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TO HUGH DELARGY, M.P.

24th October 1958.

Dear Hugh,

I sent you the rather cryptic message by Mrs Young because I don’t think it is realised at all in England the feeling created amongst the Cubans by the British government’s sale of jet planes to Batista. As you know I was there for some weeks last November and the change in Cuba between then and now is very striking. Castro has really succeeded in cutting communications inside the island to a minimum and his bands now are not only in control of the greater part of Oriente (capital Santiago) which is the largest state and from which a third of the revenue derives, but he also has stepped up operations throughout the island. For instance last November it was possible for me to motor to Cienfuegos, the naval port, and Trinidad, but now no car driver would take one more than a very few miles outside Havana itself. The murder of hostages by the government is an almost daily occurrence – bodies are found flung out by the wayside, and the activities of Captain Ventura,4the chief torturer of the Batista police, have been stepped up. Considering that Batista never came to power by constitutional means but by a coup d’état makes it all the more unreasonable, one would think, for the British government to supply planes for the bombing of his own population.

Two years ago Castro landed with a few men of whom only 8 survived to get into the mountains with him.5Last November conservative estimates of his forces were between 800 and 1200. This November his supporters would claim 15,000 and the sceptical would put the figure round 7,000. As one Cuban said to me, there is hardly a family in Havana who has not lost one member at the hands of the Secret Police.

Under the circumstances if only to prevent anti-British feeling on the part of the man who is likely to be the next ruler of Cuba, cannot you raise some opposition to the sale of these planes in the House of Commons?

This is rather a hurried note as I only got back from Havana two hours ago.

Yours ever,
Graham

Delargy, the Labour MP for Thurrock, working on a tip from Graham’s friends in Cuba, later challenged the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs about a rumoured shipment of 100 tons of rockets from a British port. The Minister hotly denied the claim.6


Date: 2015-02-03; view: 601


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