Spontaneous Combustion

"The atmosphere in Cuba is just like it was in November 1958, right before Batista fell," reported a traveler from Havana last week. The traveler was only partly right; Fidel Castro is far stronger than Batista. But for the first time last week, the rebellion against Castro spread out to ordinary people and set the island alight with a curious kind of spontaneous, uncoordinated, often futile combustion. So wide and so fast did it spread that the exile leaders plotting against Castro in Miami and Manhattan lagged far behind.

One afternoon the labor movement, taken over by Castro stooges and turned into a Castro company union, burst out in a stunning outcry that recalled the mood of the June 1953 riots in East Berlin. Summoned by Castro's Confederation of Cuban Workers to repudiate their secretary-general, anti-Communist Amaury Fraginals, 1,000 members of the Electrical Workers Union instead hoisted Fraginals on their shoulders and marched on the presidential palace shouting "Elections--down with Communism--out with fellow travelers." President Osvaldo Dorticos offered to talk to Fraginals if the demonstrators dispersed, and Fraginals told his men to hold union headquarters against possible police attack. Fraginals waited in the palace for hours to see the President, then left in disgust.

All over the island, Cubans bracketed Havana with little acts of defiance. P:At Corralillo, 100 miles eastward, on Cuba's north coast, farmers fed up with Castro's unkept promises, rose and fought his militia for two days.

P:At Cabanas, 40 miles to the west, Captain Clodomiro Miranda Mendiela, a rebel veteran, defected with 200 soldiers. Castro rushed up 2,000 men and heavy mortars, after 48 hours captured wounded Captain Miranda with ten men. P:Near Cienfuegos, five minutes after a Cubana Airlines DC-3 took off northward to Havana, 140 miles away, four men and two women passengers produced guns and tried to force the plane to Miami. The ship crash-landed, and the dash to freedom ended. A day later, after a kangaroo trial, the four men were sentenced to die. P:In Las Villas province, where the government had earlier reported a complete cleanout of the Sierra Escambray rebel bands, militia and artillery moved into the hills for a new assault on the freedom fighters' stronghold.

Bombs were exclamation points to the tension rising inside Havana itself. Two went off at the university, a third in a bakery, another apparently wrecked the control room of the giant, $20 million expropriated Shell Oil refinery. The worried regime narrowed its circle and last week more men were forced into jail, exile or ignominy. Among them: Major Humberto Sori Marin, Castro's first Agriculture Minister and chief justice of the war crimes trials--under house arrest; three Cuban diplomats in the U.S., including the alternate delegate to the Economic & Social Council of the Organization of American States--dismissed; Gustavo Hart, brother of Education Minister Armando Hart--defected to Venezuela.

With an average of 15 to 20 regular army soldiers taking off for the hills with weapons each day, Fidel Castro called in his youthful National Police Chief Efigenio Ameijeiras, told him to get busy chasing the counterrevolution, "which is out in the open." But Cuba after all was still Cuba, and last week there was one crudely comic moment. Parading past the U.S. embassy to protest the shower of U.S. rocket fragments that allegedly killed a cow near Holguin, came 250 Havana University students leading cows festooned with placards. One of the signs, obviously designed to be a double insult, read: "Eisenhower, you have murdered one of my sisters. Signed John Kennedy."

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