"A New & Horrible Phase"

The stagnant fight for Cuba's provinces began to look like a war. All week long, Rebel Leader Fidel Castro's radio blared victory, reported forces sweeping through town after town in Oriente and Las Villas provinces, routing small garrisons, setting up rebels as "civil authorities." The excited trumpeting was probably overdone. But there was little question that the rebels were on the move, or that Dictator Fulgencio Batista's army was retreating to defensive ground in Cuba's big cities.

Out of the Hills. For the first time in the two-year conflict, Castro moved his GHQ out of the Oriente mountain fastness to a site near the town of Baire, 42 miles from Bayamo. Moving through the Oriente valleys, rebel columns filtered into half a dozen weakly garrisoned small towns, captured Caimanera (pop. 4,000), just across the bay from the U.S. Guantanamo naval base. In answer, the Cuban high command sent two frigates to shell Caimanera, planes to bomb the rebels wherever they showed themselves. Batista committed few troops. Whenever possible, the beleaguered garrisons pulled back; a few surrendered to the rebels. Though official communiques said little, there were reports that Batista's big Santiago garrison, recently reinforced with 2,000 fresh troops flown in, had twice attempted to break through the rebel ring only to fail. The government still talked of an "all-out offensive"; the talk lost much of its steam when the Santiago commander bought up every foot of barbed wire in town, spun it around Moncada barracks and along the airport road.

On the sugar plains of Las Villas province the rebels claimed the capture of several more small towns. The government gave credence to their claims by shaking up the army command, ordering in more reinforcements and warning the civilian population that it intends to bomb out any rebel attempt to hold the central province. Reports of heavy fighting came out of Fomento. near the Sierra del Escambray. The rebels held Sancti Spiritus (pop. 60,000) for a night, drove the army from Caibarien. a north coast sugar port, and closed in on the Las Villas capital of Santa Clara.

Into the Camp. In the face of the new threat by the rebels, Batista's regime showed few signs of cracking. In Havana 30 new British medium tanks and cases of Italian machine guns were unloaded and hustled off to Camp Columbia. From time to time there were tales of dissatisfaction and defection among both high-and low-ranking Cuban army officers. One young air force pilot, Jose Crespo, flew his B-26 to exile in Miami last week, saying that he could not obey orders to "bomb cities and kill innocent women and children." But there were other pilots, willing to use bombs. So long as the big army garrisons remain loyal, the Batista regime still stands.

The big losers in the spreading war are Cuba's people. In Oriente the civil war moved the Roman Catholic Church to issue its own sad communique last week. Said Santiago Archbishop Enrique Perez Serantes: "We have entered a new and horrible phase--hunger produced by war. Christian hearts cannot be unmoved by the plight of nearly all our towns and villages, filling with victims of hunger and caught in the path of death."

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