Venezuelan details 1958 Castro mission
A former Venezuelan Navy captain shared new details of secret 1958
weapons deliveries that helped bolster Fidel Castro's fight against the
Batista government.
Posted on Sun, Jan. 06, 2008
BY CASTO OCANDO
El Nuevo Herald
When Venezuelan Navy Capt. Carlos Alberto Taylhardat was entrusted with
the secret mission of coordinating a series of weapons deliveries to
Cuba's Sierra Maestra mountains in late 1958, he accepted the order with
the same sense of patriotism that he had displayed when he fought the
Marcos Pérez Jiménez dictatorship, toppled earlier that year.
The mission was the culmination of a series of negotiations started when
Vice Adm. Wolfgang Larrazábal, Venezuela's provisional president at that
time, approved supporting Fidel Castro's fight against the Fulgencio
Batista government.
Taylhardat's mission was highly risky and of the utmost importance for
the Castro guerrilla movement: He was to coordinate the delivery of
modern weapons, ammunition, medicine, food and even fighters by air from
Caracas, in order to support the final phase of the guerrillas' offensive.
''We are going to entrust you with a secret mission. It's been decided
to help Fidel Castro,'' Taylhardat recalled being told by his superior,
who had received direct orders from Larrazábal.
Although the broad outlines of Larrazábal's aid to Castro has been known
for years, Taylhardat revealed new details and provided previously
unknown documents during an exclusive interview with El Nuevo Herald in
Caracas.
''It was a mission that I could not share with anyone because it
implicated the Venezuelan government,'' Taylhardat said during the
recent interview in his house in Las Palmas, a residential zone in
northeast Caracas.
One of the new details he revealed was that the five flights from
Venezuela to Cuba that delivered the supplies also carried several
Cubans who were going to join Castro's guerrillas. Also, the flights
returned with wounded rebels who were treated in private Caracas clinics
at Venezuelan government expense.
He also provided new details on the weaponry that ended up in the hands
of Castro's rebels.
A confidential document of the Venezuelan army's Armament Service, dated
Nov. 21, 1958, shows the weapons sent to the rebels included '11 boxes
that contained `Garand' M-1, rifles.''
Other items listed were three boxes containing 20 .30-caliber Browning
assault rifles, five boxes containing 10 machine guns, 35 boxes
containing 99,950 .30-caliber bullets, and a box of 100 hand grenades.
U.S. WEAPONS USED
One interesting sidelight, Talhardat said, was that the weapons,
manufactured in the United States, were part of a shipment sent by
Washington in previous months to the Venezuelan government.
''The American government never knew that all the weapons they had . . .
[sent] to Venezuela were going to end up in the hands of Fidel Castro,''
Taylhardat said.
He added that the weapons were delivered using a twin-engine Curtis C-46
airplane that had been acquired for $10,000 from a friend of Taylhardat.
Part of the operation's financing came from anti-Batista Cuban groups in
Caracas and university sectors that raised more than $1 million.
''It was an extremely important mission,'' said former Venezuelan
Foreign Minister Enrique Tejera París, who was an advisor at the time in
the Venezuelan presidential palace and one of the few men who knew of
the secret operation.
''It was life-or-death fight against dictatorships, including
Batista's,'' said Tejera París, also an old friend of Taylhardat.
''There was a threat from dictatorships like Trujillo's [in the
Dominican Republic] or Batista's against Venezuela's young democracy,''
the former diplomat added.
Larrazábal's government, then immersed in democratic enthusiasm after
the fall of the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship on Jan. 23, 1958, gave its
complete support to the Cuban rebels.
''Larrazábal's order said that there was a need to search for anything
that could be useful to Fidel Castro,'' Taylhardat said.
A CRITICAL NEED
The weapons shipment from Larrazábal to Castro was ''fundamental and of
great help'' for the consolidation of the triumph of the Castro
guerrillas, said Américo Martín a leader of a leftist Venezuelan
university movement in 1958 and later a Cuban-trained leftist guerrilla
in Venezuela.
'That was so valuable that Fidel Castro once told me in a firing range
in Havana: `We are going to shoot with these rifles, which was the
invaluable help that Wolfgang Larrazábal gave us in the final stage of
the fight against Batista.' ''
Martín said some of the guns were later used by Castro in the failed
invasion he organized against the Rafael Leonidas Trujillo dictatorship
in the Dominican Republic, in which some Venezuelan fighters participated.
According to Taylhardat, the flights from Caracas to the Sierra Maestra
mountains where Castro was headquarters took three hours each way, were
started after midnight and did not use radio communications to avoid
detection by Batista's air force. Taylhardat personally supervised the
first flight.
The weapons were transported from army warehouses in Caracas, in four
military trucks covered with thick sackcloth ''to hide what was
inside,'' he said. The pilots, among them anti-Batista Cubans, learned
about the real objective of the mission only after taking off.
''We flew above the zone where we were supposed to land, in the dark
night, and suddenly we saw an illuminated rectangle with torches made
with oil tanks filled with kerosene, to light up the landing area,''
said Taylhardat, who is now retired.
Before the airplane -- called El Libertador (The Liberator) -- stopped
in the improvised landing area, the crew lowered a ramp and began
dropping off the supplies. Then a group of wounded men boarded. In a
matter of minutes, the plane was off again, he said.
Taylhardat already had some experience in secret operations. Trained in
Mussolini's Italy and in Quantico, Va., where he became an expert in
amphibious warfare, he also participated in a 1952 Venezuelan navy plot
to overthrow the ruling junta then led by Pérez Jiménez.
The conspiracy failed, and he ended up in a military prison for 2 ½
years. But when the regime he was trying to overthrow fell in January
1958, Taylhardat participated in important missions entrusted to him by
Larrazábal, who had been his professor in the Venezuelan Naval Academy.
One of those missions was to accompany Fidel Castro when he visited
Caracas two months after he rose to power in Cuba on Jan. 1 1959.
Taylhardat said that during a meeting between Castro and newly elected
Venezuelan President Rómulo Betancourt, he witnessed an unusual request
by the Cuban commander.
''First, he asked Betancourt for a loan for $300 million to reconstruct
Cuba,'' he said. ``Since Betancourt told him he didn't have that amount,
Castro then suggested that he borrow the money to the North Americans
`because what we don't want to do is to kneel in front of the Americans,'''
A TURNING POINT?
''Perhaps history would have been different if that loan had been made.
Maybe he wouldn't have requested help from the Russians,'' he added.
Venezuelans' initial enthusiasm for the Castro fight ''fell after the
executions,'' Taylhardat said, referring to firing-squad executions of
alleged Batista supporter after the revolution's victory.
''That mythic image of Castro collapsed . . . when they started killing
thousands of people,'' he said. ``We couldn't accept the executions. It
was a reaction of generalized repulsion, and it disappointed us.''
After Castro took power, Taylhardat said, the Cuban leader provided
training and weapons to leftist Venezuelan guerrillas.
''Without wanting to, we had helped create a monster,'' Taylhardat said.
``When the operation was done, I was honored in having participated,
because we believed that we were helping to bring freedom and democracy
to our Cuban brothers. Unfortunately, things were different.''
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