Word: airstrips
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...vines and pockets of thick, orange mud. Batista, in a fatal mistake, overconfidently withdrew his troops. Castro and his men lived on plantains and mangos-and waited. The first break came from Jose ("Pepe") Figueres, President of Costa Rica, 800 miles to the southwest. To a hastily cleared Sierra airstrip, Socialist Figueres sent a twin-engined Beechcraft loaded with rifles, Tommy guns, ammunition and grenades. "I felt sorry for that man," Pepe explained...
Abroad, rebel sympathizers perfected means for buying and smuggling arms. Castro's brother Raul, commanding a column of recruits as big as Fidel's, kept an airstrip open on mountain pastures. By spring of 1958 arms flights became big and frequent-notably from rich Venezuela, which had just thrown off a dictatorship. Cubans in Florida regularly flew planeloads of arms from small airports in Broward County and at Ocala and Lakeland, once made a fire-bomb...
Obstacles in the Dark. Their troubles came with the warmth of spring and summer. Ice Skate was cracking. The airstrip had already crumbled away from the rest of the floe. Again and again they built new strips as their drifting cake crumbled and chipped apart. Heavy windstorms swept over, first from one direction, then from another, moving the ice mass slowly to and fro with a sheer force that caused new cracks and pressure ridges...
...circle Ice Skate and keep in touch lest the camp homer beacon fail. At Harmon A.F.B. in Newfoundland, SAC put on standby two crack C-123J crews who were familiar with ice landings. This time, instead of landing on a 10,000-ft.-to-20,000-ft airstrip, a single rescue plane had to make a dark-of-night touchdown on a Band-Aid-sized, 2,200-ft. strip while an escorting C-54 circled the area...
...island. There the men, lugging: what gear they could, tramped through the blackness, stumbling through piles of ice, skirting cracks and ridges. At the runway, they lit gasoline-and paper-filled cans and magnesium flares and waited in the breathless cold as the C-123J cautiously turned for the airstrip. Says George Cvijonovich, scientific leader of the group: "It was really a mixture of astonishment and aesthetics, because the landing was aesthetic at the same time that it was astonishing. The plane was like a beautiful big bird. With those flares, and the lights of the plane white, like...