Word: cuba
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Rocket-Size Crates. Cuba's Communist government tried to keep a security lid on the shipments. Casual citizens were cleared from dockside areas; unloading was confined to after midnight. The result was to proliferate rumors that most of the 5,000 new arrivals were Russian combat troops in helmets and short-sleeved uniforms: 18,000 RUSSIAN TROOPS IN CUBA, headlined the New York Daily News, going a step further. The size of the concerted shipments indicate that they were in the works before the visit to Moscow last month by Fidel's 31-year-old brother Raul, though...
...first cargoes as communications trucks, radar vans, general purpose trucks, mobile generator units-and, apparently, rockets. All the equipment pointed to large-scale coastal surveillance and air-defense systems. In other nations where similar Soviet help has been received, the contents of crates like the ones landed in Cuba turned out to be ground-to-air rockets, similar to the U.S. Nike-Ajax. Of the 5,000 technicians, according to the intelligence reports, one-half to two-thirds were military technical men sent to install and operate the electronic systems until Castro's men learn to handle the equipment...
Technicians, Yes. At last week's press conference, President Kennedy was asked about Communist-bloc troops or supplies entering Cuba, and replied: "New supplies, definitely, in large quantities. Troops? We do not have any information, but an increased number of technicians." Just the same, at week's end the President sent his top military adviser, General Maxwell D. Taylor, on a hurry-up tour of U.S. military installations that would be involved if Cuban trouble flared up: the Panama Canal Zone, the new Strike Command headquarters at Tampa's MacDill Air Force Base, and the Atlantic Fleet...
...came to power three years ago, Castro bragged that his land-reform program would rest on two principles: "The land should belong to those who work it," and "Those who have no land must have some." As a starter, he divided 13% (more than 3,000,000 acres) of Cuba's total farmland into 630 cooperative farms. Fortnight ago, Castro conceded that the land distribution to peasants had been a flop, partly because it encouraged too much private initiative...
...like everything else in Cuba, the co-ops would be collectivized - and their peasants would become hired hands...