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While a large group of bearded men triumphantly entered Havana, a wealthy family left Cuba never to return.

F

idel Castro and Che Guevara

, commanded by the Sierra Maestra guerrillas, had won their revolution and on New Year's Day 1959 they entered the capital as power was diluted between the fingers of

Fulgencio Batista

.

But, for a moment, let's forget how Cubans viewed regime change.

Let's not even think about how the whole world saw it or how it sees it now.

At 73,

Bobby Batista is

already a year older than his father was when he died.

And it is curious that now that he has crossed that threshold, he has decided to publish

Son of Batista

(Verbum) a work about the life of his father, the dictator, and about how his family lived the exile that still lasts.

The look on that New Year's Day and all the following is the look of a child who did not understand politics at all, who did not even care about her, but had games and friends in his head, and his greatest concern was probably doubting whether he would sleep those days in the Presidential Palace, on the farm, or in the barracks house, the three houses in which he spent his life.

Roberto Batista, photographed in Madrid.ANTONIO HEREDIAMUNDO

However,

to this day it continues to cause him tremors to hear his last name aloud

, as if a beating was going to happen at the

top of his voice

, or as if he were again in that New York airport, exiled without even knowing it, when he and his 11-year-old brother got off the plane alone and were insulted by a mob enraged at their father.

Shortly afterwards, a swarm of journalists arrived with those flashes that blinded the person being portrayed, and questions about things he did not understand.

Minutes later,

the kids spent hours alone in a room for undocumented immigrants

.

When the Cuban dictator left for Santo Domingo, where he made the first of many other stops, Bobby was nine years old.

Few times has the story of Cuba been told from Batista's side, cursed by what history has revealed about him:

corrupt

, coup plotter, dictator, friend of the mafia, inducer of State crimes ...

And the book of his son Bobby, second son of his second wife ("I was born condemned to be a second man," he says sarcastically), is mainly the book of his family and his life, not the life of a politician.

Bobby, apart from being startled even when he hears his last name,

has not been able to free himself in his entire life from being Batista's son

, with what that entails, such as seeing his father appear, in fiction, with Michael Corleone himself: "For

The Godfather

still asks us if it was true that we had the gold telephone. And you know what? Which is very possible, but not because of an ostentatious whim of my father, but because the president of the telephone company surely gave it as a symbolic detail to the implement the lines throughout the island. "

The story of Batista in the Pearl of the Caribbean is much more than

the golden telephone

.

In the 1930s he participated in the "sergentada", a revolt in which he himself, a sergeant at the time, ended up as head of the Armed Forces with the rank of colonel.

Cuba was a very young nation, let us remember that a little more than 30 years before it was still Spanish.

Batista with his family.Family Archive WORLD

As a military leader, he supported different governments until in 1940 he became president of Cuba in an election and signed a new Constitution considered very progressive.

His son assures that the relationship with unions and parties, including those on the left, was excellent.

A detail confirms this, at least in part:

Pablo Neruda

, who would read a poem dedicated to Fidel Castro in 1959, said of Batista in 1944, when he left power after Ramón Grau won the presidency: "We salute in him the continuator and restorer of a sister democracy, to the man who received the anarchized and torn country ... ".

That 1944, still with the world at war, Batista lived his first exile and went to the United States, where years later, in Manhattan, Bobby was born.

What did Batista ruminate during those years abroad? He abandoned the constitutional path of 1940, he returned to the spirit of the

sergeant

, pride could him. His decision almost 70 years ago changed the future of Cuba and its people until today. Bobby does not explain it to him because he was so young that he did not know his father's thoughts: "This book should have been written by one of my deceased older brothers, who understood Dad better. I think he thought he was doing his best. for Cuba, which believed that it still had things to contribute, that it could not allow itself to leave the government in the hands of others, and

its strong character led it to carry out a coup

. It was a great mistake, without a doubt. "

1952 arrived and Batista struck when he saw that he was not going to win again.

He became a de facto dictator.

In the following seven years his black legend was forged: torture, censorship of the media, assassinations, alliances with gangsters and large companies that exploited the people ... The

banana cliché

.

While the revolutionaries harassed him, he predicted that Castroism could also be a bad thing for Cuba, but no one was listening to him anymore.

"Another of my father's big mistakes was releasing Fidel Castro from jail, because as soon as he did, all the guerrillas left for Sierra Maestra," he recalls.

Bobby explains that he has dedicated a large part of his life to diving in archives and libraries, to speaking with witnesses and has never found solid evidence of many of those accusations: "

Of the mafia

, for example, beyond a photo that is doctored in the one that appears next to a mafia leader, there is nothing, "he argues. Does that mean it's a lie? Well, neither does his son know for sure, but he thinks that "Castro's propaganda did a lot to protect Batista's image and cover up the achievements of his government, which also had some very important ones, and buried the 1940 constitution."

The paradox of all this is that Bobby remembers Batista as an extremely loving father, who never raised his voice to his children, who took time to spend with them and play.

He gave them good advice and cultivated their minds while trying to give them the best life possible.

Who doesn't yearn for that for their children?

The family exile went through different dictatorships.

First, that of Trujillo, in Santo Domingo: "

Trujillo asked my father for help to invade Cuba

, he told him that he wanted to drive out the communists, but what he wanted was to keep it for himself, so my father did not help him and that's why he locked up in jail".

The next thing, with his wife and nine children scattered around the world, was to reach the Azores, sheltered by the

Salazar dictatorship

, although Bobby assures that it was a coincidence.

A short time in Lisbon gave way to a longer time in Madeira, in rugged Funchal.

While his family reunited, Bobby grew up and went through the Swiss boarding school where future dictators such as Kim Jong-un of North Korea, or Mohamed Reza Palevhi himself, the Shah of Persia, had studied.

Another dictator crossed his path:

Franco

.

The family liked Madrid and Marbella.

In Portugal they frequented Estoril, where the father of King Juan Carlos went into exile.

The whole life passed between exiles and dictatorships of others.

One day in 1973, one year before the Portuguese Carnation Revolution and two before Franco's death,

Fulgencio Batista died in Marbella

.

He is

buried in Madrid, in the San Isidro cemetery

, and the streets of Chamartín are now the refuge of Bobby and his family, still feeling daily the presence of the man who with his pride marked the Cuban destiny.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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