Word: trujillos
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Somewhere in eastern Cuba, Dominican exiles lined up the team that would take over when the great day came-if it came. For Provisional President they picked soft-spoken Angel Morales, 50, Dominican Minister to Washington in the days before Rafael Leonidas Trujillo seized power. Their "army," which now included half the University of Havana football squad, drilled with bazookas, flamethrowers and machetes. Their "air power," they figured, would surpass the Dictator's, even though Cuba last week seized part of it: a Catalina flying boat, two Ventura medium bombers and a four-engined Liberator. Despite publicity enough...
...Trujillo made no bones about it. He had not been able to find out just when & where the invaders would land to start a Dominican uprising that in the end might profit trouble-hunting Communists more than anyone else, although the plotters in Cuba still tried to keep the Commies out of the act. One night last week Trujillo pulled his bodyguards out of a party and went down to the beach. There he prowled around for a long time and scared...
...secret was there for anyone who would listen. Around the little Hotel San Luis on Havana's Belascoáin Street, the talk was loud & long about "going to Santo Domingo to fight Trujillo." Mostly the talkers were young Cubans out for adventure and a chance to strike at dictatorship. Some may have been Communists; some were Communism's most ardent enemies. But there were also Dominicans. For weeks Dominican exiles had been trickling into Havana, by plane and boat from the U.S., Puerto Rico, Venezuela and Guatemala. Something was up, and that something was a filibuster...
...Trujillo understood just how to deal with this sort of business. Yellow-eyed Julio Ortega Frier, his Washington Ambassador, broadcast that "3,000 Communist revolutionaries" were training in eastern Cuba, fixing to invade Trujilloland. Five days later he reported that 1,000 of them had already set sail in two landing barges and a corvette. But nothing happened...
...Trujillo scotched the plot and then, in the style of Spain's Dictator Franco, magnified the Communist role beyond all reality? Had the revolutionaries, knocked off balance by Ortega's premature publicity, dropped their plan, or just deferred it? Last week the U.S. press front-paged reports that seven fighter planes bought from U.S. Army surplus had taken off from a Florida airfield, heading south. Trujillo's apprehensive plane patrols still scanned offshore waters and soldiers still manned the Dominican beaches...