Yankees Besieged

The thump of dynamite blasting foxholes into the coral starts at dawn these days at Guantánamo Naval Base. All day newly arrived marines sweat and swear as they sandbag gun emplacements, communications lines and antitank positions.

Until recently, sea-oriented old "Gitmo," the besieged 45-sq.-mi. U.S. enclave on the southeast coast of Communist Cuba, counted only 300 combat marines, and their vintage M1 rifles were hardly a match for fast-firing Belgian weapons sported by Castro's militia. Now Guantánamo is grimly digging in.

Castro, in his right mind, presumably would never try to storm Guantánamo, unless he wanted to provide the U.S. with a justification for moving in to crush his Red regime. He has no legal case against the U.S.: under a 1934 treaty that cannot be voided unilaterally, the U.S. may rent Guantánamo in perpetuity.

Starting last November, Cuban bulldozers have cleared a network of military access roads, which slope down from the surrounding hills (where Castro observation posts and gun emplacements lurk) right up to Gitmo's 24-mile fence. The mined roads lead 26 miles westward to the home base of a Castro armored pool of 51-ton Stalin tanks and 155-mm., 40-m.p.h. motorized artillery.

Last month the amateurish blue-shirted militiamen outside Guantánamo were replaced by 3,500 spit-and-polish young troops in starched fatigues. Many of them, apparently, were trained in three Czech-and-Soviet-commanded camps nestled in the hills above Guantánamo. More than 25,000 Cuban troops now surrounded the Guantánamo area.

Along Guantánamo's fence, Castro's men are putting the final touches on their own Berlin Wall. Workers' cadres have carved a 75-yd. clearing around the base and in Iron Curtain fashion have carefully smoothed its surface in order to spot the footprints of anyone trying to escape into the base. Gangs of teen-age "Young Rebels" are painstakingly planting a "cactus curtain" of bayonet grass, a tough century plant with half-inch sawtooth barbs.

In the past five months, more than 800 marines with battle packs have landed in Guantánamo, boosting garrison strength to at least 1,100 marines and 2,000 sailors.

With the reinforcements has come modern equipment—new rapid-fire M14 rifles and a field patrol device which detects raiders by radar. And there is increasing support near by—an on-call Marine battalion in Puerto Rico, a U.S. fleet now stationed regularly off Guantánamo Bay, and the carrier-based, swept-wing F4H Phantom II jet fighters whose sonic booms are clearly audible in Castroland.