The Julio Incident

At 2:52 a.m., the U.S. Coast Guard radio station at Pungo, Va., picked up a nervous call. Speaking in broken English, the caller said that he was aboard the 26 de Julio, a small (943 tons) Cuban cargo vessel that normally hauls freight and cattle between Havana and Montreal. Would the Coast Guard al low the ship to put in to port at Norfolk "to discharge people who are seek ing political asylum in the U.S.?"

That request, recorded in the Pungo radio log, began the small and unhappy saga that official Washington soon called "the Julio incident." Four members of the Julio, determined to escape from Cuba, had taken guns, seized control of the ship and locked the captain and the rest of the crew in the brig. When the four asked for asylum, the Coast Guard consulted the State Department, then advised the Cuban ship to "approach no closer than the three-mile limit." It dispatched two ships--the cutter Point Brown and a seagoing tug--to investigate.

The U.S. ships found the Cuban ship dead in the water about ten miles offshore, with its anchor dragging and the four crewmen on deck. When they sighted the U.S. ships, three of the men immediately jumped into a lifeboat and began rowing toward the cutter. Suddenly, a dozen men burst onto the deck of the 26 de Julio. With the ship's anchor still dragging, they got up power and headed the ship toward the lifeboat. They missed on the first pass, but swung around again and came close enough to dump two of the lifeboat's occupants into the sea.

Late Orders. The U.S. cutter's skipper, Chief Boatswain's Mate P. W. Caviness, radioed Coast Guard headquarters for permission to intervene, was soon told to prevent the Cuban vessel from overrunning the lifeboat. The orders were too late. Before the cutter could move into position, the Julio made its third pass, and Caviness heard a shot fired from its deck. By the time the lifeboat came into sight again, both it and the sea around it were empty.

"The trouble is settled, now we go back to Cuba," signaled the Cuban master. Speaking over a bullhorn and through an interpreter, he explained that the three mutineers were now his prisoners. Powerless to stop him, the Coast Guard had no choice but to let him go. Two days later, it even had to intervene to prevent the Julio from being hijacked by an armed yacht dispatched secretly to intercept it by a Cuban exile organization in Miami. The U.S., of course, got no thanks from Havana. Raging against "this new imperialistic Yankee aggression," the Castro government charged that "Yankee warships" had "violated the principles of freedom of the seas" by carrying out a "warlike maneuver" against a helpless freighter.

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