Cuba's top military chiefs recall battles

Published Friday, March 14, 1997, in the Miami Herald

Cuba's top military chiefs recall battles

HAVANA -- (EFE) -- Cuban military interventions in countries from Angola to Venezuela are described in a collection of memoirs published this week.

Unclassified: Secrets of the Generals, a 546-page book written by Luis Baez, a reporter for the official news agency Prensa Latina, is based on interviews with 41 senior Cuban army leaders.

The book was published with the armed forces' permission and carries a foreword by Defense Minister Raul Castro. Included in the book:

Interior Minister Abelardo Colome Ibarra tells of traveling to Argentina in 1962 to lay the groundwork for a guerrilla uprising to be headed by Argentine journalist Jorge Ricardo Massetti.

Peasants apparently reported Massetti's role to authorities, however, and he is believed to have been killed as a result.

``Everything seems to indicate he attempted to flee,'' Baez told the interviewer. ``He went into the jungle and died there, although we really never found out what happened.''

Gen. Ulises Rosales del Toro remembers joining leftist fighters in Venezuela, along with three other Cuban advisers, and spending 14 ``very tense'' months trying to teach guerrilla tactics to Venezuelans who apparently resented having Cubans instructing them on how to fight on Venezuelan soil.

``While trying to show that enemy attacks could be repulsed, we four Cubans found ourselves all alone on several occasions,'' Rosales recalled.

Gen. Nestor Lopez Cubas recalls heading a Syrian tank battalion during the October 1973 war that pitted Syria and Egypt against Israel. His unit did not see full-scale combat, but did engage in a few artillery duels, he says.

But Lopez's ``most difficult, complex, dangerous and risky'' mission was in Nicaragua in the 1980s, in support of the Sandinista government's fight against U.S.-backed contra rebels.

``We risked our lives on a daily basis,'' Lopez said, describing ambushes, minefields and other characteristics of an unorthodox war, where no one knows where the enemy will pop up next.

Argentine-born guerrilla leader Ernesto ``Che'' Guevara is remembered by several of the officers.

Victor Schueg Colas recalled that he and Guevara were nearly killed in Zaire -- then known as the Congo -- when government troops surrounded their guerrilla camp and pinned them down for five days. The guerrillas and their Cuban advisers eventually slipped away.