Cuba: The Massacre

CUBA

(See Cover) Communiqué No. 4:

The invading mercenary army which occupied Cuban territory for less than 72 hours has been completely crushed.

The revolution has emerged victorious though paying a high toll in courageous lives of fighters who faced the invaders.

A part of the mercenaries sought to leave the country by-sea in a number of boats which were sunk by the revolutionary air forces.

The remainder of the mercenary forces suffered heavy casualties, dispersing in a swamp area from which no escape is possible.

A large quantity of arms of American manufacture were captured, including various Sherman heavy tanks. [signed] Fidel Castro Ruz, Commander in Chief

In Cuba, the Roman Circus was on. Radios blared the March of the Sierra Maestra, and orators described the heroic fight in glowing detail. On Havana street corners, groups of prancing militiamen fired their Czech burp guns into the air, and Jeeps draped with hot-eyed youths careened along the avenues. Communist-country correspondents were hustled off to the shell-pocked beachhead to view the wreckage of invasion—U.S.-made mortars, recoilless rifles, trucks, machine guns, rifles, and medium tanks. A few of the 400 captured survivors were shown on TV, while commentators jabbed jubilant questions at them. The government announced that on May Day, that day sacred to Marxists everywhere, Cuba would celebrate the defeat of the “North American mercenaries” with the greatest parade in history, and the youth would march side by side with Fidel Castro.

White House Huddle. In Washington, Secretary of State Dean Rusk tried to put a bland face on tragedy by calling it a minor operation by “a group of courageous men who returned to Cuba determined to do what they could to assist the people in establishing freedom in that island. The affair did not appear to be a full-scale invasion.” The man nominally in charge of the battle against Castro, onetime Havana Attorney José Miró Cardona, 58, head of the Revolutionary Council of anti-Castro exiles in whose name the landing was made, flew with the council to Washington for three anguished conferences with President Kennedy. Then the council issued a statement: “The recent landing in Cuba was in fact a landing mainly of supplies and support for our patriots who have been fighting in Cuba for months. Regretfully, we admit tragic losses among a small holding force. The force fought Soviet tanks and artillery, while being attacked by Russian MIG aircraft—a gallantry which allowed a major portion of our party to reach the Escambray Mountains.”

The Castro regime’s triumphant cock’s crow of victory, for all its exaggerations, was closer to the bitter truth. At the Bay of Pigs, on Cuba’s south coast, a force of 1,300 wellarmed, well-trained anti-Castro freedom fighters last week launched a major campaign to rid their homeland of Communist dictatorship. They were defeated within two days by a better-armed, better-led enemy, who withstood their attack and delivered a crushing counterblow. The defeat, as all the world sensed, was a tragedy not only for Cuba’s exiles. It was a debacle for the U.S. as well. Through the offices of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon, the U.S. had done everything to assure success short of providing an air cover or sending in the Marines. The invaders—all Cubans—were trained by the U.S., supplied by the U.S., and dispatched by the U.S. to carry out a plan written by U.S. military experts. President Kennedy knew D-day in advance, and had approved.

The Fish Is Red. The operation started with a surprise attack by B-26 light bombers on Cuban airports where Russian MIG-15s were reportedly being uncrated and assembled. In the best cloak and dagger tradition, to lend credence to a cover story that the bombings were by pilots defecting from Castro’s air force, a few .30-cal. bullets were fired into an old Cuban B26. A pilot took off in the crate and landed it at Miami with an engine needlessly feathered and a cock-and-bull story that he had attacked the airfields. A reporter noted that dust and undisturbed grease covered bomb-bay fittings, electrical connections to rocket mounts were corroded, guns were uncocked and unfired. The planes that actually did the bombing never were seen.

That same evening, in high romantic style, a clandestine radio transmitter sent a cryptic message crackling across the Caribbean: “Alert! Alert! Look well at the rainbow. The first will rise very soon. Chico is in the house. Visit him. The sky is blue. Place notice in the tree. The tree is green and brown. The letters arrived well. The letters are white. The fish will not take much time to rise. The fish is red. Look well at the rainbow . . .”

At the six main training bases in Guatemala, and at staging bases at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, and tiny Swan Island off the Honduran coast, fish were already rising. In recent weeks, the equivalent of 50 freight carloads of aerial bombs, rockets, ammunition and firearms was airlifted into Puerto Cabezas by unmarked U.S. C-54s, C-46s and C-47s, in such quantities that on some days last month planes required momentary stacking. During Easter week, 27 U.S. C124 Globemasters roared in three or four at a time to off-load full cargoes of rations, blankets, ammunition and medical supplies at the U.S.-built airstrip at Retalhuleu, at Guatemala City and at Guatemala’s San José airbase.

Hit the Beach. On D-day-minus-one, a fleet of invasion ships, painted black and equipped with guns and radar in New Orleans, steamed toward Cuba. That afternoon Miró and his Revolutionary Council were driven from Manhattan to Philadelphia by the CIA and flown to a secret rendezvous in Florida, where they could be held in readiness to move into the first available chunk of “free Cuba.” They were lodged in an old house near an abandoned airfield, surrounded by a swarm of agents, ordered to stay put. At one point, some of the council members announced that they were going to leave, even if it meant getting shot, but were put off with promises. Eventually, Kennedy’s Latin American affairs specialists, Adolf A. Berle and Arthur Schlesinger, flew in from Washington to reassure them.

After midnight, in simultaneous landings at three beaches on the Bay of Pigs, 90 miles southeast of Havana (see map), the attackers went in with artillery, tanks and B-26 air support. Soon afterward, Castro’s military duty officer at Jagüey Grande reported fighting on the beach. The choice of a landing place seemed to come as a surprise to a military expert of the Revolutionary Council, onetime Cuban Army Colonel Ramón Barquín. “It has a very narrow road and a railroad bed from the beach to Jagüey Grande,” he said, “a distance of 24 miles, with swamp on both sides and mosquitoes, mosquitoes, mosquitoes. This swamp offers some advantages—you can’t be flanked. But it makes no difference; you can be stopped easily enough.” Nevertheless, the plan was to cut Cuba in two by stabbing quickly northward along the road and the railroad bed to the main east-west highway, and on to the northern coast.

As the world waited, and was told nothing, the general assumption was that the venture might succeed. The first intercepted Castro-army messages told of heavy attack and confusion so great that the messages were stopped “for fear of alarming the people.” Reports poured in that the Isle of Pines, jammed with an estimated 10,000 anti-Castro political prisoners,* was under fire from five vessels.

In Miami and Manhattan, spokesmen for Miró Cardona’s council announced fighting at Baracoa, Santa Clara and Pinar del Río. Rumors raced across the island that Brother Raül Castro had been captured in Oriente province. Reports of defections among navy and militia units were reinforced by a fragmentary radio call from a naval base east of Havana that there were only eight men left—all the rest had “walked away.”

In the United Nations, U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson labored to explain to the world what was already self-evident: that the U.S. considered Castro a clear threat to hemisphere security and encouraged the Cuban exiles in their attempt to bring him down. Speaking with unusual intensity, Stevenson sought to accent the positive, reassuring Latin America in particular that the U.S. had no intention of reviving Yankee imperialism, but was acting in the interests of freedom after extreme, prolonged, unceasing provocation. He ridiculed the shrill contention of Raül Roa, Castro’s liverish little ambassador, that the invaders were scum, hired mercenaries.

“Many of them are Dr. Roa’s friends and associates of long standing,” said Stevenson. “They make a rather impressive list: the first Provisional President of the Revolutionary Government, Dr. Manuel Urrutia; the first Prime Minister, Dr. José Miró Cardona; the first President of the Supreme Court, Dr. Emilio Menéndez.” Stevenson read the full roll call: “Nearly two-thirds of Castro’s first Cabinet, rebel leaders, labor leaders, editors and commentators, and even such confidants as Juan Orta, the head of the Prime Minister’s own office.

“There was great sympathy in the United States for the proclaimed goals of the Cuban revolution,” Stevenson went on. “But in the course of 1959, Castro began the anti-American, anti-United States campaign that in recent months has risen to so strident a crescendo.” Stevenson concentrated his appeal on the Latin American diplomats present: “We must not forget that Dr. Roa has described President Frondizi of Argentina in terms so revolting that I will not repeat them.* The official Cuban radio has poured shrill invectives on governments and leaders throughout the hemisphere, and the more democratic and progressive the government, the more the regime recognizes it as a mortal enemy and all the more savage becomes its abuse.” Time after time Castro has “avowed his ambition to overthrow the free governments of the Americas and to replace them by regimes modeled in his own tyrannical image. Dr. Castro stands today an outlaw in the hemisphere.”

To Roa’s charge of direct U.S. intervention, Stevenson made only the most technical denial: “No offensive has been launched from Florida or from any other part of the United States.” It was a point that Russia’s Valerian Zorin, no great brain but adept at probing a sensitive spot, jabbed away at all week long. As it turned out, the point grew increasingly sensitive with the passage of time.

When the hours dragged into days with no proclamation of a free Cuba from Exile Leader Miró Cardona, it became apparent that something—in fact everything—had gone wrong.

Counterpoint of Terror. Recovering from the initial shock, Castro’s usually loquacious regime acted with a coldly silent efficiency that suggested expert Communist coaching. The island’s radio stations broadcast no news but plenty of lively music, as a reign of terror spread across the island. The Castro government itself boasted that it had executed 29 persons, including Castro’s ex-Agriculture Minister Humberto Sori Marín as well as three Americans, for plotting to assassinate Castro. Foreign correspondents were herded—along with 1,000 or more Cubans whose loyalty to Castro was questioned—into makeshift concentration camps in the Havana Sports Palace and a downtown hotel. Across the island, members of Castro’s Rebel Youth, some as young as 14, began patrolling city and village streets at night, encouraged to act as they saw fit if they saw anything suspicious. “Defense committees” drew up lists of persons in their districts who might be considered “enemies” and might be done away with if trouble broke out.

Back to the Bay. But for all the messages about fish rising and rainbows flashing, the expected mass uprising failed to take place, and the tide of rebellion ran out. The airstrip at Jagüey Grande was seized, but when the first rebel B-26 came in to land, it hit unexpected ridges of sand that had drifted across the runway, and crashed. Paratroopers, dropped inland, were wiped out—few prisoners were taken. The invaders from the beach never quite reached Jagüey Grande. Obviously forewarned of the general area where the landing would take place (“Someone committed treason,” charged a council member), Castro had 10,000 troops on hand to meet the men coming up the track bed. Heavy artillery pinned the invaders down. The invasion ship carrying all the broadcasting equipment was sunk, and with it another landing craft. The Castro command threw its Soviet-built T-34 tanks into the fight; a dozen jets, some of them MIGs flown by Czech pilots, shot down five of the invaders’ twelve B-26 bombers. Other Castro aircraft swept over the exposed troops in strafing runs. A desperate call for help went out from the beachhead: “We are under attack by two Sea Fury aircraft and heavy artillery. Do not see any friendly air cover as you promised. Need jet support immediately.”

The support never came. Foot by foot, the anti-Castro forces were driven back down the road and railroad bed toward the Bay of Pigs. A few soldiers scattered across the swamps in a desperate attempt to reach the hills of Escambray, 50 miles away. A radio ham in New Jersey picked up a faint signal: “This is Cuba calling. Where will help come from? This is Cuba calling the free world. We need help in Cuba.” In Miami, Miró Cardona and the Revolutionary Council finally broke silence to issue a statement. They had radioed the men at the Bay of Pigs to ask whether they wished to be evacuated. The answer: “We will never leave this island.”

Friendly Peasants. Months may pass before the full story of the disaster in the swamp is known. The CIA and the Pentagon, which sponsored and embarked the exile army, obviously were under instructions to keep their lips zippered tight. But from the exile command, which sat helplessly by while 1,300 of its countrymen were ground up by Castro’s military machine, came a tragic account of miscalculation, compounded by political bickering, distrust and gross ineptitude.

The greatest of all the failures was the failure of intelligence. Advisers to the invasion army professed to believe that the Cuban peasantry and militia were so fed up with Castro’s Communism that there would be mass defections. But the area chosen for the invasion was one in which Castro spends many weekends fishing, resting and talking with the peasants; he has a grand, job-producing scheme under way to drain the swamp and turn it into a tourist attraction. The peasants remained loyal to Castro and added their weight to the militia, which fought well enough for an outfit that was supposed to turn and run. The U.S. planners, despite counsel that June—when the sugar harvest is in and unemployment is high—would be a better month to count on unrest, decided to invade sooner, on the ground that it would be harder once some 200 Cubans returned from MIG training in Communist Czechoslovakia.

Saddest of all, there was virtually no coordination between the invaders on the beach and the thousands of underground fighters presumed to exist inside Cuba. And for that, the Revolutionary Council blames the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon. Said one revolutionary chief on D-day-plus-two: “We offered the complete underground system in Cuba for the purposes of coordination. We were capable of bringing about great defections in the military inside Cuba, even contacts to bring off a general strike. Why, 48 hours after the invasion started, has this not been done? Why hasn’t anyone called us and made contact?”

Seeds of Disaster. The dragon seeds of last week’s disaster were sown as far back as mid-1960. By then the Eisenhower Administration had overcome its original benefit-of-the-doubt attitude toward Castro, concluded that Cuba was being turned into a Communist base for subversion of Latin America, and started looking for ways to bring Castro down. Direct intervention was ruled out, barred by a natural distaste for it, by a fear of raising the old cries of Yankee imperialism, and by specific U.S. pledges under the treaty of the Organization of American States. Refugees from Castro were turning up in Florida by the hundreds, and many were eager to fight to restore the independence of their country. A U.S. decision was made to train and support an anti-Castro organization of Cubans who were not tainted with the earlier and hated regime of Dictator Fulgencio Batista, who is now in exile in Lisbon.

The CIA picked the Revolutionary Democratic Front (Frente), a fragile union of five organizations that held much the same point of view as their “coordinator,” Manuel Antonio (Tony) Varona, 52—that “the need for agrarian reform in Cuba is a myth.” The land expropriated by Castro, says Varona, onetime head of the old-line Auténtico Party, should be returned to its original owners except for “about 15%” that is not productive. Later, another organization came to the CIA’s attention: the People’s Revolutionary Movement (M.R.P.), led and founded by Manuel (“Manolo”) Ray,* 36, a soft-spoken engineer whose talent for organization had made him leader of the highly effective underground movement against Batista in Havana. Ray became Castro’s Minister of Public Works, and stood it until November 1959, shortly after Castro jailed one of his comrades-in-arms in the Sierra Maestra, Huber Matos, for objecting to Communist infiltration of the revolutionary army. Ray angrily resigned his Cabinet post and went back to teaching engineering at the University of Havana. When the Communists took over the university as well, in July 1960, he resigned again and dropped out of sight to reorganize his old underground, this time against Castro.

When the M.R.P. came along, the CIA looked over the two outfits—one headed by a well-known practical politician who spoke the language of stability and the good old days, and the other run by a little-known reformer who proposed, in effect, a continuing revolution in Cuba, without Castro or Communism. There was a feeling that disillusionment with Castro had come a little late for Ray and many of his followers. The CIA decided to stick with Varona and his Frente as the instrument to overthrow Castro, and assigned an agent named Frank Bender to the task.

Money & Bases. The CIA’s decision against them quickly became apparent to Manolo Ray and the M.R.P. Organized into cells to spread sabotage across Cuba, the M.R.P. men say they asked many times for explosives and boats to get the stuff ashore, but were usually waved aside. But the Frente was becoming a big enterprise. Estimates of how much money was pumped into the Frente for recruiting centers and other political expenses vary from $130,000 monthly to a high of $520,000 last December. As the plans for a frontal invasion took shape, CIA men went to Guatemala and arranged with Rancher-Businessman Roberto Alejos* to use three of his properties—coffee plantations named Helvetia and La Suiza near the town of Retalhuleu, and a cotton farm called San José Buenavista, 35 miles from the Pacific port of San José—as camps to train an army of invasion (“No charge.” said Alejos. “Just remember me in Havana”). Through Alejos, the CIA also arranged a $1,000,000 hurry-up surfacing of a 5,000-ft. airstrip at Retalhuleu. Starting in September, an airlift of U.S. planes shuttled between recruiting centers in Florida and the Guatemalan camps, bringing in the first of more than 2,000 combat trainees. Later, Alejos helped establish two more camps, one at San Juan Acul, close to the Mexican border, the other at Dos Lagunas in the jungles of northern Guatemala. A heavyset, grey-haired CIA agent known as “Charlie” took charge of the Guatemalan operation, backed up there and in Miami by “Jimmy,” “Clarence,” “Adams” and “Roderick.”

As rumors began to circulate about mysterious goings-on at Retalhuleu, Alejos last winter allowed nosy journalists to visit the Helvetia plantation. Before they arrived, the Cubans were transferred to nearby La Suiza; they were brought back as soon as the visitors left. The recruits got rugged training in jungle, commando and night fighting techniques from a dozen U.S. experts and one Filipino instructor. They learned to use the most modern U.S. weapons—bazookas, recoilless cannon, machine guns. So strict was security that only a few officer B-26 pilots were allowed to visit nearby towns; infantry recruits were confined to camp. Incoming mail was addressed to an A.P.O. number; outgoing mail, heavily censored, was carried by pouch on a weekly C46 flight to Miami to friends and family. Yet Castro’s spies penetrated the camp, and one even managed to smuggle movies of the training activity to Havana.

In the midst of the Frente buildup, the underground sabotage operations of the M.R.P. inside Cuba came almost to a halt for lack of matériel. In November, Manolo Ray sneaked out of Cuba to the U.S., hoping to win some support. Anxious to collect all anti-Castro organizations under one umbrella, the CIA offered to help M.R.P. on condition that it join Varona’s Frente. The M.R.P. refused. The M.R.P. asked that arms be dropped to guerrillas in Escambray. The CIA, say the exiles, finally agreed, but on condition that the weapons be stamped with the Frente’s initials. The M.R.P. asked for 15 minutes’ broadcasting time on the CIA-controlled radio station on Swan Island. Again, they say, Bender agreed, but insisted that a CIA man direct the program.

Who & What For? Varona’s Frente had its own complaints about the CIA, despite all the help the Frente was getting. “They want to know everything,” complained one Frente leader. “Suppose you ask for 100 rifles. They want to know to whom, what for, where they will be used—in triplicate.” Exiles also say that they were subjected to lie-detector tests before going to camps (sample question: Have you had homosexual relations?) and were threatened with deportation or detention camps at McAllen, Texas, if they got out of line. They say that in the final stages, the Pentagon moved in to take direct control of the operation. The Frente representative was removed when he tried to exert some authority, and the Batista followers in the camps moved toward the leadership, working with a militant young opportunist named Manuel Artime, 28, onetime Catholic student leader at Havana University and a Frente subchief who schemed to leapfrog into supreme power. When one Frente man mentioned the Batista recruits to a U.S. colonel, the colonel dismissed the matter with “they’re antiCommunists, aren’t they?”

Increasingly, the Frente and the M.R.P. leaders complained to intimates that the liberation of Cuba was no longer in their hands. “The U.S. has taken over, and they are owners, not allies,” one confided. “The attack is coming soon. I don’t know exactly when; it’s no longer our decision. They plan to establish a beachhead, establish there a government-in-arms, hold air control, and move for the interior.” On a map he pointed to a spot in Las Villas province, close to the Bay of Pigs.

All Together. By the middle of February, an urgent and anxious atmosphere settled over the exile groups. CIAgent Bender called representatives of the Frente and M.R.P. together in Washington, told them to join forces and stop squabbling about politics. He is said to have handed them a list of 26 Cubans, told them to choose ten to participate in the selection of a Cuban provisional President. The Cubans looked at Bender’s list, say that they failed to recognize six of the names, refused.

Two weeks later, the Cubans got together independently for four days in Room 125 of Manhattan’s Hotel Commodore, where they finally agreed to cooperate. The pact was sealed in a banquet room of the Skyway Motel, Miami. There, say the exiles, a CIA agent named Carr called for “democratic agreement of all present in order to choose a chief or President, who would head the provisional government later.” The choice of the Revolutionary Council, as the joint Frente-M.R.P. group was named: José Miró Cardona, a man whose career has been based on mediation and compromise.

Earning the Hatred. Miró, son of a division general in Cuba’s Third War of Independence (1895-98), has always avoided getting involved in partisan politics. A Havana University Law School graduate, he began a practice in 1938 that eventually earned him a reputation as Cuba’s best-known criminal lawyer, a professor’s chair at his old university and the presidency of the Cuban College of Lawyers, the equivalent of a national bar association. His most celebrated case: the defense of Army Colonel Ramón Barquín, accused in 1956 of plotting against Batista. Barquín got six years on the Isle of Pines, but Miró’s defense was so brilliant that he earned Batista’s cordial hatred.

Miró’s characteristic response to the dictator’s dislike was to try to mediate between Batista and his opposition. But his attempts to draw feuding Cuban factions together ended abruptly in 1958, when Batista suspended all civil rights to cope with the rebellion of Fidel Castro. An organization of Miró’s friends, largely conservative businessmen and professional men, denounced the Batista regime for “supporting itself by force.” The dictator sent some henchmen to arrest Miró. As they were searching his office, he was making his escape to the Argentine embassy, disguised as a priest.

Moving to Miami eight months before Batista fell, Miró united anti-Batista groups in exile under the banner of Castro’s 26th of July Movement. Four days after Castro’s triumph, Miró was named Premier of Cuba (Castro stayed on as armed-forces chief). Miró soon realized he was nothing but Castro’s puppet, resigned after 39 days. He told a friend: “I cannot run my office while another man is trying to run it from behind a microphone.”

Returning to his university law professorship, Miró watched as Castro turned Cuba left. He served briefly as Ambassador to Spain, accepted a second appointment (never fulfilled) as Ambassador to the U.S. Like Ray, he stayed on at the university until the Communists took over. Then he returned to exile in Miami—where, almost by instinct, he began to try to conciliate between Ray’s M.R.P. and Varona’s Frente.

“They Promised.” As president of the Revolutionary Council, Miró began to plan Cuba’s provisional government and the elections that would come afterward, in which (as part of the bargain) he agreed not to be a candidate. But neither the president nor his council had much to say about the military campaign that was gathering force. All now say that the timing was wrong, that an invasion should not have been mounted until after a revolutionary mood had been established inside Cuba by a growing wave of sabotage and underground organization. Nevertheless, they went along. The day they elected Miró, Frente members asked him: “Do you think we are going to know the plan?” Miró assured them, “Yes, we will know the plan.” One of the Frente members asked Miró, “Do you think the U.S. will back us with troops if necessary?” Said Miró: “Yes, they promised me they will use the troops.”

Of Miró’s Revolutionary Council, only the ambitious Artime agreed with the Pentagon-CIA decision to invade immediately. (“He’s my golden boy,” a top-level CIA man said.) Artime agreed that something had to be done or morale among the Cubans, chafing under discipline in the Guatemalan camps, would begin to deteriorate. He also agreed that time would only favor Castro, enable him to root his dictatorship even more firmly in Cuban soil. When President Kennedy also agreed on the timing, it was Artime who was permitted to break the news for the new Cuba, while his fellow council members—including Mir—were held incommunicado by the CIA.

On the evening of the first day of last week’s ill-fated expedition to the Bay of Pigs, Artime’s taped voice was heard coming over Miami’s WMET. Introduced as “Commander in Chief of the Army of Liberation,” Artime announced: “I am in Cuba again after my promise last year that I would come back.” By battle’s end, he reportedly lay dead in the sunken radio ship. There were rumors that there might be important casualties on the other side as well. Ernesto (“Che”) Guevara was reported gravely wounded in the head, the result of a suicide attempt following an argument with Castro over command of the armed forces. And the persistent absence of Castro himself from the early victory celebration gave weight to reports that he had been hurt in a bombing attack on Jagüey Grande.

The defeat caught up everybody concerned—Artime, the CIA, the Pentagon planners, President Kennedy, Miró and the Revolutionary Council. At the news, Bender and Carr broke down and cried.

Before news of the disaster arrived, some 15,000 wives, mothers and friends of members of the wiped-out invasion forces gathered in Miami’s Bayfront Park for a scheduled “Thank Kennedy” meeting. But under the impact of tragedy, the women, faces wet with tears, screamed instead, “Kennedy! Help!”

In the aftermath, Cubans bitterly blamed the U.S. and were less inclined to acknowledge the harm done by their own internecine quarreling. But they had paid dearly, too. Miró’s own son was Castro’s prisoner. Varona’s son, two brothers and one nephew were missing. So was Council Member Antonio Maceo’s son. The Revolutionary Council held a funereal press conference in the tinseled gaudiness of the Moderne Room of Manhattan’s Belmont Plaza. Still playing by the rules, Miró gamely denied that the U.S. had helped. He conceded that the landing “did not achieve all of its proposed objectives,” announced that he believed that “the U.S. should not intervene militarily,” promised that “landings will continue to take place.” Then, tears in his eyes, he walked down a hall to another room and slumped against a wall.

From a lonely hilltop in the Escambray Mountains of Cuba, a small radio voice, escaping Castro’s destruction so far, still spoke in the defiant tones of freedom to the world.

*Among them: Huber Matos, one of Castro’s chief lieutenants in the hills.

*”A viscous blob of human excrescences.”

*Pronounced “Rye.”

*Brother of Guatemala’s Ambassador to the U.S.