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The government of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes was sickly and weak from the moment it took power.1 Sumner Welles and the United States had their fingerprints all over the provisional government. On the day Céspedes was sworn in, August , , Welles went to congratulate the new president. The embrace between the two men, captured in photos in all the national dailies and weeklies, was awkward. Welles, who stood at well over six feet, towered over Céspedes, who was about six to nine inches shorter. The imbalance in their stature could be seen as a metaphor for the power imbalance between the United States and Cuba. Céspedes was president, in large part, because of Welles. The ambassador agreed to accept General Herrera as provisional president, but when the Cuban Army declined, he worked hard to promote Céspedes as the compromise candidate. Once in power, Welles did all he could to keep him there by securing quick diplomatic recognition from Washington and proposing a loan to assist the government. As a career diplomat and former ambassador to the United States, Céspedes had strong ties to Washington. A personal friend of Welles, he was eminently acceptable to the Roosevelt administration .2 Gaining the acceptance of the Cuban people would be far more difficult. In the days after Machado’s abrupt departure, mobs roamed the streets of Havana and other major cities hunting down supporters of the former regime. Radio stations urged residents to “stay in their homes and keep their blinds down.”3 Havana’s chief of police, Antonio Aincart, committed suicide after being cornered by an angry crowd. Several days later, his rotting corpse was disinterred and dragged through the streets of the capital. Machado          8 sergeants’ revolt 05Chap5.qxd 2/26/2006 7:26 AM Page 53 supporters were beaten and gunned down in broad daylight. One man was cornered on the third floor of a Havana building, shot, and then thrown out a window onto the pavement below. The crowd then picked him up, carried him up the stairs, and threw him out the window a second time. Struggling to his knees, the man was kicked in the face and left to die in the street.4 While driving along the Prado, one of the main streets in central Havana, the ambassador’s wife, Mathilda Welles, saw that “a small crowd of men were dragging a Machado suspect on the street, a rope tied to his neck. The victim had been shot and killed that morning.”5 The Cuban press captured and fed on the bloodlust by providing a daily menu of photos of the corpses, beaten and mutilated. Typically, youthful revolutionaries posed with the bloody corpses, smiling and making obscene gestures to mock the dead.6 The Presidential Palace was sacked, and participants ran through the streets displaying their “souvenirs,” including a water cooler, pillows, chairs, and typewriters.7 The homes of Machado supporters were looted and destroyed as members of the army and police looked on, occasionally taking part in the activities. Pro-Machado newspapers were firebombed, including El Heraldo de Cuba in Havana and Diario de Cuba in Santiago. Any link to Machado, no matter how tenuous, was sufficient to justify violence, such as the case of Machado’s barber, whose pornographic theater was destroyed by an angry mob. The weekly news magazine, Carteles, described the violence as “popular justice” and editorially endorsed it.8 The armed forces and police were unable and unwilling to control the mobs, because they themselves were suspect. As the bulwarks of Machado’s regime, the military and police were viewed with apprehension and disdain. The slightest suggestion that a soldier or officer had close ties with the disgraced dictator was enough to ensure his arrest.9 Many police officers abandoned their posts after becoming targets of mob violence. A national debate ensued over how to “purify” the army. By the end of August, the Céspedes government arrested twenty-one officers and fifty soldiers, but no one thought the purification process should stop there.10 There were rumors that the fifteen thousand–man army would be reduced by several thousand and that salaries would be cut.11 The ABC, which held several cabinet positions in the Céspedes administration, proposed mandatory military service as an alternative to the volunteer army. With the armed forces in disgrace, factionalism was the order of the day as each segment of the military...

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