Julio Loace was 24 when, in the summer of 1962, soldiers from Havana turned up at his sleepy rural village to say he and his family had to leave the plot of land where they reared cows and planted black beans. A house would be built for them, he was told, beyond a new perimeter.
Soon after, lorries hauling ominous objects as long as trees drove through his village under cover of darkness. The ground trembled under their weight.
“They were huge,” Loace, now 86, said from a rocking chair while chickens pecked outside his house. “Nobody had ever seen equipment so big.”
