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Cuban embassy officials held out against the eviction orders, demanding to remain until they were certain that more than 650 Cuban construction workers and military personnel being held by the U.S. Army were being properly treated and until arrangements for their return to Havana were complete. Army troops kept U.S. newsmen from entering the Cuban embassy. Reporters learned, however, that during the invasion U.S. paratroopers had vandalized the Cuban ambassador's one-story residence on a promontory near the uncompleted Point Salines airport. Furniture was smashed, windows broken and an obscene message written on the wall. Libya's ambassador, meanwhile, finally arranged a meeting with U.S. officials to deliver a plaintive question: "How can we get off the island?" He was flown to Barbados aboard a military plane two days later.
After sitting for six days under the eyes of U.S. Army guards, the Cuban construction workers were permitted to move to a more habitable tent city they had erected near the airstrip. All of the captured Cubans were sent there as the tedious process of interviewing each man continued. The U.S. interrogators wanted to determine just how many were professional soldiers, trained reservists, ordinary workers or various combinations of all three. Many of the prisoners looked too old, paunchy or otherwise unfit to be soldiers.
When 57 wounded Cubans were returned to Havana, Western journalists were permitted to interview some in their hospital beds. Most claimed that on Grenada they had been asked whether they would like to defect to the U.S. They contended that they had received no advance warning of the U.S. invasion—a claim that conflicts with Castro's report that he sent warning to "Cuban representatives in Grenada" on the Saturday before the Tuesday strike. Even the U.S. State Department told Havana just hours before the invasion that the strike was imminent, assuring Castro that it was not aimed at his workers. This tip-off angered the Pentagon.
The wounded Cubans say they did not hear Havana's radio instructions that they should resist "to the death." They surrendered in small groups, they said, because they had run out of ammunition. Asked how long the Cubans had possessed large stores of weapons on the island, Lieut. Colonel Mariano Marquez Lopez evaded the question, finally saying that he could not remember.
Arrangements for releasing all of the captive Cubans were finally worked out, and the movement started late in the week. U.S. military planes began taking the Cubans from Grenada to Barbados, where they were picked up by Cuban airliners. They were welcomed as heroes in Havana.