ABSTRACT
Fulgencio Batista was useful to the interests of the Cuban oligarchy, to American investors, to the Stalinist Communist party in Cuba, to the bourgeois political parties, to the Department of State in Washington, to the army he built and later destroyed, to organized labor, to all the pressure groups that operated in Cuba during the tiresome quarter of a century that elapsed between 1933 and 1958. Batista was boorish, and to avoid appearing so, he would end up being pretentiously uncouth. Behind his thirst for power there was no psychological motivation other than his deep-seated social resentment. He made pathetic efforts to be accepted by the Cuban aristocracy which were later expanded by befriending the European aristocracy. Fidel Castro was one of the five children of the second union of a Galician immigrant named Angel Castro who had arrived in Cuba about 1898 as a Spanish soldier to fight the mambises rebels.
