[3] Cuban communists later claimed Matos was helping plan a counter-revolution organized by the American Central Intelligence Agency and other Castro opponents, an operation that became the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

[4][page needed] The scandal is noted for its occurrence alongside a greater trend of removals of Castro's former collaborators in the revolution.

Matos' arresting officer and former collaborator of Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos, would soon die in a mysterious plane crash shortly after the incident.

[5] In early January 1959, Fidel Castro appointed various economists such as Felipe Pazos, Rufo López-Fresquet, Ernesto Bentacourt, Faustino Pérez, and Manuel Ray Rivero.

[6] Cuban revolutionary Antonio Núñez Jiménez had been appointed the first director of the INRA, and was suspected of communist sympathies by the US embassy.

[7] In July 1959, Matos grew suspicious of the new government after the deposition of President Manuel Urrutia Lleó, and attempted to soon resign.

[1] In October 1959 Fidel Castro ordered a minor member of the 26th of July Movement to go on television and accuse Matos of treason.

[1] Matos lamented in his resignation that communists were gaining positions of power that he felt were undeserved for having not participated in the Cuban Revolution.

[13][a] In the meantime Fidel Castro flew down to the INRA headquarters in the Camagüey Province to organize a mob of 3000 men to storm Mato's army post if Cienfuegos was unable to arrest him.

Raúl Castro's security chief Ramiro Valdés Menendéz took Matos from Cienfuegos and transported him to Havana to wait to stand trial.

Ambassador to Cuba Philip Bonsal, Castro used Díaz Lanz's action, which he characterized as a "bombing", to create a mass reaction and suppress the issues raised by Matos's resignation.

[21] Shortly after Matos' arrest, the prime minister and Che Guevara made a speech to members of the INRA that Cuba would continue to turn in a socialist direction.

Artime then contacted the American embassy in Havana, and on 14 December 1959, the CIA arranged for him to travel to the US on a Honduran freighter ship.

Artime's organization MRR thus grew to become the principal counter-revolutionary movement inside Cuba, with supporting members in Miami, Mexico, Venezuela etc.

[22][23][5] After the arrest of Huber Matos, Bohemia magazine records that Cienfuegos commented on the political trajectory of the provisional government by stating: This Revolution is humanist, olive green, and as Cuban as the palm trees; but be assured that if the solution to the people's problems, if the guarantee of the future were communism, then I will be a communist.

[24]On the late evening of 28 October 1959, Cienfuegos' Cessna 310 ('FAR-53') disappeared over the Straits of Florida during a night flight, returning from Camagüey to Havana.

Despite the fact of Cienfuegos' evidently exceptional loyalty to Castro, he hesitantly supported the arrest of his friend Matos only days earlier.

Che Guevara, who was close to Cienfuegos and named his son Camilo in his honor, dismissed the notion of Castro's involvement.

Ambassador Philip Bonsal, Cienfuegos enjoyed Havana's nightlife and he "may have had a penchant for friendships and associations deemed undesirable by some of his more austere revolutionary comrades".

[31] Testifying the next day, Castro delivered a seven-hour speech accusing Matos and the others of campaigning against the revolution and "indirectly" promoting the interests of the United States, large landowners, and supporters of Batista and the dictatorship in the Dominican Republic.

On and off, I spent a total of sixteen years in solitary confinement, constantly being told that I was never going to get out alive, that I had been sentenced to die in prison.

The controversy surrounding Huber Matos' arrest was only a signal for the trend of larger political consolidation around Fidel Castro.