Word: batista
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...High Road. Despite an army announcement that it planned to mop up Castro's revolt within a week, Batista's troops moved with a caution bordering on ineffectiveness. Army troops patrolled the main roads leading into the mountains, but footpaths remained open. Castro's couriers walked in and out of Santiago de Cuba, capital of Oriente, without interference...
...railway warehouse, a railroad line. Bombs exploded nightly in Havana. The center of civil resistance was Santiago, where Castro has become a romantic hero. There, 26 women were arrested for marching through the streets with a Cuban flag and posters protesting the "killing of our children," and ordering Batista's police chief...
...peasants of Cuba's rebel-held Sierra Maestra region plodded down mountain tracks last week toward lowland towns in the eastern province of Oriente. Evacuated by army order, they left behind the makings of a jungle guerrilla war-to-the-fmish between troops of President Fulgencio Batista and rebels led by Fidel Castro...
...antirebel drive began, Batista made his determination plain. He sent his PT boats, subchasers and gunboats to blockade the coastline south and west of the mountains. He airlifted more than 250 army reinforcements from Havana to Oriente. His Air Force B-26s skimmed the mountain treetops, looking for signs of rebel movements. He bitterly denounced "predatory oppositionists" and "criminal elements, including Communist collaborators," who "seek through terrorism and disorder to damage their nation's economy as well as its prestige to satisfy their own personal anti-patriotic ambitions." He rejected any thought of a truce...
Moving Target. But wiping out Castro & Co. called for more than angry words. The government troops, trained on flat, open land, had to fight in mountainous terrain in which the rebels were thoroughly at home. Batista's forces had orders to shoot at anything that moved-but in the tangled, rain-soaked forests of the Sierra Maestra it was hard to see anything move. In the 5½ months following Castro's Mexico-based invasion, his rebels learned how to fire from cover and silently slip away to fire again. Castro kept on the move constantly, toughening...