President Dwight D. Eisenhower did not stop at formalisms and started an undeclared war against the Cuban Revolution months before his National Security Council gave the go-ahead to the Covert Action Program against the Castro regime on March 16, 1960 and to the CIA to blow up the French steamship La Coubre at a cost of more than 100 dead.
Such a macabre event, one of the worst criminal actions of the 20th century in our region, took place as the ship was unloading military supplies at the Havana docks on Friday, March 4, 1960.
In those days, U.S. power circles were striving to keep Cuba from receiving the Belgian-made Light Automatic Rifles (FAL), considered among the best of their time, which the Revolutionary Government had purchased from that country’s war industry through a contract signed in 1959.
On that morning, La Coubre arrived in Havana, after sailing from Antwerp, Belgium, with a cargo of about 100 tons of grenades and ammunition. Shortly after three o’clock in the afternoon, the ship unexpectedly exploded, causing alarm throughout the city. Actions to help the victims started at once, but then came a second and stronger explosion which caused the greatest number of deaths as a mushroom-like black cloud rose more than a thousand meters above the remains of the ship and became visible from anywhere in the capital city.
Obviously, the second explosion was intended to kill more people, sow panic among the population and, above all, eliminate the leaders of the Revolution, including Commander in Chief Fidel Castro, who, as was widely known since the struggle in the Sierra Maestra mountains, would always show up in the most dangerous places together with his combatants. The CIA planners had been within an inch of achieving their aim.
In his documented article La Coubre hizo brotar la convicción de Patria o Muerte (La Coubre brought out the conviction of ‘Homeland or Death’), published in the daily Granma on March 3, 2015, researcher Tomás Gutiérrez González includes the testimony of José Alberto León Lima, one of Fidel’s escorts who that day was on the 18th floor of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA)—currently the Ministry of the Armed Forces—together with Commander Raúl Castro, Commander Guillermo García and other officers, when the explosion shook the entire building.
León Lima recalled “(…) We all went out to the street and got into the cars. With us were Fidel, Raul and other members of the escort. As we drove there we saw cars that seem to be taking the wounded to La Covadonga Hospital. Near the Tallapiedra Power Plant we had to stop the car because of a wide and deep ditch that prevented the passage of vehicles. (…) Just as we got out of the cars to cross the ditch, we heard the second explosion. That ditch kept us from reaching the place where, a few seconds later, many people who were helping the victims ended up dead.”
Aleida March, who together with Ernesto Che Guevara and his escort, First Lieutenant Hermes Peña Torres, arrived in the premises, said about that fateful day:
“We were not far from the pier when the explosion occurred. (…) We stopped the car near the San Ambrosio Barracks. They got out and walked towards La Coubre. I wanted to go with them, but they asked me to stay to take care of the documents, the weapons and other things we were carrying. I think it was their excuse to protect me, since I was pregnant. Moments later there was a second explosion, and I thought the worst.”
Years later it was known that an American journalist named Donald Lee Chapman came on La Coubre as a passenger, something unusual for a ship carrying explosives. He was supposedly on his way to his native Nebraska and would disembark in Miami, quite far from his destination, and other American citizens would get on board there.
The dictator of the Dominican Republic, Leonidas Trujillo, is held to have known about the U.S. plans, and Cuban experts in their subsequent investigations launched from planes boxes of ammunition and grenades that came on the ship and they didn’t explode, which proved that it had been an act of sabotage by the CIA and its accomplices.
So far, the U.S. government and its intelligence community have refused to declassify documents about the event.
The CIA plan failed in its attempt to break the Cuban people’s decision to move forward, as pointed out by Fidel at the memorial service given to the victims of the sabotage on March 5, when he said: “(…) we will know how to resist any aggression, we will know how to defeat any aggression,
and once again we will have no other choice than the one with which we began the revolutionary struggle: freedom or death, except that now freedom means even more: freedom means Homeland. And our dilemma would be Homeland or Death!”
