Word: escambray
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...hundred miles southwest of Havana in south central Cuba lies the Sierra Escambray, an area of precipitous hills pocked with large caves and dominated by two 3,000-ft. peaks. The Escambray is fine country to hide in. Since May 1960, when the first anti-Communist defectors from Fidel Castro's army took refuge there, the number of guerrillas fighting Castro from the Escambray has swelled to some 1 ,000 men. By last week whispered tales seeping out of Cuba told of pitched, no quarter battles in the Escambray and of hospitals overflowing with wounded. The reality...
...their first few months in the Escambray, the anti-Castro rebels did virtually nothing but lie low. As more and more ex-Castro officers appeared, the senior men took command. Today Captain Evelio Duque, a veteran of Castro's Sierra Maestra fight against former Cuban Dictator Fulgencio Batista, is the rebels' nominal chief. In fact, the Escambray guerrillas are still divided into half a dozen forces with only loose coordination, but since last October they have been getting arms in speedboat forays and airdrops organized by Cuban refugee groups in Miami...
...Olive Branches. All the militiamen Castro has mustered so far-10,000 men with Soviet-bloc guns-have not been able to rout the rebels out of their rocky, cave-pitted hillsides in the Escambray mountains 170 miles east of Havana. The fighting is small-scale but so bitter that militia units are losing their taste for the chase. Castro, like Batista before him, has resorted to promising common criminals their freedom if they will fight. For the rebels, help from the outside increases: the Escambray has received much of the 40 tons of opposition arms airdropped into Cuba; small...
...tried to force the plane to Miami. The ship crash-landed, and the dash to freedom ended. A day later, after a kangaroo trial, the four men were sentenced to die. ¶In Las Villas province, where the government had earlier reported a complete cleanout of the Sierra Escambray rebel bands, militia and artillery moved into the hills for a new assault on the freedom fighters' stronghold...
...couple of hundred miles away in the Sierra Escambray, Dr. Manuel Fajardo, 29, Castro's close friend and personal physician, who was also commander of the local militia, intercepted two boys heading into hills that still hide some 300 oppositionists. Dr. Fajardo opened fire and was shot dead in the fight. Fidel Castro gave Fajardo the revolutionary version of a Chicago-style funeral, and bitterly blamed "the bandits of the Pentagon." Meanwhile, in Peking, "Che" Guevara got for Cuba's bare-larder economy the biggest foreign loan Red China ever made-$60 million for five years...