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To top it off. Castro's noisv insults and his slave trader's offer to sell for $62 million the 1,179 Bay of Pies prisoners have disgusted and alienated many of the Latin Americans at first disposed to treat his revolution kindly (even though his may still be a name to reckon with among Latin America's back-country illiterates). Last week the strongest of the 60 sick and wounded prisoners Castro has sold on credit were in the U.S. to beg funds to buy themselves and the other 1,119 still in Jail-In Manhattan. Cardinal Spellman contributed $5,000 to their cause. From Mexico, onetime Cuban Vice President Guillermo Alonso Pujol flew to Havana, paid $100,000 cash for his son, a private in the exile brigade, and flew out again.
Chance to Ride. Despite what oratorical mileage he can still get out of the Bay of Pigs. Castro's people cannot live on oratory. The revolution is foundering, and for advice the amateur student of Marxism has had to turn increasingly to Cuba's old pros in the field. For Roca it was the opportunity the party had been looking for ever since it rose up 37 years ago in Cuba's eastern Oriente province. In all their years of maneuver and propaganda, the Communists had never found popular support among Cubans. Cynical and corrupt, the Reds had enjoved only brief periods of influence by dealing with detested dictators, which inevitably added to their later disfavor. Now suddenly they saw a chance for a ride on the wave of the future.
No one yearned more for power than Bias Roca, the dogged party chieftain who had made the long climb up through the ranks, memorizing his Marxist catechism and steadily following Communism's twists and turns. A largely self-educated and self-disciplined man, he knows how to smile when he is angry, agree publicly when he disagrees privately, listen when he wants to speak, make deals with those it is his instinct to detest, keep his temper even when slapped in the face.
A Way Out. Eldest son of a poor shoemaker named Francisco Martinez and his common-law wife, Bias Roca was born July 24, 1908 in Manzanillo's working-class district of San Nicolas. The children took their mother's family name; Roca was named Francisco Calderio, nicknamed "Paco," meaning Little Frank. Known as a vivo—someone not deeply intelligent, but clever—he managed to get through grammar school before he had to join his brothers cutting leather and stitching peasant shoes in a tiny home workshop. Against the bleak prospect of a lifetime at the cobbler's bench, the Communists offered a way up and out.
Before long, Roca was an official of Manzanillo's Communist-controlled shoe workers' union and deeply involved in the party's struggle for recognition. Unable to get anywhere on their own the Communists sought to make a deal in August 1933 with Dictator Gerardo Machado whom Cubans knew as "the butcher of Havana." Virtually the entire country was on general strike against Machado and the Reds were offered control of Cuba's entire Labor Confederation if they would denounce the strike. The party accepted the offer. Four days later, Machado fled, leaving the Communists behind as the dictator's last remaining supporters.