Better Targets, Better Weapons

Something new has been added to the exile raids on Fidel Castro's Cuba-efficiency and equipment. Early one morning last week, the Cuban government reported, two unidentified twin-engine bombers appeared in the dark skies over the provincial city of Santa Clara, 186 miles east of Havana. Antiaircraft batteries filled the air with flak, but the planes managed to scatter their load of bombs before flying away.

It was the fourth raid on Cuba in less than a month. In the first, a plane strafed and bombed a sugarmill in Camaguey province. Three nights later, the Castro government complained, a lone bomber, lights out and engines feathered, coasted over the southern coastal town of Casilda. Parachuting a yellow flare to light up the target, it launched three rockets at the town's oil storage tanks, setting fire to a railroad tank car. In another night attack, two landing craft slipped up the Santa Lucia estuary to the heavily guarded Patricio Lumumba metal-processing plant. A raiding party scrambled ashore, took careful aim, and laid down a barrage of bazooka shells. When militiamen returned fire, the raiders made an orderly retreat, covered by machine guns. But they left their mark: gaping holes in the plant's sulphuric-acid and petroleum tanks.

The attacks were a considerable improvement over the usual rag-tag raids staged since the Bay of Pigs. The professional touch has Castro worried. The "pirate" attacks, charges Radio Havana, prove that a "plan of aggression" has been initiated by the U.S., "with the approved participation of some puppet governments of Central America."

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