Word: castros
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Miami's Cuban exile community lives on hope-and stories from home. For six months the rumors have swirled around the mysterious disappearance of Che Guevara, 37, long the most important figure next to Castro in Cuba's Communist hierarchy (TIME, June 25). Last week the Che story receded into the background before a whole new crop of tales whispering of sabotage and assassination attempts inside Cuba. Some were open to question; others were at least partly based on fact. Either way, they all hinted at growing unrest on Castro's troubled island...
Ramiro Valdés, Castro's Minister of Interior, suggested as much in a brief radio speech last week. "We must fight," he told Cubans, "against internal espionage, sabotage, acts of terrorism and attempted assassinations." A few weeks ago, according to one report, saboteurs put the torch to two Cuban PT boats in Santiago harbor. Another report tells of a Cuban antiaircraft battery that gunned down a Cuban army transport in the belief that Castro was aboard...
Still other reports tell of an unsuccessful ambush of a Castro motor caravan in Pinar del Rio province, and a bomb planted at a Cuban power plant where Castro was scheduled to talk...
Everybody ought to have a gun, Fidel Castro maintained - until lately. At a 1960 rally in Havana, he explained that "This is how democracy works: it gives rifles to farmers, to students, to women, to Negroes, to the poor, and to every citizen who is ready to defend a just cause." Weapons ranging from Czech submachine guns to Belgian FN automatic rifles were handed out to 50,000 soldiers, 400,000 militiamen, 100,000 members of the factory-guarding popular defense force, and to many men, women and children in Cuba's 1,000,000-strong "neighborhood vigilance committees...
...Miami Castro watchers speculated that he was so shaken by the overthrow of his Algerian counterpart, Ben Bella, that he doubts his own popularsupport. In any case, there was a touch of urgency about the new policy that suggested serious concern. Failure to turn in military weapons by Sept. 1, warned Radio Havana, would be punished not by criminal courts but bythe dreaded Revolutionary Tribunals - those kangaroo courts that havealready sentenced to death at least 1,100 Cubans since Castro took over...