Cuba: The Underground

With the air of a man who has won a great victory—or would like people to think he has—Fidel Castro turned his guns from the sea and ended the mythical “Yankee invasion” scare. Calling for “a quest of peace” with the new Kennedy Administration, he turned his attention inland last week, and for good reason. There is a very real foe to fight at home. It is the underground rebellion, operating in Cuba’s hills and cities, infiltrating the army and government agencies, doing more damage to the new dictatorship in six months than Castro had managed against the old in a year.

Flying southeast down the island to the hills where 400 rebels are holed up, Castro first tried to arrange a parley with one of their leaders, a former captain in his army. When that failed, 10,000 militia attacked and were driven off. In Havana, Castro wasted no time in persuasion; his revolutionary tribunals held 13 trials in five days, cranked out prison terms of nine to 30 years for 77 “counter-revolutionaries,” death for nine more.

Castro’s Techniques. The killings, bringing Castro’s total executions to 587, will not stamp out the movement. The top leadership operates in Miami, headquarters of the Frente, which hopes to become a sort of supreme command for the harassment of Castro. The Frente is making impressive preparations: guerrilla training camps in Florida and Guatemala, arms-carrying PT boats that average a trip a week to Cuba, an air group of some 80 flyers who reportedly fly out of the mystery field at Retalhuleu in Guatemala and the inactive U.S. Marine Corps Opa-Locka airbase in Florida.

So far, the Frente has done little fighting itself inside Cuba. The actual sabotage is the work of a group of anti-Communist former Castro followers who call themselves the Revolutionary Movement of the People and are organized in every province and major municipality. Using the techniques they learned with Castro, they fight him by breaking political prisoners out of jail, by derailing trains, shooting up militia patrols and triggering bombs at strategic points. M.R.P. men blacked out Camagüey for three days, went on to set off 13 blasts that knocked out main Havana power circuits for 20 hours.

Six Months Left? Yet for all the activity, some of the rebels are growing discouraged. They lack sufficient means, coordination, complain that the U.S. is half asleep and not doing as much as it could. Operations are difficult; arms-drop plans misfire, and the weapons fall into Castro’s hands. On two occasions M.R.P. efforts to arrange arms drops to disillusioned army officers planning to desert with their commands failed when the arms could not be got. As a result, the process of transforming disaffected Cuban army units into active anti-Castro rebels is almost suspended.

The underground Big Two are wide apart on politics and on who gets what funds. The Frente apparently gets virtually all the U.S. financial aid to Cuba’s underground (estimated to range from $135,000 monthly to as high as $500,000 on occasions), and Mr. “B,” the CIA agent in charge, reportedly has suggested the M.R.P. get help from the Frente.

The fight against Castro is also getting tougher. The break in diplomatic relations, plus the U.S. decision last week to shut off all travel to Cuba, makes it harder to shunt agents back and forth. Castro’s decree of the death penalty for all counter-revolutionary activities—including mere possession of a bottle of gasoline (in Castro’s lexicon, that equals one Molotov cocktail)—”is having a great effect,” says a Frente leader. “Underground work is much harder now. People are no longer willing to hide revolutionaries because it means death.”

Worst of all, the rebels fear that time is on Castro’s side, that they must move faster. Warns an underground chief who was once a high official in Castro’s government : “If Castro gets through the first six to nine months of this year, he will have a more or less stable garrison state—operating on a minimal level, but operating. Most of the people will give in. They cannot live forever on tension.”