As it was laid out in Manhattan, the wristwatch advertisement showed a model, one Pete Jarman, in a false beard impersonating an antarctic explorer who had found the watch just the thing for polar expeditions. It was good hard-selling copy of the Hathaway eye-patch school. And sell it did when the ad appeared a fortnight ago in Havana newspapers. Grinning and snickering, Cubans quickly bought out the local dealers whole stock. But in spite of the ad7s success, further publication was hastily suspended. Reason: Jarman-in-a-beard was a dead ringer for Fidel Castro, the tenacious rebel who burrowed into eastern Cuba's Sierra Maestra mountains eleven months ago and has since then been plaguing Cuban Strongman Fulgencio Batista with guerrilla warfare.

But if Cubans chuckled, the ad only stirred Batista into stepping up his drive to hush out the rebel forces. Government planes attacked at least eight villages near Castro country. Four B-26 bombers and three F-47 fighters swooped down on the hamlet of Purial de Pilón a few days after some rebels passed through, strafing and bombing it for 25 minutes; 40 of the 400 townspeople were killed, including 17 women and children who were later buried in a common grave. In Dos Bocas de Cordero, Batista's airmen killed 15 villagers (and eight cows). Planes machine-gunned a peasant's funeral apparently mistaking the single file of mourners for rebels. The government put a price of $100,000 on Castro's head and sent 1,000 men to reinforce the 1,500 already ringing the Sierra Maestra.

Despite Batista's attacks, Castro, his army grown from a ragtag band of less than 100 to 600 wily sharpshooters, claimed victory in recent skirmishes. Guerrillas raided an army convoy, capturing Garand rifles and .30-cal. machine guns. The rebels reported the loss of 40 dead in the nine clashes but claimed to have killed five times that many government troops. For his next move Castro called for wide-scale sabotage, through his underground, of Cuba's all-important sugar-cane harvest, which traditionally starts in January. His slogan: "Batista without harvest or harvest without Batista."

Outside Cuba, more trouble piled up for Batista. In Miami his exiled foes last week formed a united front, at a meeting that joined Castro's fanatic student worshipers to old-pro politicos such as ex-President Carlos Prío Socarrás in a "Cuban Liberation Council." The council's first demand: formation of a provisional government that "will call general elections as quickly as possible."