CUBA: The Start of Sabotage

The pamphlets appearing on Havana’s streets last week had a familiar ring. Only the name was new. “Fidel,” they warned, “you are not going to sleep in peace from now on. We are not going to let you.”

With the same weapons that made life unbearable for Dictator Fulgencio Batista. Cuba’s new revolutionaries are setting out to make nightmares for the new dictator. Not a day passes without a bomb explosion in Havana—a grenade tossed inside the Capitol Building, a Molotov cocktail splashed against a government Jeep. One night last week bombs exploded in a water main, a power transformer, a government-operated filling station, several shops.

In the provinces, fires destroyed 2,500 tons of sugar cane and a tobacco-curing house in Pinar del Rio. In mid-island Camagüey province, two trains were derailed by sabotage; Camagüey city itself was darkened for four hours by the bombing of a key power transformer.

The spreading resistance represented no major threat to the Castro regime as yet. But as the opposition began to take organized form, it led Castro, like Batista before him, into the usual dictator’s mistake of counterterror. Last week there were reliable reports that a Castro cop, in a moment of rage, killed a 14-year-old involved in the opposition. Just such brutality had mobilized an indifferent Cuban public against Batista; the opposition plainly intended to provoke Castro into the same error.

With growing troubles at home, the Cuban government showed its unease by relaxing for the moment its word war with the U.S. President Osvaldo Dorticós, a reliable echo chamber for Castro, spoke about repairing relations with the U.S. Castro himself struck an unaccustomed note: “Perhaps by temperament many of us like battle more than tranquil life. Nevertheless when we have on our shoulders a responsibility like we have today, we strive to be above all passions.” Brother Raul chimed in: “It is not our desire to be at war. One day we will see these weapons converted into plows.”

Unless Soviet Russia is willing to underwrite a bigger share of Cuba’s economy, weapons may be all Castro has before long. Faced with an almost 50% drop in foreign exchange in the past year, the U.S. trade boycott, and the loss of $150 million from the discontinued U.S. sugar bonus, Economic Czar “Che” Guevara flew behind the Iron Curtain last month for help to avert economic disaster. Czechoslovakia agreed to double its aid, bringing the total to $40 million. But estimates are that Cuba needs an irreducible minimum of $250 million in freely convertible currencies this year to replace income lost by severing its U.S. trade ties, and Che was reportedly asking for a $400 to $600 million loan. As Che traveled to Moscow, on to Peking and points East before returning to Moscow, there was still no announcement of such massive aid.