Cuba: The Massacre

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Front (Frente), a fragile union of five organizations that held much the same point of view as their "coordinator," Manuel Antonio (Tony) Varona, 52—that "the need for agrarian reform in Cuba is a myth." The land expropriated by Castro, says Varona, onetime head of the old-line Auténtico Party, should be returned to its original owners except for "about 15%" that is not productive. Later, another organization came to the CIA's attention: the People's Revolutionary Movement (M.R.P.), led and founded by Manuel ("Manolo") Ray,* 36, a soft-spoken engineer whose talent for organization had made him leader of the highly effective underground movement against Batista in Havana. Ray became Castro's Minister of Public Works, and stood it until November 1959, shortly after Castro jailed one of his comrades-in-arms in the Sierra Maestra, Huber Matos, for objecting to Communist infiltration of the revolutionary army. Ray angrily resigned his Cabinet post and went back to teaching engineering at the University of Havana. When the Communists took over the university as well, in July 1960, he resigned again and dropped out of sight to reorganize his old underground, this time against Castro.

When the M.R.P. came along, the CIA looked over the two outfits—one headed by a well-known practical politician who spoke the language of stability and the good old days, and the other run by a little-known reformer who proposed, in effect, a continuing revolution in Cuba, without Castro or Communism. There was a feeling that disillusionment with Castro had come a little late for Ray and many of his followers. The CIA decided to stick with Varona and his Frente as the instrument to overthrow Castro, and assigned an agent named Frank Bender to the task.

Money & Bases. The CIA's decision against them quickly became apparent to Manolo Ray and the M.R.P. Organized into cells to spread sabotage across Cuba, the M.R.P. men say they asked many times for explosives and boats to get the stuff ashore, but were usually waved aside. But the Frente was becoming a big enterprise. Estimates of how much money was pumped into the Frente for recruiting centers and other political expenses vary from $130,000 monthly to a high of $520,000 last December. As the plans for a frontal invasion took shape, CIA men went to Guatemala and arranged with Rancher-Businessman Roberto Alejos* to use three of his properties—coffee plantations named Helvetia and La Suiza near the town of Retalhuleu, and a cotton farm called San José Buenavista, 35 miles from the Pacific port of San José—as camps to train an army of invasion ("No charge." said Alejos. "Just remember me in Havana"). Through Alejos, the CIA also arranged a $1,000,000 hurry-up surfacing of a 5,000-ft. airstrip at Retalhuleu. Starting in September, an airlift of U.S. planes shuttled between recruiting centers in Florida and the Guatemalan camps, bringing in the first of more than 2,000 combat trainees. Later, Alejos helped establish two more camps, one at San Juan Acul, close to the Mexican border, the other at Dos Lagunas in the jungles of northern Guatemala. A heavyset, grey-haired CIA agent known as "Charlie" took charge of the Guatemalan operation, backed up there and in Miami by "Jimmy," "Clarence," "Adams" and