Journalist Massó has written his book to acquaint the people of the United States with the infamy of the Castro dictatorship in Cuba. Although intended for United States readers, the 170-page paperback is in Spanish and therefore not likely to reach its main objective.
The first sixty pages are a sustained diatribe against the regime, in a brief accounting of events from January 1, 1959, to April 17, 1961. The most compelling reading, however, comes later in the eyewitness accounts of persons arrested in Cuba as a result of the Bay of Pigs invasion April 17, 1961. Through these reports by refugees the full impact and horror of events elsewhere in Cuba are to be seen. The invasion itself is not described, but the brutalities visited upon suspected gusanos (“worms”), or counterrevolutionaries, are graphically reported. Thousands of persons were rounded up, thrown into prisons, and held incommunicado for days without adequate food, clothing, and sanitation, and threatened with death.
When the author refers to Cuba as “the greatest drama of horror in the history of the Americas,” however, he is overlooking the Paraguayan War in the 1860’s, three decades of Trujillo terrorism in the Dominican Republic, and the Civil War in Colombia after 1948, in which more than 100,000 persons were killed. But such hyperbole is pardonable in view of the writer’s intimate involvement in the Cuban tragedy, and in his passionate plea for the Americas to react. The book has made its point.
