Word: maestra
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...five days last week the Cuban government kept officially mum while high-ranking members of the regime leaked to the press that 11,000 army troops, with artillery, mortars and bombing planes, were in an all-out drive to flush Fidel Castro from his mountain fastness in the Sierra Maestra. "This is the real thing," they said...
...clandestine rebel radio seemed to confirm that some hard fighting was in progress, because it appealed: "Come to the Sierra Maestra, Cuban doctors. We need surgeons urgently. The enemy offensive has begun violently along a 200-kilometer front...
Talk of a "big drive" involving 11,000 army troops is undoubtedly exaggerated, but there is evidence that Batista is beefing up his operations against the rebels. The army is now establishing fortified posts deep in the Sierra Maestra. Men and arms for these posts are supplied by a new weapon in Batista's arsenal-British-made, armored helicopters, each reportedly carrying 14 men with full equipment...
...capital as caused mostly by "delayed public reaction," insisted: "Our units are intact." Broadcasting from the clandestine rebel station, Castro unleashed a farrago of nonsensical victory claims, e.g., "There is no rebel patrol that has not scored a resounding success." He added an unlikely atrocity tale: "In the Sierra Maestra peasants' huts are being bombed with napalm that came from the United States...
There was no doubt that the rebels were hurt, and they showed it. From the chief himself came a summons to his six top provincial lieutenants to head back to the Sierra Maestra, presumably for an agonizing reappraisal. The total failure of Castro's touted "total war" had highlighted 1) his weakness in practical organizing ability, and 2) the movement's lack of a social program to attract Cuba's labor and its Negroes (25% of the total population, some 40% of Oriente's). Said a wealthy, aging Havana rebel last week: "From...