Reclaiming History (298 page)

Kennedy’s no-invasion pledge caused rage in the exile community. Wrote one prominent exile, “For hundreds of thousands of exiles eager to stake their lives to liberate their native land, it was a soul-shattering blow.”
¹⁶⁸
“Suddenly,” the HSCA observed, “there was a crackdown on the very training camps and guerilla bases which had been originally established and funded by the United States, and the exile raids which once had the government’s ‘green light’ were now promptly disavowed and condemned.” In some cases, the Kennedy administration went beyond this, U.S. Customs and the Coast Guard, respectively, arresting members of an anti-Castro force in training in the Florida Keys and anti-Castro raiders on four exile ships off the Florida coast. The U.S. crackdown on the exiles caused Dr. José Miro Cardona, the head of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, an umbrella group that had been receiving an estimated $2.4 million annually in U.S. support, to resign. And Cardona had been looked upon by many of the exiles as a mouthpiece for the Americans. Cardona accused Kennedy of “breaking promises and agreements” to support another invasion of Cuba, and declared that Kennedy had become “the victim of a master play by the Russians.” Other voices were heard in the chorus alleging betrayal. Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, the ace World War II pilot, said that “the Kennedy administration has committed the final betrayal of Cuban hopes for freedom by its order to block the activities of exile Cuban freedom fighters to liberate their nation from Communism.”
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Although the Church Committee stated categorically that “the Mongoose Operation was disbanded following the Cuban Missile Crisis…and the SGA [Special Group (Augmented)] was abolished,”
¹⁷⁰
it would be wrong to infer that Kennedy’s no-invasion pledge in the missile crisis ended Mongoose, because it did not. Though the Special Group (Augmented) was, indeed, terminated, and at least protocol dictated that, as the Church Committee said, “the Special Group, chaired by McGeorge Bundy, re-assumed responsibility for reviewing and approving covert actions in Cuba,” Mongoose, if not in name, continued. And RFK, who was not a member of the Special Group, continued to ride herd on the effort to overthrow Castro. Richard Helms, the CIA deputy director of plans at the time who was heading up the CIA effort in Mongoose, says in his memoir,
A Look over My Shoulder
, that the only thing that changed with the Mongoose operation was the cessation of support, ever again, of any future effort by the exiles to
invade
Cuba. Other than that, he said, the Mongoose operation continued and “[President Kennedy] and his brother
remained
absolutely determined to trounce Castro once and forever.”
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(This makes sense since Mongoose, though never explicitly rejecting the invasion possibility, never contemplated it as its plan for overthrowing Castro anyway. So as with the Bay of Pigs, this may be another instance where the exiles were misled.) And the HSCA itself, after suggesting, in so many words, that the United States ended all exile raids on Cuba after the no-invasion pledge, goes on to say on a succeeding page that “some extremely significant Cuban exile raids and anti-Castro operations…took place, despite the crackdown, between the time of the missile crisis and the assassination of President Kennedy,” though it was unclear, the committee said, “to what extent, if any, the military activities of the anti-Castro exile groups were sanctioned or supported by the Kennedy administration or by the CIA or both.”
¹⁷²
*

Indeed, on December 29, 1962, two months
after
the missile crisis ended, Kennedy and the First Lady flew to Miami to personally welcome the returning Bay of Pigs prisoners in a huge, emotional ceremony at the Orange Bowl that brought many to tears. Holding the brigade’s flag (depicting a rifleman with a fixed bayonet moving forward) handed to him by Brigade Commander Pepe San Román (with brigade leaders Manuel Artime and Erneida Oliva standing nearby) “for temporary safekeeping,” Kennedy proclaimed to the survivors, “I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this Brigade in a free Havana.” The throng of forty thousand Cuban exiles, many shouting “
Guerra
,
Guerra
” (“War, War”) and “
Libertad
,
Libertad
” (“Liberty, Liberty”) erupted in tumultuous applause.
¹⁷³
†

Though this was not an invasion pledge (again, Kennedy had promised Khrushchev just two months earlier that the United States would not invade Cuba), this clearly reflected the U.S. government’s continued support—I would think not just as cheer-leaders—of the plan to overthrow Castro. Indeed, one of the Cuban exile pilots who had flown in the Bay of Pigs invasion, Eduardo Ferrer—a Cubana Airlines pilot who hijacked his own commercial flight to Miami to join up with the brigade—told author Peter Wyden that when Kennedy made his way down to the field after his speech to shake hands with more brigade leaders, exchanging words here and there, he said to Ferrer, “You didn’t get any help from us.”

“No, Mr. President,” Ferrer replied, “but I expect it the next time.”

“You better believe there’s going to be a next time,” Kennedy told him, suggesting that next time would be different. Ferrer beamed and told Wyden “I believed in him again.”
¹⁷⁴

T
here were over one hundred anti-Castro exile groups (some formed in Cuba, others in the United States) during the immediate years following the Cuban Revolution.

The first prominent group in the United States was the Frente Revolucionario Democratico (“Democratic Revolutionary Front,” or FRD). The revolutionary
frente
, or front, consisted of five exile groups and was the first large anti-Castro group formed on American soil, one that was literally put together by the CIA (when it hosted Cuban exile leaders in New York City on May 11–12, 1960) to implement President Eisenhower’s March 17, 1960, directive to the CIA to recruit and train a guerilla force of Cuban exiles to overthrow Castro. On March 18, 1961, in Miami, the CIA put pressure on the FRD and the MRP (the Cuban anti-Castro group, Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo, “People’s Revolutionary Movement”) to join forces with the FRD into a new group, the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC), which the United States would treat as the Cuban provisional government if Castro were overthrown. On March 22, the two groups agreed and the CRC was formed, with various anti-Castro leaders sitting on the council. However, the FRD and the CRC continued to function as separate entities until October of 1961, when the FRD was completely absorbed by the CRC in order to avoid the confusion resulting from duplication of personnel, activities, and funding. Lest there be any doubt as to the involvement of the CIA in these two anti-Castro groups, CIA documents themselves confirm this fact. “The FRD was created with Agency [CIA] assistance, guidance and financial support,” and was “the front organization for recruiting the members of the Bay of Pigs invasion force.”
¹⁷⁵
“The CRC had direct access to and support from the White House as well as CIA.”
¹⁷⁶

Among the other prominent exile groups were the following: Cuban Revolutionary Junta (JURE); Movimiento de Recuperacion Revolutionaria (the “Movement for the Recovery of the Revolution,” or MRR), the group whose members were the original nucleus for Brigade 2506; Alpha 66, one of the most militant and organized of all anti-Castro groups; Second National Front of Escambray (SNFE, a group closely affiliated with Alpha 66); Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (“Student Revolutionary Directorate,” or DRE), which was a militant as well as a psychological warfare outfit that published its own newspaper,
Trenchera
(Trenches), and was an outgrowth of an activist student group started on the campus of the University of Havana; 30th of November Movement; International Penetration Forces (InterPen); Christian Democratic Movement of Cuba (MDC); Junta of the Government of Cuba in Exile (JGCE); Movimiento Insurreccional de Recuperacion Revolucionaria (MIRR); Ejercito Invasor Cubano (EIC); United Organization for the Liberation of Cuba; Cuban Constitutional Crusade (CCC); and Commandos L-66. Many of these groups, of course, worked together, and their members frequently left one group to join another, since all had the same objective: the overthrow of Castro.

Virtually all militant anti-Castro groups were headquartered in Miami, the center of the exile community, where over one hundred thousand Cubans had arrived by small boats and planes to plot their counterrevolution against Castro so they could return to their homeland. Over their small cups of
café cubano
(a strong expresso coffee so popular among the exiles) in the many little restaurants of Little Havana (southwest Miami), thousands of exiles mapped their strategies on table napkins. As already alluded to, many of the members of the anti-Castro groups, including some of appreciable wealth, had been supportive of Castro’s revolution against the corrupt Batista regime but became greatly disillusioned with and eventually violently opposed to Castro when he confiscated their property, and renounced the country’s long affiliation with the United States and embraced Marxism.
¹⁷⁷
Others were hard-core “Batistianos” who had fled Cuba around the same time their leader, Fulgencio Batista, did, on New Year’s Day 1959, or stayed for awhile in Cuba working in the underground against Castro. It should be reiterated that Castro’s broken pledges of free elections and a free press, and the more than five hundred public executions of ex-Batista officials within three months after he assumed power, convinced many Cubans on
both
sides of the revolution that Castro was a dictator, not the political savior he had held himself out to be.
¹⁷⁸

Although it is not implausible that anti-Castro Cuban exiles angry at Kennedy over the Bay of Pigs
*
might encourage Oswald, or some other likely candidate, to kill Kennedy as an act of revenge on their part, it is highly implausible that anyone in the anti-Castro movement, other than an uneducated, unintelligent group of street warriors, would think there was even the smallest of possibilities that the assassination would precipitate a U.S. invasion of Castro’s Cuba. The leadership of the various anti-Castro groups would have to know that even if a
pro
-Castro
Cuban national
killed Kennedy, the expectation of our invading Cuba would be very remote, since how could we know Castro was behind it? Even more improbably, how could any group of conspirators with any respectable level of intelligence believe that if an
American
like Oswald—who was simply a supporter of Castro, and who had never been to Cuba, and had absolutely no connection with the Castro regime—killed Kennedy, that the American government would decide to invade Cuba? When, in fact, Oswald was arrested for Kennedy’s murder and was believed by Americans to be the president’s assassin, and his pro-Castro sympathies had become known, there was no cry from any segment of our society to launch a military attack on Cuba.

And the leaders of the many anti-Castro counterrevolutionary groups, almost without exception,
were
intelligent and educated. Manuel Antonio de Varona, the leader of the FRD, had been president of the Cuban Senate and then prime minister in the administration of President Carlos Prío. Manuel Artime, the nephew of a popular poet, José Angel, and the head of the MRR, had a bachelor of science degree and completed most of his studies to become a doctor in Cuba. Justo Carrillo, one of the original leaders of the FRD, was president of the Bank for Industrial and Agricultural Development under Castro. José Ignacio, head of the MDC, was a history professor in Cuba. Manuel “Manolo” Ray, head of JURE (and before that in Cuba, the MRP), had been an engineer in Cuba who became the minister of public works under Castro.
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Miro Cardona, the head of the CRC, had been a lawyer and professor at the University of Havana and was Castro’s first prime minister and then his ambassador to the United Nations.
¹⁸⁰
And so on. Indeed, even the “delegates” (leaders in their respective communities) of the anti-Castro groups were normally intelligent and educated. For instance, Carlos Bringuier, the New Orleans delegate of the DRE who had the street confrontation with Oswald in New Orleans in the summer of 1963, had been an attorney in Cuba.

So not only were the anti-Castro leaders men of intelligence and stature, but they were not criminals or murderers, a prerequisite, I would think, for anyone deciding to murder the president of the United States out of revenge.

Moreover, at least the brigade leaders (the men who, along with the members of their brigade, risked their lives to free Cuba) were not antagonistic toward Kennedy at the time of his death.
*
In writing
The Bay of Pigs
with the main brigade leaders, Haynes Johnson obviously had to get to know them fairly well, and they confided in him. For instance, Pepe San Román, the brigade commander, admitted that while in prison following his capture at the Bay of Pigs, he ruminated that “I hated the United States, and I felt I had been betrayed. Every day it became worse and then I was getting madder and madder and I wanted to get a rifle and come and fight against the United States.” But San Román, Artime, and Oliva, all of whom were at the Bay of Pigs and felt deep betrayal, welcomed Kennedy with open arms at the Orange Bowl. Why? It’s clear that on reflection they knew that although Kennedy had not come through for them at that point in time, his heart was always in the right place.

Johnson writes, “For all of them [referring to the brigade members, most likely an overstatement by Johnson], and especially the leaders, the death of Kennedy came with shattering impact…They believed in President Kennedy and he gave them reason to hope for the future. They believed, no matter what mistakes he personally made during their invasion, that he had saved their lives with his strong warning to Castro immediately upon their defeat [i.e., they believed it was Kennedy’s words in a speech the day after the invasion ended, that “our restraint is not inexhaustible” and the U.S. “must take an even closer and more realistic look at the menace of external Communist intervention and domination in Cuba,” not Castro’s humanity, that were responsible for Castro’s not risking the possible consequences of executing them];…that he had liberated them from prison; and that he meant what he said in the Orange Bowl—that he wanted them to return at the head of the column to a free Havana, and he wanted to be there on that day.”
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