Word: castros
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Everyone a Loser. U.S. intelligence estimates say that only 20% to 30% of Cuba's population still actively support Fidel Castro. Aside from all the other aggravations, Castro's police state is such that virtually every Cuban has lost a relative or close friend in exile, or locked up among the 50,000 prisoners in Cuban jails, or dead at the hands of Castro's executioners. A distinguished, once-prosperous Havana doctor shrugged his shoulders disconsolately, as he explained that most of his friends are in exile. "I'd go myself," he sighed, "except that...
...Cubans have tried to stay and fight - usually small bands of desperate men operating in the central Escambray Mountains and in Castro's old Sierra Maestra stamping grounds. They face the full might of a 200,000-man army (plus 100,000 militia reserves) equipped with the best of everything Russian, including supersonic MIG-21s based outside of Havana. They also face Raul Castro, who used to be quite a guerrilla fighter himself but now heads the counterinsurgency operations and treats it as rather a sport...
...Castro technique offers an interesting example for anti-guerrilla students everywhere. When a guerrilla band turns up in Cuba, Raul smothers the area with as many as 5,000 troops. All civilians are removed, along with cattle, chickens and other sources of food; homes and barns are destroyed, wells filled in, fences pulled down. Then the troops sweep forward, much as beaters at a rabbit hunt. When the guerrillas are caught, they are shot; if they own land, it is confiscated. Their children become wards of the state, are separated from their mothers and placed in Castro training schools...
Ready for Plucking. From time to time there is talk that Castro's army will one day turn on him. After all, it is a Latin American army. But these troops have always seemed too well-fed, too pleased with their toys to give Cubans much hope. They are also young-members of the Cuban youth that Castro works incessantly to indoctrinate. "Our commitment," says Jorge Enrique Mendoza, national director of the state scholarship program, "is to forge Communists...
Ciudad Libertad (Liberty City) is a huge educational complex that covers more than 1,000 acres of former military barracks in Havana. It is the pride of the Castro government; more than 10,000 Cubans study there, taking primary, high-school and technical-school courses. An art instructor laid it on the line: "Children don't have prejudices. They are like fruit on the tree, ready to be plucked when ripe." On the walls were student sketches of Castro with peace doves, Castro standing atop the globe with a radiant smile, Castro at the Bay of Pigs invasion...