Sabotage on the French M/V "La Coubre" in the port of Havana results in more than 100 victims and many hundreds of wounded

Sabotage on the French M/V La Coubre in the port of Havana

At 3:15 on the afternoon of March 4th, 1960, the steamship La Coubre blew up on the dockside in Havana. The esplosion caused 101 deaths, over 200 injuries and an indetermine number of disappearances. The U.S. government had put the Belgian authorities under pressure not to send the arms shipment to the island, and from January of the same year the CIA had unleashed an underground war against the Cuban Revolution.

Thirty minutes later, while hundreds of people were helping the victims in a rescue operation,a further explosion, even more powerful, blew the remains of corpses to pieces, mixing them with molten metal warped by the force of the explosion. The next day, March 5th, 1960, Fidel said: "Freedom means even more now. Freedom means country and our choice now will be HOMELAND OR DEATH."