Word: havana
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...emerged, looking grimy and bedraggled; some were shirtless but most wore torn blue jeans or other work clothes that they had pulled on hastily when the fighting began eight days earlier. The last eleven of the 57 Cubans injured in the U.S. invasion of Grenada and sent home to Havana last week had to be carried off the plane on stretchers...
...Havana in addition is preparing Cuban and world opinion for the possibility that some Cuban prisoners in Grenada might defect to the U.S. That has not happened yet, but Castro evidently fears it will and is seeking to soften the blow by dismissing any defections in advance as the result of U.S. psychological coercion. A government communique charges that American interrogators are "using every possible means to undermine the morale" of the prisoners, telling them that Cuba does not want them back and offering them political asylum...
Washington was uncertain how seriously to take a tip from a friendly intelligence service that Cuba had asked South American terrorist groups to attack U.S. targets, presumably citizens and embassies. Nonetheless, the U.S. twice warned Havana that it would hold Cuba responsible for any such attacks. Alarcon said Cuba had asked only for "expressions of solidarity of a political nature...
...airport ceremony for the wounded demonstrated, Castro is appealing to patriotic fervor rather than revolutionary enthusiasm to maintain his hold on the populace. There is, in fact, little of the old guerrilla spirit left in Cuba: like Castro, the revolution has gone middle-aged and gray. Visitors to Havana are struck by the similarity to most Communist countries: a rigid bureaucracy, a once lively press that is now dismissed even by sympathetic leftists as boring, buildings that are shabbily maintained...
Ostensibly the mobilization is designed to deter the U.S. invasion that Castro regularly warns against in time of crisis. Its real motive is probably to instill enough patriotic feeling to draw the people closer to Castro. If so, it has worked. Says a Latin American diplomat in Havana: "As long as Fidel is around, support for the government will be strong. The people adore him. When they are unhappy with the government, they say, 'Many things happen that the commandante en jefe [commander in chief] doesn't know about...