Recipe for Crisis

It was almost 1 1 p.m. when the unmarked speedboat dropped anchor 100 ft. off the Cuban coast near Havana.

Working quickly and silently, the six crew members inflated a rubber raft, slipped it into the chilly black waters, and loaded in two small suitcases crammed with two submachine guns, three pistols, a carbine, four hand grenades and ten blocks of explosives. Then four of the six crew members jumped aboard and pushed off for the rocky Cuban coast.

The man in charge was Antonio de la Cuesta Valle, 38, the surest and shrewdest of the anti-Castro exiles now actively trying to overthrow Cuba's Maximum Leader. A sturdy 200-pounder, Cuesta had made ten previous trips to Cuba, taking in men and equipment and bringing out agents for debriefing. Last week, on his eleventh trip, Cuesta's luck ran out. No sooner had the raft put ashore than it was spotted by an antiaircraft battery. Two of the men were killed; the other two made it back to the main boat, but were apparently drowned when the boat was sunk minutes later.

Their bodies never turned up. The injured survivors--Cuesta and his first mate--were captured.

Unhappily for Cuesta, he and his bold little band had walked right into one of Cuba's biggest states of alert since the Bay of Pigs. All around the island, armed troops and civilians alike were watching coastlines, spotter planes were poised for takeoff and Havana radio was crackling with a call to arms --as part of a new Castro effort to cook up a crisis with the U.S.

On the Fence. It began two weeks ago when a Cuban militiaman slipped into the U.S. base at Guantanamo and --ignoring two warnings from guards --was shot trying to scale the fence back into Cuban territory. Castro angrily claimed that the marines had coldbloodedly gunned down the militiaman inside Cuba. Two days later, six more militiamen showed up on the base and even exchanged fire with marines before scrambling back. Once again, Castro accused the U.S. of taking potshots at innocent Cubans. Then, lashing out at the "uncontrolled bandits" and "sons of bitches" to the north, he accused Washington of planning an invasion. For his part, Secretary of State Dean Rusk warned that any further border incidents could trigger "grave and regrettable consequences."

Since the U.S. was obviously planning no invasion, just what was behind Castro's scare-talk? Partly, it was his way of taking Cuban minds off the island's economy, which slides deeper into chaos and ruin every week--despite $1,000,000 a day in Soviet aid. So desperate are conditions that by last week, when the Cuban airlift completed its first six months, 25,000 Cubans had left the country and almost 1,000,000 more--fully one-seventh of the Cuban population--were on the waiting list. Invasion talk was also a good way to justify the sleek, new, expensive arms and other military hardware pouring into Cuba from the Soviet Union at a time when everything else was in such short supply.

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