Cuba Prepares For New Invasion

Press, Volume C, Issue 29513, 13 May 1961, Page 11

Cuba Prepares For New Invasion

(N.Z. Press Assn. —Copyright) NEW YORK, May 12. Cuba was continuing to prepare against an invasion which it said might come any time, the “New York Times’’ said today. The newspaper, in a dispatch from Miami, said today that radio messages picked up indicated that the fear of an invasion was not mere propaganda. On Wednesday night, orders were broadcast for the diversion of construction equipment to defence work.

A message from the Minister of Public Works, Captain Osmani Cienfuegos, said plans for construction work at Playa Giron, a beach involved in the April 17 landing, would be put off because construction equipment was needed for defence work. The Castro Government had been developing Playa Giron as a holiday area, the “New York Times” said.

A Havana Radio broadcast yesterday claimed President Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes of Guatemala had ordered "numerous Yankee combat planes” painted with the Cuban flag to fake an attack on Guatemala as a pretext for declaring war against Cuba. The broadcast also warned that an attack on Cuba would be followed by another attack on another country—but d'id not name the country, United Press International reported. The broadcast claimed the United States was planning a new invasion of Cuba, using “counter-revolution-ary worms and Batista war criminals such as those who are now being concentrated on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico.” “Yankee imperialism plans to use in this new aggression

Latin American cannon fodder supplied by some of the tyrannies such as that of Ydigoras Fuentes and put the monstrous attack, which includes the bombing of our cities, under the banner of the Organisation of American States." A Cuban Embassy official and his wife, working in Mexico City, defected yesterday and asked Mexico for asylum, the Associated Press reported. They denounced the Castro Government and said its attack on the Roman Catholic Church was the “last straw.” In Havana yesterday, the Cuban Government announced that it had taken over American film distributing companies. The Government named 20th Century Fox. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Warner, Columbia. United Artists, and Universal International. They will be operated by the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Arts and Industries. The institute's director, Dr Alfredo Guevara, told a press conference that American films carried political messages aimed at undermining the work of those who had "struggled for the liberation of people oppressed by Yankee imperialism."