Hairbreadth Escape

Cuba's biggest manhunt in recent years got under way one night last week when an informer tipped off police that Aureliano Sanchez Arango, the elusive underground revolutionist (TIME, Nov. 2), was holed up with fellow plotters in a neat, palm-shaded and hedge-hidden house in the outlying Country Club District. The tipster claimed that the rebels were plotting President Fulgencio Batista's assassination. Police, reinforced by army troops, threw a cordon around the district. As 20 radio patrol cars converged on the quiet residence in West Royal Avenue, a group of men and one woman ran out and scattered, some in cars and some on foot.

For 15 minutes, to the sound of shrieking tires and intermittent gunfire, police played hare & hounds with a 1954 green Oldsmobile. In it the cops claimed to have got a momentary view of Sanchez Arango, dapper in a white suit and sporting a brand-new mustache. Just as a patrol car closed in behind the Olds, an older Buick got in the way, neatly blocked the police out of play, and the Olds disappeared in a burst of speed.

In the West Royal Avenue house, the cops found four small TNT bombs, three hand grenades and a .45 pistol. From a house near by they hauled a former congressman who admitted that he had just been talking to Sanchez Arango. When police asked him about what, the man replied, "Baseball."

While 1,000 cops and soldiers were still searching the district, President Batista put on a show of unruffled calm and laid the cornerstone for a new municipal hospital. At the same time Cubans added a new word to their vocabularies, inspired by Aureliano Sanchez Arango's fifth escape from arrest: it was aurelianada, meaning an escape carried out in a hairbreadth, spine-tingling manner.

But Aureliano himself had had enough of aurelianadas for the moment; four days later he turned up at the Uruguayan embassy in the nearby suburb of Miramar and asked for asylum. Although it was the second time he had done this (the first was in 1952), Batista ordered that he be granted safe-conduct from the country,

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