Cuba: Pulling the Tail

With little support either inside or outside Cuba, the 275,000 Cuban exiles in the U.S. and around the Caribbean have long since ceased to pose a serious military threat to Fidel Castro. But they do manage to tweak the dictator’s beard from time to time. The most successful of them seems to be Manuel Artime, 31, a leader of the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion who heads an exile group calling itself the Revolutionary Recovery Movement. Last May, Artime’s men blew up a sugar mill at Cabo Cruz on the south coast of Oriente province. Last week their target was a coastal radar station in the same area manned by Russian technicians and guarded by 150 Castro militiamen.

As told by Artime in Panama afterwards, the men landed at night from two heavily armed torpedo boats. At a signal, one group attacked the militia garrison assisted by machine gun and recoilless rifle fire from the boats, thus pinning down most of the troops. An other group then fought its way to the radar station and destroyed most of the equipment with antitank weapons. The action lasted 55 minutes be fore the commandos escaped safely out to sea and back to “a secret base somewhere in the Caribbean.” His own group suffered no losses, Artime claimed; but he could not be sure about Castro casualties. “We have shown,” said Artime, “that we can pull the tail of the Russians.”