Cuba: Infiltration, Not Invasion

“WAR COMMUNIQUé NO. 1,” read the announcement from Miami. “Commandos of the Cuban Revolutionary Council have landed in different parts of Cuba, and the farmers are helping them. They are continuing the action, which will definitely lead to liberation of our country.”

Was it for real? It seemed like it; so radios blared and headlines blossomed.

Wall Street jumped nervously, as it often does when the talk is of war and peace. At one point, the ticker ran eleven minutes late on the New York Stock Exchange as the sell orders flooded in. Between noon and 1 p.m., nearly 1,400,000 shares had changed hands, and prices went down as much as 4.98 points on the Dow-Jones industrial average before the market got its equilibrium back.

The rumor factory, one of the strongest industries among Cuban exiles, got busy. Florida’s Democratic Congressman Paul G. Rogers, who claimed “a very reliable” source, put the figure at 3,000 men ashore all told.

The excitement lasted only a few hours. Washington, which in the Bay of Pigs learned its own lasting lesson about excessive hope-raising, and has since broken with the council, dismissed the reports as “inaccurate and highly colored,” and dangerous because “they deceive and frustrate the hopes of anti-Castro elements” within Cuba. U.S. intelligence men guessed that no more than 50 people could be put ashore in Cuba unnoticed. In Miami, Manuel Antonio de Varona, 54, coordinator of the Revolutionary Council, agreed that perhaps infiltration was a better word than invasion. And in Philadelphia, the freighter Maximus, bound for Havana, loaded 5,000 tons of supplies, valued at $1,750,000, the last payment to Castro for the $53 million ransom release of 1.113 Bay of Pigs prisoners.