CUBA: Ready for War

Burdened by as much of their shabby belongings as they could carry, some 2,000 peasants of Cuba’s rebel-held Sierra Maestra region plodded down mountain tracks last week toward lowland towns in the eastern province of Oriente. Evacuated by army order, they left behind the makings of a jungle guerrilla war-to-the-fmish between troops of President Fulgencio Batista and rebels led by Fidel Castro.

As the antirebel drive began, Batista made his determination plain. He sent his PT boats, subchasers and gunboats to blockade the coastline south and west of the mountains. He airlifted more than 250 army reinforcements from Havana to Oriente. His Air Force B-26s skimmed the mountain treetops, looking for signs of rebel movements. He bitterly denounced “predatory oppositionists” and “criminal elements, including Communist collaborators,” who “seek through terrorism and disorder to damage their nation’s economy as well as its prestige to satisfy their own personal anti-patriotic ambitions.” He rejected any thought of a truce.

Moving Target. But wiping out Castro & Co. called for more than angry words. The government troops, trained on flat, open land, had to fight in mountainous terrain in which the rebels were thoroughly at home. Batista’s forces had orders to shoot at anything that moved—but in the tangled, rain-soaked forests of the Sierra Maestra it was hard to see anything move. In the 5½ months following Castro’s Mexico-based invasion, his rebels learned how to fire from cover and silently slip away to fire again. Castro kept on the move constantly, toughening his men by day-long forced marches and showing them every strategic rock, gully and tall tree. He won the good will of mountain peasants by spending hours in conversation with them, paying them in cold Cuban cash for food and help. He kept discipline taut, collected recruits a few at a time. By the time last week’s campaign began, he had close to 400 seasoned men, most of them equipped with modern weapons. And though evacuated peasants jammed hospitals and army barracks in towns surrounding the mountains, upwards of 30,000 were left behind to continue supplying Castro with home-grown vegetables and freshly butchered meat.

The High Road. Despite an army announcement that it planned to mop up Castro’s revolt within a week, Batista’s troops moved with a caution bordering on ineffectiveness. Army troops patrolled the main roads leading into the mountains, but footpaths remained open. Castro’s couriers walked in and out of Santiago de Cuba, capital of Oriente, without interference.

Beyond the mountains, Castro’s sabotage campaign damaged stored sugar, a railway warehouse, a railroad line. Bombs exploded nightly in Havana. The center of civil resistance was Santiago, where Castro has become a romantic hero. There, 26 women were arrested for marching through the streets with a Cuban flag and posters protesting the “killing of our children,” and ordering Batista’s police chief to “get out.”

In his heavily guarded palace in Havana, Batista looked tired but confident. Still backed by the army, he could count on a good sugar crop to keep the island’s economy on an even keel. But as long as Castro remained free to fight and sabotage, Batista’s regime would obviously be in danger.