“Nixon was the one in the White House applying the pressure,” says Marine colonel Robert Cushman, who was Eisenhower’s senior military aid in 1960.
14
“Help the Cubans to the utmost,” Ike berated JFK when handing over the reins. “We cannot let that government go on.”
15
“We should take more chances and be more aggressive. The U.S cannot take being kicked around.”
16
“Castro looks like a madman. If the Organization of American States won’t help remove him, we should go it alone.”
17
Eisenhower said he was prepared to defend U.S. action against Cuba in front of anyone. He referred to Castro as an “incubus” and said helping Cubans rid themselves of him would be well worth the price.
18
After the Bay of Pigs disgrace, Ike took JFK to the woodshed—though not publicly. He called the administration’s handling of the Bay of Pigs “a dreary account of mismanagement, timidity, and indecision.”
19
When JFK told Ike he worried how Latin America would react to American involvement in the Bay of Pigs, Eisenhower shot back:
“How on earth could you expect the world to believe we had nothing to do with it? Where did they get those ships, the weapons? How could you possibly have kept from the world any knowledge that the U.S. had been assisting the invasion? . . . There’s only one thing to do when you go into this kind of thing—it must be a success. . . . This failure at the Bay of Pigs will embolden the Soviets.”
20
It seems that JFK brooded seriously over Ike and Nixon’s advice. His security adviser Walter Rostow noticed this and advised him, “If you’re in a fight and get knocked down, the worst thing to do is to come up swinging.”
21
Now they could pause and think. “There will be plenty of times and places to show the Russians that we were not paper tigers. Berlin,
Southeast Asia
.” (Emphasis mine.) So instead of knocking out a Soviet beachhead ninety miles away, Kennedy decided to intervene half a world away in an Asian jungle, where in the end the Democratic Congress decided to let the Communists win anyway—over the protests of President Richard Nixon—by refusing to aid the South Vietnamese army.
If this logic strikes you as odd, well, then, you’re obviously not among the Best and Brightest that extend from the administration of John F. Kennedy to Senator John F. Kerry. The most striking thing about these Best and Brightest is their overweening, almost pathological, arrogance. “Those bearded Commies can’t do this to
you
,” snarled Robert Kennedy to his brother right after the Bay of Pigs. This reaction inspired Operation Mongoose (the psychological warfare programs aimed at destabilizing Fidel) and the Castro assassination attempts. But notice, this was only because the Kennedys took it
personally.
To them it wasn’t so much a matter of national security, much less a matter of freedom for Cubans, but of getting even, of settling scores. “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.”
22
JFK played politics with the Cuban exiles through his entire administration. One source, then CIA director John McCone, in documents declassified in 1996, claimed that Castro had agreed to return the Bay of Pigs prisoners seven months earlier than they were released.
23
But the Kennedy brothers (both president and attorney general) feared the Bay of Pigs issue coming up in the November 1962 congressional races. So the prisoners were conveniently released Christmas Eve of 1962. A few died in prison during those intervening seven months.
“I will never abandon Cuba to Communism!” That was JFK addressing the recently ransomed Brigada and their families in Miami’s Orange Bowl on December 29, 1962. “I promise to deliver this Brigade banner to you in a free Havana!”
“Hands up! You’re under arrest!” That was the U.S. Coast Guard (under orders of the Kennedy administration) to Cuban freedom fighters assembling in Key Largo for a landing in Cuba the following month.
“Hands up! You’re under arrest, blokes!” That was the British navy (after a tip-off by the Kennedy administration) to Cuban freedom fighters assembling in the Bahamas.
“You throw those Cuban exiles out and you close down their camps, or we cut off your foreign aid!” That was the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica after Cuban freedom fighters sought bases in those countries.
And in the swindle that ended the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy administration promised no invasion of Cuba by anybody in the hemisphere, including the Cuban exiles. Here’s the most nauseating part: The pact with Khrushchev was made barely a month before JFK made his liberation promises in the Orange Bowl. Yet he addressed those men, their families, and his compatriots with a straight face. As Grayston Lynch writes, “That was the first time it snowed in the Orange Bowl.”
The Brigada got more respect from its enemies than from JFK: Nine of the ten Castroite pilots who flew missions against the Brigada eventually fled Castroland.
24
They knew more about Castro than Kennedy did.
CHAPTER TWELVE
FIDEL AS BUSINESS PARTNER
Politicians who hail
the business prospects of trading with Castroite Cuba forget that Fidel didn’t just defraud U.S. stockholders, and he didn’t just steal millions of dollars in American assets. He stole
billions
of dollars from American businesses: $1.8 billion from a total of 5,911 different companies, to be precise. Fidel pulled off the biggest such heist in
history
. He didn’t obfuscate the matter, either. He crowed about it gleefully, then boasted that he’d never repay it—and hasn’t, not a penny.
Castro doesn’t pay debts, either. In 2001, the United States International Trade Commission Report said, “Cuba stopped payment on all its foreign commercial and bilateral debt with non-socialist countries in 1986.” Reuters reported in June 2001, “Debt talks between Cuba and the Paris Club of European creditor nations are on hold.... On the table was $3.8 billion of official debt to Paris Club members, part of a much larger debt Cuba ran up through the 1980s, until it began to default on payments and then stopped talking with creditors.”
And remember, back then Cuba was getting $5 billion a year from the Soviet sugar daddy. So what happened to
that
debt, you ask? Well, Fidel repudiated it, too, about $50 billion worth. “Soviet Union?” he frowns. “What Soviet Union? Where is this Soviet Union?” No country by that name anymore, right? So how can he owe it any money?
No problema
.
Nelson Mandela’s South Africa stepped in to offer comradely assistance to Fidel, and here are the results of that shrewd move: “Cuba’s efforts to attract more investment from South Africa are being frustrated by the island nation’s failure to pay a $13 million debt. South African Trade and Industry Ministry is wary of exposing itself to the Cuban risk until the debt is settled.”
1
Mexico got bit too. Last year, Mexico’s Bancomex, trying to recoup its ghastly losses from financing trade with Cuba, froze Cuban assets in three countries.
But some people never learn. The
Houston Business Chronicle
calls Castro’s Cuba “a great new marketplace.” I recently read a report from the head of Mississippi’s recent trade delegation to Cuba. He gushed that they’d “had a chance to meet Cuba’s business community.” Problem is, Cuba has no business community—it’s been the government since Castro took over. In fact, in recent years, the small number of private enterprises has actually
shrunk
. According to Moody’s Investors Service, July 2002: “Recent Cuban government actions indicate that official attitudes toward economic reform may have soured.... Increased obstacles to private sector activities and restrictions to foreign direct investments reveal heightened concerns about the loss of political control inherent in the economic reform process.”
But still they come. So many American businessmen come knocking and displaying their wares that Castro finally threw them a party. In July 2002, Cuba’s Communist Party put on a rollicking Fourth of July bash at Havana’s Karl Marx Theater. The festivities were “in honor of the noble American people on the anniversary of their independence,” proclaimed Cuba’s Communist Party newspaper,
Granma
. Fidel himself declared, “The cultural, spiritual, and moral legacy of the American people is also the heritage of Cuba and of the Cuban people!” And a choral group sang “Old Man River.”
Wow. What happened to the United States as “a vulture preying on humanity” (circa 1960), or the United States as “the cancer of humanity” (circa 1968), or “We will bring America to her knees” (in Iran in 2001), or “worse than Hitler’s Germany” (a Castroite staple for forty years). What a difference a few years—and going bankrupt—make. The sugar daddy Soviet Union is gone and Cuba’s credit rating is now rated below Somalia by Moody’s and below Haiti by Dun & Bradstreet. Another sign of Cuba’s desperation is that Havana recently topped Bangkok as “child-sex capital of the world.”
Today Castro has to pay cash for American products. But he and American companies are hoping to cozy up so he can get credit—guaranteed by American taxpayers through the Export-Import Bank. No risk to Castro and American businesses, only to you and me.
In the meantime, trade delegations visit Havana to chum it up with the murderers of Americans. Thousands of businessmen attended the U.S. Food & Agribusiness Exhibition at Havana’s Palacio de las Con-venciones on September 26–30, 2002. Among the dignitaries they might have met was Cuba’s “minister of education,” Fernando Vecino Alegret.
The book
Honor Bound: American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia 1961–1973
provides some interesting biographical details on Alegret. During the Vietnam War, the Communists ran a “Cuba Project” at the Cu Loc POW camp (also known as “The Zoo”) on the southwestern edge of Hanoi. The “Cuba Project” was a Josef Mengele–type experiment run by Castroite Cubans to determine how much physical and psychological agony a human can endure before cracking. The North Vietnamese never asked the Castroites for advice on combat, only on torture.
For their experiment, the Cubans chose twenty American POWs—mostly Navy fliers. One died: Lt. Colonel Earl Cobeil, a Navy F-105 pilot. His death came slowly, in agonizing stages, under torture. His torturer, nicknamed “Fidel,” was identified in congressional hearings (and in the
Miami Herald
in 1999) with great probability as Cuba’s minister of education, Fernando Vecino Alegret.
“The difference between the Vietnamese and ‘Fidel,’ ” testified fellow POW Captain Ray Vohden, “was that more or less, once the Vietnamese got what they wanted, they let up, at least for a while. Not so with ‘Fidel.’ . . . ‘I’ll show him,’ ‘Fidel’ said to me. ‘I’ll make him [Cobeil] so happy to bow down when I finish with him, he’ll come crying to me on his knees begging me to let him surrender.’” Vohden continued, “When I saw ‘Fidel’ with the fan belt I was surprised, because up to that time I had never heard of anyone getting hit like that. Slaps, punches, straps, manacles, ropes, yes. But ‘Fidel’ was going to show the Vietnamese a new trick.... Earl Cobeil had resisted ‘Fidel’ to the maximum. Now I could hear the thud of the belt falling on Cobeil’s body again and again, as ‘Fidel’ screamed, ‘You son of a beech, you fooker, you are cheating me. I will show you. I will show you.’ I could hear the thud of the belt falling on Earl Cobeil’s body again and again. I almost threw up each time I heard the belt hit Earl’s body. I didn’t think any human could endure such a thing. The guards all stood around laughing and yelling in Vietnamese. It had been far easier for me to endure the straps myself than to have to go through this.
“They [the North Vietnamese] tortured to obtain military information or a political statement, they punished us for breaking their rules ... but rarely tortured indefinitely just for the sake of torture. Eventually, they always let up. . . . However, ‘Fidel’ unmercifully beat a mentally defenseless, sick man to death.”
2
“Earl Cobeil was a complete physical disaster when we saw him,” testified another fellow POW, Colonel Jack Bomar. “He had been tortured for days and days and days. I went down to clean him up. When ‘Fidel’ dragged us down there, he said, ‘Clean him up, and if anything happens to this man, you, Bomar, are responsible.’ Then he hit Cobeil right in the face, knocked him down again. His hands were almost severed from the manacles. He had bamboo in his shins. All kinds of welts up and down all over; his face was bloody. He was a complete mess. They brought him into the room and as far as we could tell, Captain Cobeil was totally mentally out of it. He did not know where he was. I don’t think he knew where he had been or where he was going. He was just there. Then ‘Fidel’ began to beat him with a fan belt.... When he lost his temper, he was a complete madman. He would get red in the face; he just exploded with rage. So if you refused to bow to him like Cobeil refused to do . . . his temper just went out of control.”
“Fidel’s” monthlong beatings of another U.S. POW named Jim Kasler were “among the worst sieges of torture any American withstood in Hanoi,” according to
Honor Bound
. “Fidel” flogged Kasler “until his buttocks, lower back, and legs hung in shreds, and at the end he was in a semi-coma.”
3
That bowing down—not just murdering Americans, but humiliating them in the process—is a Castroite hang-up.