A Point of View By Paul V. Montesino

A Date I could never forget.

A Point of View
By Paul V. Montesino, PhD, MBA, CSP.

 

On Wednesday, March 13, 1957, sixty-eight years ago, everything at work, the Economic Development and Social Bank of Cuba, in Spanish called “Banco de Desarrollo Economico y Social” (BANDES,) was business as usual. My boss, Dr. Jorge Diago Govin, the company’s Secretary and chief legal counsel of the bank and one of the most prestigious members of the legal profession in Cuba, asked me to deliver an important document needing official signature from Cuban President Fulgencio Batista. 

In a role like the known guarantors of bond issues in the United States, Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s come to mind, the Government of Cuba, through the National Bank, was the ultimate guarantor of any debt we issued at BANDES and, quoting the famous words from Harry Truman, the American president, “the buck ended at the top.”

It was a beautiful sunny spring day, and I welcomed the opportunity to stop reading long legal briefs and contracts with my lawyer colleagues and get out of the office to stretch my legs. I took a bus and went to the Presidential Palace (now the “Museum of the Revolution”) near the Havana waterfront at Refugio #1 between Monserrate and Zulueta (now Agramonte) streets and approached the main entrance. The armed soldier who was standing guard opened the gate allowing me to enter briefly to deliver my letter and stamp the copy as a receipt. I then left.

Minutes later, as I was walking blocks away in the direction of the Cuban National Bank at 402 Cuba Street to deliver another copy of the same document in need of a signature, a young University of Havana student, of my age, approached the same soldier. He had arrived in a van loaded with hidden armed revolutionaries who were pretending to be a flower delivery to the palace. 

Unlike me, he had a concealed rifle and shot and killed the guard I had just met. With help from the other attackers hidden in the truck he gained entrance to the palace with the intention of killing President Fulgencio Batista who was on one of the upper floors at the time and, hearing the commotion, hid in an elevator holding his revolver for protection surviving the attack. 

Forty attackers to the heavily protected palace and accomplices who had supported a coordinated effort elsewhere in the city never made it, including José Antonio Echeverría, known as “Manzanita,” a student leader, and Menelao Mora Morales, a former Autentico Party congressional representative and owner of public buses. 

In the ensuing bloodbath of a secret police gone berserk after the attack, one of the casualties was distinguished attorney and former senator Pelayo Cuervo Navarro, a prominent leader of the Ortodoxo Party (Castro’s political base) and presidential candidate who was not even aware of the attempt on the president’s life. Security agents killed Pelayo Cuervo the night of March 13, as the new wave of violence surged. When these revolutionaries died, Castro moved up on the revolutionary scale and became the next feasible option against Batista, time would make him probable, the political vacuum now certain.

Constitutional rights were suspended that day and political life in the nation, one more time, had become a nightmare. Earlier, in 1956, in Panama, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower had attended a conference with leaders from other Latin American nations and turned his back on Fulgencio Batista when the two approached accidentally and the latter extended his hand in vain to shake the US president’s. Mr. Eisenhower did not reciprocate and simply walked away. 

The not-so-subtle message from the U.S. President had a lot of strategic significance at the time. This political and military fiasco at the palace opened the way for only one Cuban group opposing the Batista regime at the time to succeed, the Castro revolutionaries in the eastern mountains of Cuba.  

They landed there on December 2 of 1956 on Playa Las Coloradas, Niquero, and were fighting a low-level guerrilla conflict of attrition in the jungle. It took twenty-two bloody months before Cuba could get rid of the Batista regime, a criminal chapter in our history book. A new violent phase of our political tragedy then opened, one that we still read, page after sad page, with pain and suffering.

The noise of the commotion in the ferocious attack on March 13 reached my ears after I left the presidential palace and was approaching, on foot, my next stop at 402 Cuba Street, the main office of the National Bank of Cuba where I cooled my heels for several hours before I felt safe enough to leave and return to my BANDES office. I had been only minutes and feet away from a situation endangering my life and was in the typical wrong place at the wrong time, but fortunately not the latter. 

I do not know if I should have been grateful or scared and in what order; I am sure I was both. After the incident, the University of Havana closed, college education had to wait until the political situation changed; a situation not made easier by a new revolutionary government relying on political indoctrination and taking no prisoners, just executing them for expedience if not for true justice. Cuba did not graduate medical doctors for a while.  

And as for me, it took five years and fourteen days more to open my doors to Miami, Florida, and my American life.

And that is my Point of View today. So long.

 

This story was first published in my memoirs “Pablito-A Cuban with a Boston Accent.”