In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

7 good neigHbor batista Diaz, Machado, Gómez, Ibarra, Perón, Trujillo, Duvalier, Somoza, Stroessner , Pinochet, Castillo-Armas, Batista: for the better part of the twentieth century, US policy makers held their noses and cozied up with politically useful tyrants in Latin America. Somewhere back in junior high civics, most of us knew they were the neighborhood thugs; but at least they were our neighborhood thugs. At the height of the charade, we actually called it the Good Neighbor policy. Now little known—or at least little remembered—is the bizarre local interlude when one such figure also enjoyed domestic notoriety as the neighbor just down the street. To be exact , from 1944 to 1948, and then off and on again during the 1950s, even after he had reassumed the Cuban dictatorship in 1952, Fulgencio Batista was the good neighbor who made his home at 139 Halifax Avenue in Daytona Beach, Florida. As late as 1956, the city held a Batista appreciation day, complete with a parade, banquets, and toasts. In 1957, presumably in gratitude and happy memory, the dictator and his wife in turn announced to a visiting Florida delegation the eventual bequest—with a phrasing still carefully noted as “a gift to the city and people of Daytona Beach”—of the family residential properties, along with the couple’s personal acquisitions of Cuban art. Today, the properties are no longer recognizable as such, with the original sites occupied by new construction. Meanwhile, trailing the increasingly shadowed vestiges of their place in history and memory, the Batista art treasures themselves remain there as the centerpiece of a museum collection unrivaled outside the island for its cultural value and beauty—at once the less than savory legacy of a community’s eager embrace of a despised tyrant and the glittering cultural reward of his civic benefaction. Various accounts are given of how Batista went from being absolute dictator of Cuba to being a homeowner in Daytona Beach. As to events on the Cuban side, the generally accepted explanation is that, having held power for more than a decade behind a series of presidential stand-ins, he Good Neighbor Batista 87 had miscalculated the outcome of the 1944 election, somehow allowing his handpicked candidate, Carlos Saladrigas Zayas, to lose to an old rival, Ramón Grau San Martín, and deemed it best to leave the country for a while. Often cited as equally important, however, was a parallel development in the dictator’s personal life, namely a desire to end his first marriage , to Elisa Godinez Gomez, mother of his three children, and begin his second, to his twenty-year-old mistress, Marta Fernandez Miranda, by whom he would father four more. If so, this was duly accomplished through the making of a new domestic life in Florida, albeit one that was not without its own residential complications . The American part of the narrative indeed begins with a story that his original choice of destination, Palm Beach, made it clear that, rich ex-dictator or no, a new resident of mixed Spanish, black, Indian, and Chinese racial ancestry would be decidedly unwelcome. According to this account, Batista and Marta, still his wife-to-be at that juncture, just pointed their car northward on US Highway 1 and chose Daytona Beach as the first place where people seemed cordial and welcoming. What is known for certain is that he quickly bought a typical large 1920s stone and stucco house on a riverside lot—as can still be discerned from dwellings of similar vintage along Halifax Avenue, a place of size and substance, but not of particular ostentation—and settled in as an accepted member of the community. His next-door neighbor was the retired industrialist and automotive pioneer Ransom Eli Olds, who had, among other things, put the town on the map at the turn of the century as an automobile mecca with its wide, flat beaches especially suited to speed racing. Presumably, they got on well enough for Batista eventually to be given the opportunity to buy the adjacent Olds property and riverfront acreage. Meanwhile, according to a Time magazine article of 12 April 1948, the resident dictator became known among fellow residents of the municipality for his brisk early morning exercise rowing on the river in a nine-foot dinghy, his tennis at the Daytona Beach Bath and Tennis Club, his twice or thrice weekly movie outings, and his occasional speeches to the Rotary Club. Driving about town on...

Share