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Even the leave-taking turned into a Red rally. Learning that his Cubana Airlines Britannia had been impounded in New York by a U.S. court order,* Castro requested that Khrushchev lend him a Soviet plane. Promptly a Soviet Il-18 turboprop turned up. Beaming, Castro read newsmen another homily: "The U.S. takes away our plane and the Soviets give us a plane. The Soviets are our friends." A newsman asked if his government was Communist and Castro snorted: "You've got Communism on your mind. Everybody who is not like Chiang Kai-shek or Franco or Adenauer is a Communist for you. We are by the humble people, of the humble people and for the humble people—you know, just like Lincoln. I'm coming back soon," he yelled, and was off.
Bombs at Home. In Havana, Castro went straight to the Presidential Palace for a 2½-hour speech. An hour after he started, an oppositionist showing unprecedented derring-do set off a noisy bomb amidst the meeting. Castro laughed it off: "The moment I started talking of imperialism, the bomb exploded." But he announced a police-state innovation, apparently long planned: a neighborhood spy system set up to "know who lives in each block and what he does." Off went a second bomb and Castro's smile grew wan. "Let us not underestimate the imperialist enemy," he said.
That same night, wandering onto a TV panel show, Castro, 33, called Kennedy, 43, and Nixon, 47, "ignorant, beardless kids." His eleven days in Manhattan had brought the showdown with the U.S. much closer. The U.S. embassy suggested to the 4,000 U.S. citizens still working in Cuba that they would be "prudent" to send home their dependents, and the State Department advised Americans not to visit Cuba.
* In two weeks, writs impounding three planes flown to the U.S. were served on the government-controlled Cubana Airlines. A Miami advertising agency, trying to collect an unpaid $285,000 bill for tourist advertising, obtained two of the writs; the third was obtained by a Cubana stockholder in Florida concerned over the Castro government's progressive nationalization of the line's assets. Actually planes flying to the U.N. on government business are entitled to diplomatic immunity, and the U.S. State Department tried to advise Cubana how to void the writs, but the company ignored the advice.