By mid-July, the returns to the Twenty-sixth of July Movement of favorable publicity and a cessation of Cuban government bombing began to be outweighed by the exasperation of U.S. officials, many of whom were ready to free the hostages by force. Sensing the turn in U.S. sentiment, Fidel Castro ordered his brother to release the American military personnel. On July 18 Raúl Castro finally did so, and all returned safely to the U.S. base.
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U.S. opposition to Fidel Castro's ascendancy was not simply a product of anticommunism. In the wrong hands, democracy could be as dangerous as communism, and was thought to be its antecedent. Such was
the premise behind the CIA-orchestrated coup that deposed Jacobo Ãrbenz Guzmán, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, in June 1954. “Spaniards have many talents,” Vice President Richard Nixon informed the National Security Council early the next year; “government was not among them.” A few years later, Nixon told the same audience that Latin America's embrace of democracy was not necessarily a welcome thing. For states “lacking in maturity,” Nixon observed, democracy “may not always be ⦠the best of all possible courses.” John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's secretary of state, shared Nixon's alarm at the “tremendous surge in the direction of popular government by peoples who have practically no capacity for self-government and indeed are like children in facing this problem.” Nations that made a premature leap to “self-government directly out of a semi-colonial status [provide] Communists with an ideal situation to exploit.”
39
Throughout the summer and fall of 1958, as the Cuban resistance endured and as Batista proved helpless to crush it, the U.S. State Department and National Security Council (NSC) returned with increasing frequency to the conundrum of whether Castro was or wasn't a Communist.
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In general, the farther American officials were from the fighting in eastern Cuba, the more prone they were to view the Cuban resistance through the prism of communism. This was inevitable. Touring the towns and villages of Oriente province from his base in Santiago, Park Wollam could see for himself the psychological and physical effects of Batista's dictatorship and bombing campaign. The suffering was real, popular frustration justified. So, too, Cubans' hostility toward U.S. support for the Batista regime. Wollam recognized that, seen through a local prism, the resistance could not be reduced to communism, notwithstanding the presence of avowed Communists in its midst.
Wollam himself had gone out of his way to support the resistance. Just a year before Raúl Castro's kidnapping of American GIs, while Charles Ryan was still in the mountains, Wollam arranged for Léster RodrÃguez, a Castro lieutenant, to receive safe passage from the Sierra Maestra to the U.S. base and ultimately on to Mexico City, in exchange for a pledge by Castro's forces to stop using the base as a source of weapons and ammunition. Wollam personally transported RodrÃguez to the naval base in the trunk of his car, past checkpoints
manned by Batista's soldiers. Meanwhile, the smuggling of arms to the rebels continued.
41
By contrast, from Havana, where Ambassador Smith enjoyed a regular audience with Batista, and from Washington, where criticism of the United States was equated with communism and where dictators such as Batista in Cuba and Duvalier in Haiti were thought to be all that stood between communism and the eastern seaboard of the United States, mere contact with Communists was enough to disqualify Castro for U.S. recognition. A few days before the release of the hostages in late July 1958, Smith boasted to Lansing of maintaining “a pleasant relationship with Batista, [who] has always tried to accede to my requests.” Naturally, Batista was upset by “the many acts, which he considers to have been unfriendly, on our part,” Smith explained. If Washington was going to insist that the American ambassador negotiate with the Castro brothers for the hostages' release, thereby granting them de facto recognition, he, Smith, hoped that Washington would show Batista “some act of good faith before we press him again.” Smith thought “the delivery to Batista of a wing of T-28” combat training jets would have just the right effect.
42
Three days later, Smith went further, urging Washington to rethink the arms embargo against Batista. Just “because we do not approve of dictators,” Smith observed, “let us not unwillingly give aid to those in league with communism.” Here Smith made a significant leap. Released U.S. hostages had described their kidnappers as “extremely religious, anti-Communist and ultra super-nationalist.”
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Either way, by December 1958, the Eisenhower administration concluded that Castro must be stopped. At a December 23 meeting of the NSC, CIA director Allen W. Dulles “added that we ought to prevent a Castro victory,” Secretary S. Everett Gleason confided in his notes. “The President believed this was the first time that statement had been made in” that forum.
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There was, of course, precedent for U.S. intervention in a Cuban revolutionary war. In April 1898, with Máximo Gómez's Liberation Army on the verge of victory over Spain, the United States intervened in the Cuban War of Independence, thus supposedly saving Cuba from itself. But if Dulles and company meant to prevent a Castro victory, they would have to hurry. After repelling Operación Verano, a government offensive in the summer of 1958, Castro's forces abandoned
the eastern mountains and moved into central Cuba, where they were greeted by enthusiastic crowds. By late December they arrived at the outskirts of the city of Santa Clara, less than two hundred miles east of Havana. Here, over the course of four days, between December 28 and 31, Che Guevara led just under three hundred rebel troops into what proved to be the largest and last pitched battle of the revolution. Aided by a cache of weapons and ammunitions captured from a government train, Guevara routed a force far superior in arms and manpower, much of which capitulated without a fight. In the wee hours of the New Year, Batista fled Cuba for the Dominican Republic, never to return. Within a week, the Revolutionary army arrived in Havana, jubilant and flush with state-of-the-art government weaponry captured at Santa Clara the week before.
45
The Eisenhower administration spent much of the next two years trying to get a bead on Castro (as late as June 1960, a National Intelligence Estimate conceded that it was “unable to answer the simplified question âIs Castro himself a Communist?'”).
46
At stake was nearly $1 billion in U.S. investment in Cuba. U.S. businesses produced 40 percent of Cuba's sugar; owned two out of three of Cuba's oil refineries, 90 percent of its public utilities, and half of its railroads and mines; and, through the likes of Meyer Lansky and his mob associates, dominated Cuban tourism. Cuba, in turn, counted on a U.S. sugar subsidy worth $150 million, which constituted 80 percent of its foreign exchange.
47
When, on January 9, 1959, U.S. national security officials first broached the question of how Castro's rise would affect the status of the Guantánamo naval base, they assumed Castro would do nothing to jeopardize the two nations' intimate relationship so long as the United States still held the chips in Cuba.
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By May 1959, Castro had begun to put that assumption to doubt. As early as February, Castro set aside the 1940 constitution that had once restored democratic government and to whose resurrection he had once committed himself. In March he reduced rents by 50 percent, thereby signaling to foreign and domestic property owners an end to the status quo. In April, while on a trip to Washington, D.C., he alarmed U.S. officials by never bringing up the subject of U.S. aid, as if he did not need it. In May he introduced an agricultural reform bill that limited farm holdings to under a thousand acres, directly
threatening U.S. sugar producers on the island, some of whom owned 400,000-plus-acre estates. Confronted by these and other developments centralizing and nationalizing Cuba's politics, industry, and services while targeting foreign businesses and upper-class Cubans, Cubans began to depart for the United States as early as June 1959, just as moderates abandoned Castro's government. Meanwhile, Castro steeled himself for battle, creating the citizen militia that galvanized the lower classes in defense of the revolution.
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Just over a year after first raising the subject of intervening in Cuba to stop the revolution, the CIA director, Dulles, called for Castro's overthrow. Castro was a “madman,” President Eisenhower declared in January 1960; he “is going wild and harming the whole American structure.”
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From January 1960, when Dulles and Eisenhower decided that Castro must be overthrown, to President Kennedy's pledge not to intervene in Cuba, which precipitated the withdrawal of Russian missiles from Cuba in October 1962, U.S. officials' sense of the strategic value of the Guantánamo naval base underwent a curious evolution. In the first year and a half or so after Castro's rise, U.S. officials appear to have been genuinely concerned that Castro might attack the base. By September 1960 that concern yielded to a conviction that should he do so, U.S. forces would go “all the way to Santiago,” as Joint Chief of Staff Arleigh Burke put it. Not to be outdone, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Livingston T. Merchant remarked that if Castro attacked Guantánamo, “that's itâwe are at war. We would move on Havana.”
No sooner had Burke and his associates come to realize Guantánamo's potential value as bait than they were forced to acknowledge that Castro was not so stupid as to invite an American invasion. At the very meeting in which Burke and Undersecretary Merchant first raised the rhetoric on Guantánamo, the participants were informed that the State Department considered a Cuban attack on the base unlikely. Guantánamo was too valuable to Castro as a source of anti-American propaganda.
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In that case, U.S. intelligence and military officials would have to precipitate a Cuban attack on Guantánamo or conjure
one up on their own. “We should stage an attack on Guantánamo,” Secretary of State Christian Herter told President Eisenhower on November 1, 1960. Contemplating cutting off diplomatic relations with the Castro government, Eisenhower himself argued that “the quicker we do it, the more tempted Castro might be to actually attack Guantánamo,” a prospect that intrigued the president, who would then have had the provocation to depose Castro “with force.”
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The evolution of U.S. thinking on Guantánamo is also plain in the minutes of the National Security Council. In March 1960, National Security Council officials spoke uncertainly about Guantánamo's status. Confident that the United States occupied the base legally, Eisenhower officials were less certain of political support at the United Nations should Castro ask the Americans to leave; typically the United States did not like to occupy the territory of another nation without the host nation's consent. Moreover, at this stage in the getting-to-know-you with Castro, U.S. officials could not be sure that Castro wouldn't target the base. While Admiral Burke was confident that American marines could repel an armed attack on Guantánamo, he was less sure about the integrity of the water supply, which was piped in from the nearby Yateras River.
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Throughout this period, the naval base served as a barometer of U.S.-Cuban relations. As early as January 9, 1959, just a few days after the Revolutionary Army's triumphant arrival in the capital, a meeting of U.S. national security officials acknowledged that the revolutionary turn in Cuba had clouded the future of the base. At a minimum, the officials concluded, Castro was likely to want to renegotiate the lease as well as to end the apparent discrimination against Cuban workers. Still, they did not expect Castro to threaten the base and thereby jeopardize the two nations' intimate economic relationship.
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The extent to which the naval base was involved in U.S. plans for what became known as the Bay of Pigs invasion remained underreported for years. When Admiral Lyman Lemnitzer wondered aloud in March 1961 if the Cuban exiles training in Guatemala might be moved to Guantánamo Bay, he was informed by Admiral Robert Dennison, commander
in chief of the Atlantic Fleet, that the base was not suitable for such purposesâfirst, because Cuba controlled the local high ground surrounding the bay, hence secrecy at Guantánamo was impossible; and second, because the navy did not want to compromise its legal position at the bay. Still, if secrecy at Guantánamo was out of the question, Guantánamo could still be useful in backing up covert actions in Cuba, especially if, as the administration seemed to hope, Cuba struck back somehow at the United States. In the days leading up to the Bay of Pigs, Dennison pledged to have ready all the ships, planes, and combat troops necessary to overthrow the Cuban government should the opportunity arise. And so, in the weeks preceding the operation's launch, Guantánamo bustled with activity not seen since World War II.
But Guantánamo had a role in the Bay of Pigs invasion unacknowledged until relatively recently. Unbeknownst to President Kennedy, simultaneous with the training of Cuban exiles in Guatemala, another band of 260 Cuban exiles, under the leadership of the former rebel army commander and now CIA agent Higinio DÃas Ane, was preparing off the South Carolina coast for an attack on the city of Baracoa, on the southeastern tip of Cuba, intended to distract the Cuban military in advance of the main invasion force. From Baracoa, the group was to proceed to the naval base and, disguised as Cuban Army troops, provoke the base into launching an attack on Cuba. What happened to this second “invasion” is not exactly clear; it remains a blurry sideshow in the bigger fiasco.
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