Word: castros
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Cuban exile communities from Miami to Caracas, the word was out: "Algo se mueve"-Something is moving. First came the faint, crackling anti-Castro broadcast last week from inside Cuba. Then 24 hours later came word of the biggest raid in months on Castro's fortress. The raiders identified themselves as members of the Movement for Revolutionary Recuperation, led by Manuel Artime, who headed the abortive Bay of Pigs landing...
Linking up with a second force of guerrillas from the nearby Sierra Maestra mountains, the exiles had captured the town and held it for three hours against Castro's militia, during that time declaring it a "free territory of Cuba." They then blew up the Cabo Cruz sugar mill and disappeared. Puerto Pilón, the exiles noted with satisfaction, was only a few miles from the spot where Castro himself originally landed in 1956, and the Sierra Maestra was his sanctuary in the early stages of the revolution...
Within hours, Radio Havana was on the air railing about the attack. Castro denied that the exiles had sent in a landing party. The mill, he fumed, was bombarded from the sea "by a pirate vessel of the Rex type, which the CIA operates from bases located in Florida, Puerto Rico and Central America...
Nevertheless, he admitted damage to shore installations and cried that "70,000 sacks of sugar" had been destroyed. Naturally, he blamed "a new criminal, vandalistic act by the United States Government." Two days later, Castro's internal radio reported two more landings-one by Artime on the southern coast, and the other by Underground Leader Manolo Ray somewhere in the north. But exile groups in Miami would neither confirm nor deny the new raids...
...Castro himself sounds edgy and gloomy about the future. In his May Day speech, he dourly conceded that some day his Communist regime might be toppled. "Most of us-the leaders of today-would disappear in that struggle; but the people would remain, and the party would remain." Surely the people would remain...