Attack in the Caribbean

Shortly after noon last Wednesday, the radio in the Miami office of the Bahamas Line shipping company crackled with an emergency message. It came from the captain of the Johnny Express, a slow (12-knot), 1.500-ton freighter returning to Miami after delivering general cargo to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Captain Jose Villa, a Cuban exile who is now a U.S. citizen, reported that as his ship was passing between the West Caicos Islands and the Inaguas in the Bahamas, a Cuban patrol boat demanded that he submit to a search. When he refused to stop, the Cubans opened fire. Villa was badly hurt and so were some members of the 13-man crew, many of whom were Dominicans.

As the attack continued. Villa talked for nearly an hour with the Miami office. Excerpts:

Villa: Notify the Coast Guard. We have wounded.

Miami: Affirmative, affirmative.

Villa: These people are finishing us.

Miami: Tell us if they are still firing.

Villa: Yes, they are still firing. Have the helicopter come quickly. I'm badly wounded.

Moments later, the radio of the Johnny Express fell silent. In a flagrant breach of freedom of the seas, the Cubans rammed and boarded the freighter, then towed it to a port on Cuba's north coast. The Coast Guard helicopter never arrived. Partly because the ship was sailing under the Panamanian flag and partly because the incident took place outside U.S. territorial waters, the Coast Guard delayed its response to the call for more than an hour.

Washington's official response was even slower. At first the State Department said only that the U.S. could make no protest since the ship was registered in Panama. Then, as the impact of Cuba's piratical act sank in. President Nixon personally intervened. As a sign of his concern, the President received Villa's wife at Key Biscayne and promised to do his best to secure the captain's immediate release. Later, the U.S. warned Cuba that it would take "all measures under international law" to protect American and other ships from further attacks, and U.S. war planes and naval units began to patrol the Caribbean.

Cuba was unrepentant. The owners of the freighter are the Babun brothers, members of a wealthy Cuban family that settled in Miami twelve years ago. Radio Havana claimed that the Babuns are front men for the CIA and that last October the ship took part in a machine-gunning raid on the Cuban seaside town of Boca de Sama, in which several people were killed and wounded. Earlier this month the Cubans seized another Babun freighter, the Lyla Express, near Great Inagua. That ship and its crew are still in Cuba.

So far, the Cuban naval offensive has been directed at solely Babun-owned ships. But Radio Havana warned that Cuban gunboats would have no compunction whatsoever about seizing any vessel "under any flag or camouflage" that they believed had been engaged in "counterrevolutionary activities."

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