to change his approach to the take over. Set battles were not the option anymore to Castro. A war of hit-and-run, with bombings, sabotage, and harassment led to Batista responding with counter terror acts. Batista's counter attacks would broaden the support for Fidel. At this point, Batista could no longer maintain order of the state. In the next election Batista hoped that using another front man would get him out of the hot seat. The voters did not want any part of Batista and felt that his time had run out as the leader either directly or indirectly. He lost all the important support in Washington "and the country had become so convinced of his fall that the economy was increasingly disrupted as businessmen and bankers waited for the inevitable."(Smith p.275) Batista knew that this battle would end up in a loss, so he designated a successor for the presidency and left with his family for the Dominican Republic.Fidel RulesCastro wanted to change things for the underprivileged, the rural poor, and the working middle class. At the UN meeting in New York he wanted not only the United States, but also the rest of the world, that Cuba was opposed to foreign intervention but also not a communist. He managed to keep the U.S. at a distance from the Cuban economy and politics. On May 17, 1959, Fidel carried out the Agrarian Reform Law. "This law split up giant estates, expropriating farmlands over 1000 acres, with compensation to be paid in Cuban currency bonds in proportion to the declared value for taxes in 1958."(Smith p.277) This simply meant that no foreigners would be able to purchase agricultural land. The United States thought that this might have been Castro's first step to communism.After two years of office, Castro had four basic trends taken hold: (1) the nationalization of the economy; (2) a sharp swing to the Soviet bloc; (3) the establishment of an authoritarian regime; and (4) the launching of an egalitarian soci...
