That Martial Fever

The wacky obsession of Fidel Castro's Cuba last week was that war with the U.S. was close at hand. "Machetes ready, rifles oiled." cautioned the mouthpiece newspaper Revolution. "Yankee warships off the Cuban coast!'' In the drumfire of propaganda, even some of Castro's 6,000 political prisoners began believing the lies. "Every time we heard a plane go overhead," reported a prisoner just released, "we thought the Americans were coming to rescue us.''

The only plane that came was a twin-engine Piper Apache piloted by a U.S. adventurer whom U.S. authorities had been trying to get the goods on since last year. The pilot was Matthew Edward Duke, 45, ex-Navy flyer and ex-husband of Melody Thomson, 35, blonde heiress to a $3,000,000 tobacco fortune. In 1947, Duke hit the skids, got picked up on bad-check charges, then turned to the dangerous game of flying anti-Castro Cubans to U.S. exile for $1,000 a job.

When he touched down just at daybreak on a highway 15 miles west of Havana last week. Cuban police were waiting in ambush. As Duke gunned the plane to escape, the police riddled it with submachine gunfire and killed him.

Castro himself created another flurry by reporting that the U.S. frigate Norfolk had violated Cuban waters and that a Cuban patrol boat had fired on a U.S. sub. The U.S. Navy answered that the Norfolk would have run aground had it been where the Cubans said it was. The sub Sea Poacher reported that it might have been shot at on May 6 more than five miles off Cuba, but the shots were so wild that the sub crew thought the tracer bullets were signal flares. Even so. the U.S. made a formal protest to Havana.

A main purpose of the war flapping apparently was to divert attention from the seizure of the only important anti-Castro newspaper in Cuba (see PRESS). But if the bearded Castro himself really thought his country in peril, he hardly showed it. He escorted Indonesia's President Sukarno around the island, then took ship for the "Hemingway Tourney.'' Castro's impressive catch: a 46-lb. sailfish and three marlin weighing 47, 54 and 74 Ibs.

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