Cuba: More Mosquito Bites

Fidel Castro's Communist dictatorship fairly bristles with coastal emplacements, sea-scanning radar, patrolling helicopters and 45-m.p.h. komar-class Soviet torpedo boats. Yet whenever the mosquito navy of the anti-Castro exiles buzzes up to bite away at fortress Cuba, as it did in Havana harbor last week, the recruits behind Castro's hardware curiously seem to be looking the other way.

Arrowhead Approach. Under a full moon one evening, three or more exile gunboats—each painted a glossy white, showing red and green running lights and flying the Cuban flag—approached Havana in arrowhead formation. By midnight, the exiles had reached the city without so much as a challenge, broke out 20-mm. cannon and .50-cal. machine guns, and raised havoc along the waterfront for half an hour.

One boat cruised east along Malecon Drive, at times no more than 30 yds. from the sea wall, shot up the Havana Riviera hotel—a favorite of Iron Curtain visitors—and left flames licking from third-floor windows. Farther east along the shore, a second raiding group blasted away at a police station, then at a group of soldiers, who scrambled for cover. To the west, the other boat raked the seaside home of Castro's Puppet President Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado, drawing erratic rifle fire from nearby guards. By the time the attackers turned for home, the confusion was such that antiaircraft guns were pumping shells into the sky as searchlights crisscrossed futilely for enemy planes.

The embarrassing news reached Castro atop Pico Turquino, a 6,560-ft. mountain in the Sierra Maestra, where he started his revolution nine years ago. He was there, improbably enough, to award diplomas to 426 medical students, climaxing nearly a week of hoopla calculated to revive his people's flagging "revolutionary fervor." For four days and nights, students and friends had hiked up the mountain with the bearded dictator.* At one point during the trek, Castro called for helicopter delivery of 1,000 quarts of ice cream for his weary followers. Tons of food, TV cameras and electrical generating equipment were hauled to the campsite, where eventually over 1,000 Cubans gathered with the Maximum Leader.

An Exile Caper. On TV from Pico Turquino next day, Castro predictably blamed the waterfront raid on "the CIA, which has perpetrated all types of misdeeds and crimes against this country." In reply, three exile groups in Miami quickly admitted that they had pulled off the caper "to show that Castro is vulnerable." The boats, according to exiles, had not come from Florida but from a "secret base" outside U.S. jurisdiction. There seemed little doubt on that score. For over a year, the U.S. has tried to restrain anti-Castroites from such exciting but basically pointless adventures.†The surveillance has been in creased fivefold since the Cuban refugee evacuation began last month with a rush of small boats from Florida; now that Castro has signed a "memorandum of understanding" to set up an airlift of 3,000-4,000 refugees a month, no one wants to give him any excuse to renege.