The Invaders

The secret was there for anyone who would listen. Around the little Hotel San Luis on Havana's Belascoain Street, the talk was loud & long about "going to Santo Domingo to fight Trujillo." Mostly the talkers were young Cubans out for adventure and a chance to strike at dictatorship. Some may have been Communists; some were Communism's most ardent enemies. But there were also Dominicans. For weeks Dominican exiles had been trickling into Havana, by plane and boat from the U.S., Puerto Rico, Venezuela and Guatemala. Something was up, and that something was a filibuster in the romantic Caribbean's best tradition.

Money for the plot had been supplied by Dominican exiles and by patriots in Trujilloland itself. "General" Juan Rodriguez Garcia had put up the most cash. Until the Dictator dispossessed him two years ago, he had been the Dominican Republic's biggest rancher. Cuban officials played dumb, but that they knew about what was going on was obvious.

Trujillo understood just how to deal with this sort of business. Yellow-eyed Julio Ortega Frier, his Washington Ambassador, broadcast that "3,000 Communist revolutionaries" were training in eastern Cuba, fixing to invade Trujilloland. Five days later he reported that 1,000 of them had already set sail in two landing barges and a corvette. But nothing happened.

Had Trujillo scotched the plot and then, in the style of Spain's Dictator Franco, magnified the Communist role beyond all reality? Had the revolutionaries, knocked off balance by Ortega's premature publicity, dropped their plan, or just deferred it? Last week the U.S. press front-paged reports that seven fighter planes bought from U.S. Army surplus had taken off from a Florida airfield, heading south. Trujillo's apprehensive plane patrols still scanned offshore waters and soldiers still manned the Dominican beaches.

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