Cuba: Mystery Ship

Cubans have only hungry, depressing things to talk about these days—more crop failures, still tighter rationing, and a brutal hurricane that took at least 1,200 lives and left an estimated $500 million damage. Last week, faced by his devastated people, Fidel Castro tried to give them something else to talk about by finding a new cause against the U.S. In two separate TV talkathons, Castro spun an Eric Ambler tale of arms smuggling, sabotage raids and mystery ships, and accused the U.S. of waging “an undeclared war” on Cuba.

For proof, Castro displayed captured grenades and announced the arrest of six “agents” of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Several of the prisoners, he said, had been captured Oct. 21 while attempting a night landing on the western tip of the island, coming ashore in two launches from a “mother ship” that Castro identified as the Rex, a 170-ft. vessel flying the Nicaraguan flag and operating out of West Palm Beach. The raiders were armed with two .30-cal. machine guns on each of the launches, and the Rex was loaded for bear: a 75-mm. cannon, two 57-mm. and five twin 20-mm. cannon. In seven months, continued Castro, the Rex has carried out ten missions to slip arms and men into Cuba—”and it is not the only boat that the CIA has.”

How much truth was there to Castro’s story? There seems to be some. A 174-ft. vessel called the Rex, a converted U.S. Navy patrol boat flying a Nicaraguan flag and carrying radar, searchlights and a heavy crane, has indeed been tied up at West Palm Beach. Port fees are paid by the SeaKey Shipping Co., known only by a Miami post office box. The Rex’s voyages are shrouded in mystery. It engages in electronic and oceanographic research, says a Miami oil executive who claims to own the ship. On her last sailing, Oct. 19, the Rex left with two 20-ft. launches, and returned last week without the speedboats. The Spanish-speaking crew has nothing to say about anything, but Cuban exiles in Miami buzz with stories of four dead men and a wounded man transferred to a U.S. submarine off the coast of Cuba on the morning of Oct. 22.

CIA officials issued their standard “no comment.”