coup in March of that year. He suspended the constitution and many civil liberties, was returned as president in the 1954 election after the main opposition candidate withdrew, and ruled with US backing while his police repressed opponents and Havana's casinos and businesses enriched the regime and organised crime. The armed rebellion of Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement grew from 1956, and after rebel victories at the end of 1958 Batista resigned and fled on 1 January 1959. He lived in exile, mainly in Portugal and Spain, until his death in Marbella in 1973.