Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE)

A group of University of Havana students formed in1960 by Juan Manuel Salvat’s Trinchera groups as a wing in the university of the Movimiento de Rescate Revolucionario (MRR).  As the activities of such anti-Castro organizations as the DRE hampered the government’s efforts to control the university, it repressed their members through beatings, expulsion from the university, and temporary arrest.  Denied the shelter of the university, the DRE leaders had to choose between the underground, imprisonment, or exile.  In mid-1960, after several months in the underground, leaders Muller and Salvat escaped to Miami.  There the DRE broke with the MRR and joined the Democratic Revolutionary Front, a loosely coordinated body of anti-Castro organizations.  Between the end of 1960 and the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, the DRE engaged in a variety of successful underground activities such as sabotage, propaganda, and a partially successful national student strike.  A small party led by Albert Muller began guerrilla warfare in Oriente.  But the DRE never attained the prominence of the earlier Directorio Revolucionario of the 1950s.  The brutal repression following the Bay of Pigs smashed the entire Cuban underground.  The DRE never recovered, although it continued its activities in exile for a while before dissolving.  The most spectacular of these was a 1962 raid by 23 men on two former navy PT boats, which sped in close to shore to shell a hotel in a Havana suburb, hoping to kill some of its Soviet guests (none was hit).