Word: freighter
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...Pentagon's leak about the mysterious ship at Nikolayev was obviously timed to coincide with President Nixon's request for more defense funds. It is possible that the vessel, which is about half complete, may turn out to be a tanker or a big cargo freighter. But some Allied naval experts are already willing to bet that the Pentagon is right, and that the ship really is Russia's first attack carrier (it already has two cruiser-sized helicopter carriers). If so, the decision to build an attack carrier represents a dramatic and fundamental shift in Moscow...
Shortly after noon last Wednesday, the radio in the Miami office of the Bahamas Line shipping company crackled with an emergency message. It came from the captain of the Johnny Express, a slow (12-knot), 1.500-ton freighter returning to Miami after delivering general cargo to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Captain José Villa, a Cuban exile who is now a U.S. citizen, reported that as his ship was passing between the West Caicos Islands and the Inaguas in the Bahamas, a Cuban patrol boat demanded that he submit to a search. When he refused to stop, the Cubans opened...
Moments later, the radio of the Johnny Express fell silent. In a flagrant breach of freedom of the seas, the Cubans rammed and boarded the freighter, then towed it to a port on Cuba's north coast. The Coast Guard helicopter never arrived. Partly because the ship was sailing under the Panamanian flag and partly because the incident took place outside U.S. territorial waters, the Coast Guard delayed its response to the call for more than an hour...
Cuba was unrepentant. The owners of the freighter are the Babun brothers, members of a wealthy Cuban family that settled in Miami twelve years ago. Radio Havana claimed that the Babuns are front men for the CIA and that last October the ship took part in a machine-gunning raid on the Cuban seaside town of Boca de Samá, in which several people were killed and wounded. Earlier this month the Cubans seized another Babun freighter, the Lyla Express, near Great Inagua. That ship and its crew are still in Cuba...
From the correspondents' files, and from background research assembled by Reporter-Researcher Susan Altchek, Contributing Editor Marguerite Johnson wrote the cover story. A veteran of TIME'S Art section, Marguerite shifted to World last winter after taking a five-month-long excursion around the globe by freighter, jetliner and Trans-Siberian Railroad. Upon her return, she was assigned to what seemed at the time a relatively tranquil part of the world: India. This is her second cover story since then on the tragic subcontinent. "The conflict," she says, "is so suffused with ancient religious, cultural and racial hatreds...