TRANSCRIPT OF BROADCAST BY FULTON LEWIS, JR.

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP63T00245R000100220002-4
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 12, 2004
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: January 1, 1959
• Content Type: TRANS

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I
TRANSCRIPT OF BROADCAST
By
Fulton Lewis, Jr.
Station WOL at 7-7:15 P. M.
1 January 1959
A very happy,'new:year to you, ladies and gentlemen, But
if you happen to be in the little island republic of Cuba, it
is not so happy because that island is torn with riots and
bloodshed; the city of Havana is completely out of control;
Santa Clara fell to the Fidel Castro rebels last night; his
armies now are marching now on Havana; and President Fulgencio
Batista has been overthrown and has fled for his life to the
Dominican Republic together with most of the top side of his
cabinet. With him in his flight was Andres Rivera Aguerro,
the president elect who was handpicked by Batista to succeed
him in the elections of last November 3rd which Castro and
his rebels refused to recognize on the grounds that they were
fraudulent, which they very probably were because fraudulent
elections are pretty much standard equipment for all Latin
American dictators. Batista left behind him a three-man mili-
tary junta which very clearly is going to be short lived be-
cause Castro's leaders have already announced that the junta
is unacceptable to them. Under Cuban law the senior justice
of the Supreme Court, in this case Carlos M. Piedra, auto-
matically becomes the provisional president and he issued an
immediate appeal to the Castro rebels for a cease fire. He
might have saved himself the trouble, however, because the
main portion of violence was not the doing of the Castro forces
on their way up from Santa Clara, but right there in Havana on
the part of mobs and rioters who broke into stores, pillaged
the stores, smashed windows and doors, rode through the streets
with volleys of indiscriminate gunplay and generally tearing
the city into bedlam. There are no reports of any American
casualties as yet, but that may be because no information is
coming out of the city or indeed within the city is obtain-
able. Hotels have locked and barred their doors and all guests
have been ordered to stay in their rooms, but the turmoil con-
tinues and the civilian police make no effort to control the
mobs. In fact one dispatch says that no police were in evi-
dence on the street throughout most of the day.
The armed forces apparently have gone over to Castro's
side and the main forces at Havana, at Camp Colombia, are re-
maining there apparently awaiting his orders.
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Batista's 25-year-old son fled to Jacksonville, Florida
with 52 other refugees. He said his father's decision to
leave Cuba came very quickly--which seems to be a masterpiece
of understatement--in the small hours of this morning and no-
body had time to gather up anything except the barest personal
belongings. They boarded respective planes at the military
airport at Camp Colombia from which, day before yesterday,
Cuban air force planes were maintaining a continuous round of
missions against the rebels at Santa Clara hoping to suppress
the revolution in Batista's behalf.
Young Batista said his father made his decision in the
hope that it would pacify the people and end the bloodshed,
and that President Batista wants only peace for the Cuban
people. The son went on to say that some of the revolution-
aries have good intentions,but there is a large number of them
who are fortune seekers and that there is a very dangerous Com-
munist influence. He said that several of Castro's chief lieu-
tenants are members of the Communist party and that the rebel
movement has strong Communist backing. He said they probably
are a minority of the Castro movement but they are the best
organized minority and they have great influence in shaping
Castro's policies in such cases as promising a partition of
privately owned land and nationalization of industries and other
measures of socialistic tendency.
That Communist question was uppermost in all minds here
in Washington, too, make no mistake about it, although nobody
seems to have any answer to it, Assistant Secretary of State
Roy Rubottom, Jr., in charge of Latin American affairs, was
questioned about it yesterday even before the climax of this
revolution, before a closed session of the Senate Foreign Re-
lations Committee, and he didn't have any definitive answer
either. The best he was able to come up with was the nega-
tive statement that "I am aware of no evidence that there is
any organized Communist element in the rebel movement."
Just where the CIA, Mr-Allen Dulles's Central Intelligence
Agency, has been in all this, if this government doesn't have
any better information than that, would seem to be open to
serious question. Cuba after all is a very easy country in
which to operate when it comes to intelligence. It couldn't
be easier, and yet the State Department comes up with answers
of this kind, "No information." This much can be said, the
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leaders in exile in the Miami area certainly are not Commu-
nist in any sense of the word, nor is former President Carlos
Prio Socorras, who has been the key figure in all of these
activities. He has been in exile in Miami since March 10,
1952, when he and his government were overthrown in a blood-
less coup d'etat by Batista. He said that he would try to
fly to Havana this afternoon in the hope that he can be of
assistance in restoring order.
(From here on the broadcast made no further reference
to CIA).
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