Apparently an overenthusiastic group of would-be liberators landed in the area of Nombre de Dios, east of Colon. Then Prime Minister Fidel Castro denounced the action and sent more people to bring the invaders home. Here is an article from the Cornell paper a few days later:
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Interesting. Thanks for sharing. And Lee, love that website with your video clip. There are some more interesting clips on there like the 1940 great fire in Colon that left 10,000 without homes and the Red Cross had to set up a tent city.
I wondered if this was real, so I found a reel, shot at the time. It really happened.
http://www.britishpathe.com/video/panama-the-invasion-that-failed
April 1959 was a busy month for politics in Panamá. Student radicals attempted a guerrilla uprising at Cerro Tute in Veraguas, followed by an bungled coup by a faction of the political elite that was supposed to start with a landing at Santa Clara balanced by a Cuban incursion that, in the end, wound up in Nombre de Dios.
A contemporary chronicler of the revolutionary scene of those times in Panamá wrote that, despite their professed hostility toward the ruling classes, the group at Cerro Tute was acting in (poorly coordinated) concert with Roberto Arias and both expected support from the Cubans.
In 2010 documents were released in which British government minister John Profumo (that's right, he of L'affaire Profumo) wrote that the Margot Fonteyn and her husband, Roberto Arias had enlisted Fidel Castro, who “promised to help her husband in his aims to overthrow the existing regime in Panama”. Profumo found found the episode farcical as he stated “I had to pinch myself several times during her visit to be sure I wasn’t dreaming the comic opera story she unfolded.”