As for Castro's support, public opinion studies provided to the White House (April 1960) concluded that most Cubans were optimistic about the future and supported Castro, while only 7 percent expressed concem about Communism and only 2 percent about failure to hold elections. Soviet presence was nil. In the United States, Jules Benjamin observes, “The liberals, like the conservatives, saw Castro as a threat to the hemisphere, but without the world communist conspiracy component.”
By October 1959, planes based in Florida were carrying out strafing and bombing attacks against Cuban territory. In December, CIA subversion was stepped up, including supply of arms to guerrilla bands and sabotage of sugar mills and other economic targets. In March 1960, the Eisenhower Administration formally adopted a plan to overthrow Castro in favor of a regime “more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the U.S.”âthe two conditions being equivalentâemphasizing again that this must be done “in such a manner as to avoid any appearance of U.S. intervention.”
Sabotage, terror, and aggression were escalated further by the Kennedy Administration, along with the kind of economic warfare that no small country can long endure. Cuban reliance on the US as an export market and for imports had, of course, been overwhelming, and could hardly be replaced without great cost. The New Frontiersmen were obsessed with Cuba from the first moments. During the presidential campaign of 1960, Kennedy had accused Eisenhower and Nixon of threatening US security by allowing “the Iron Curtain...90 miles off the coast of the United States.” “We were hysterical about Castro at the time of the Bay of Pigs [April 1961] and thereafter,” Defense Secretary Robert McNamara later testified to the Church Committee. A few days before the decision to invade Cuba, Arthur Schlesinger advised the President that “the game would be up through a good deal of Latin America” if the US were to tolerate “another Cuba”; or this one, JFK determined. Much of Kennedy's Latin American policy was inspired by the fear that the virus would infect others and limit US hegemony in the region.
At the first cabinet meeting after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the atmosphere was “almost savage,” Chester Bowles noted privately: “there was an almost frantic reaction for an action program.” The President's public posture was no less militant: “the complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong...can possibly survive,” he told the country. Kennedy broke all diplomatic, commercial, and financial ties with Cuba, a terrible blow to the Cuban economy, given the dependency that had been established under US suzerainty. He succeeded in isolating Cuba diplomatically, but efforts to organize collective action against it in 1961 were unsuccessful, perhaps because of a problem noted by a Mexican diplomat: “If we publicly declare that Cuba is a threat to our security, forty million Mexicans will die laughing.” Fortunately, the educated classes in the United States were capable of a more sober evaluation of the threat posed to the survival of the Free World.
10
Theoretically, medicines and some food were exempt from the embargo, but food and medical aid were denied after Cyclone Flora caused death and destruction in October 1963. Standard procedure, incidentally. Consider Carter's refusal to allow aid to any West Indian country struck by the August 1980 hurricane unless Grenada was excluded (West Indians refused, and received no aid). Or the US reaction when Nicaragua was fortuitously devastated by a hurricane in October 1988. Washington could scarcely conceal its glee over the welcome prospects of widespread starvation and vast ecological damage, and naturally refused aid, even to the demolished Atlantic Coast area with longstanding links to the US and deep resentment against the Sandinistas; its people too must starve in the ruins of their shacks, to satisfy our blood-lust. US allies timidly followed orders, justifying their cowardice with the usual hypocrisy. To demonstrate that its malice is truly bipartisan, Washington reacted in much the same way when a tidal wave wiped out fishing villages leaving hundreds dead and missing in September 1992. The
New York Times
headline reads: “U.S. Sends Nicaragua Aid As Sea's Toll Rises to 116.” “Foreign governments, including the United States, responded with immediate help today for the survivors,” the
Times
excuse for a reporter wrote, while Washington announced “that it was making $5 million available immediately as a result of the disaster.” Such nobility. Only in the small print at the end do we discover that the $5 million is being diverted from scheduled aid that had been withheldâbut not, Congress was assured, from the over $100 million aid package that the Administration had suspended because the Nicaraguan government is not yet sufficiently subservient to its wishes. The humanitarian donation amounts to an impressive $25,000.
11
Any weapon, however cruel, may be used against the perpetrators of the crime of independence. And, crucially, the awed self-adulation must never falter. “It was a narrow escape,” Mark Twain wrote: “If the sheep had been created first, man would have been a plagiarism.”
12
The Kennedy Administration also sought to impose a cultural quarantine to block the free flow of ideas and information to the Latin American countries, fearing the rotten apple effect. In March 1963, JFK met with seven Central American presidents who agreed “To develop and put into immediate effect common measures to restrict the movement of subversive nationals to and from Cuba, and the flow of materials, propaganda and funds from that country.” The unwillingness of Latin American governments to emulate US controls on travel and cultural interchange always greatly troubled the Kennedy liberals, as did their legal systems, requiring evidence for crimes by alleged “subversives,” and their excessive liberalism generally.
13
Immediately after the Bay of Pigs failure, Kennedy initiated a program of international terrorism to overthrow the regime, reaching quite remarkable dimensions. These atrocities are largely dismissed in the West, apart from some notice of the assassination attempts, one of them implemented on the very day of the Kennedy assassination. The terrorist operations were formally called off by Lyndon Johnson. They continued, however, and were escalated by Nixon. Subsequent actions are attributed to renegades beyond CIA control, whether accurately or not, we do not know; one high-level Pentagon official of the Kennedy-Johnson Administrations, Roswell Gilpatric, has expressed his doubts. The Carter Administration, with the support of US courts, condoned hijacking of Cuban ships in violation of the anti-hijacking convention that Castro was respecting. The Reaganites rejected Cuban initiatives for diplomatic settlement and imposed new sanctions on the most outlandish pretexts, often lying outright, a record reviewed by Wayne Smith, who resigned as head of the US Interests Section in Havana in protest.
14
From the Cuban perspective, the Kennedy terror seemed to be a prelude to invasion. The CIA concluded in September 1962âbefore Russian missiles were detected in mid-Octoberâthat “the main purpose of the present [Soviet] military buildup in Cuba is to strengthen the Communist regime there against what the Cubans and Soviets conceive to be a danger that the US may attempt by one means or another to overthrow it.” In early October, the State Department confirmed this judgment, as did a later State Department study. How realistic these fears were, we may only speculate.
Of interest, in this connection, is Robert McNamara's reaction to the late Andrei Gromyko's allegation that Soviet missiles were sent to Cuba “to strengthen the defensive capability of Cubaâthat is all.” In response, McNamara acknowledged that “If I had been a Cuban or Soviet official, I believe I would have shared the judgment you expressed that a U.S. invasion was probable” (a judgment that he says was inaccurate). The probability of nuclear war after a US invasion was “99 percent,” McNamara added. Such an invasion was frighteningly close after JFK dismissed Khrushchev's offer of mutual withdrawal of missiles from Cuba and Turkey (the latter obsolete, already ordered withdrawn). Indeed, Cuba itself might have initiated nuclear war when a US terrorist (Mongoose) team blew up a factory, killing 400 people according to Castro, at one of the most tense moments of the crisis, when the Cubans may have had their fingers on the button.
15
The March 1960 plan to overthrow Castro in favor of a regime “more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the U.S.” remains in force in 1992 as the US pursues its venerable task of preventing Cuban independence, with 170 years of experience behind it. Also in force is the Eisenhower directive that the crime should be perpetrated “in such a manner as to avoid any appearance of U.S. intervention.” Accordingly, the ideological institutions must suppress the record of aggression, campaigns of terror, economic strangulation, and the other devices employed by the Lord of the hemisphere in its dedication to “the true interests of the Cuban people.”
That dictate has been followed with loyalty perhaps beyond the norm. In respected scholarship, US terrorism against Cuba has been excised from the record in a display of servility that would impress the most dedicated totalitarian. In the media, Cuba's plight is regularly attributed to the demon Castro and “Cuban socialism” alone. Castro bears full responsibility for the “poverty, isolation and humbling dependence” on the USSR, the
New York Times
editors inform us, concluding triumphantly that “the Cuban dictator has painted himself into his own corner,” without any help from us. That is true by virtue of doctrinal necessity, the ultimate authority. The editors conclude that we should not intervene directly as some “U.S. cold warriors” propose: “Fidel Castro's reign deserves to end in home-grown failure, not martyrdom.” Taking their stand at the dovish extreme, the editors advise that we should continue to stand aside, watching in silence as we have been doing for 30 years, so the naive reader would learn from this (quite typical) version of history, crafted to satisfy the demands of authority.
News reports commonly observe the same conventions. Cuba is a basket case,
Times
Caribbean correspondent Howard French reports, “a Communist oddity in an increasingly free-market world,” “a Communist dead end” struggling vainly against “economic realities.” These “realities,” we are to understand, are the failures of sterile Communist doctrine, unaffected by US terror and economic warfare. The former is passed over in silence. The latter is mentioned, but only as posing a tactical question: we must decide whether the embargo should be tightened, or simply maintained on the assumption that the “economic realities” alone will work “inexorably to bring about a dramatic transformation.” Any opinion outside this spectrum is another “oddity,” not to be sampled by a responsible journalist operating in the free market of ideas.
Boston Globe
Latin America specialist Pamela Constable adopts the same conventions. Reviewing
Miami Herald
correspondent Andres Oppenheimer's
Castro's Final Hour
, she opens by explaining that he “is far from a rabid anticommunist, but his credentials as a seasoned journalistic observer of Latin America make his [book], a relentless exposure of the cynical, obsessive workings of Fidel Castro's aging socialist regime, all the more persuasive.” He portrays Cuba “as a classic, decaying dictatorship, ruled by a man whose ideals have long succumbed to the hard logic of power,” “clinging to a failed system with determined but fatal defiance.” In “hilarious and tragic detail,” Oppenheimer shows how “life for average Cubans has become a gantlet of woes and absurdities,” which she recounts with much amusement. “Oppenheimer leaves little room for doubt that like other messianic tyrants, Castro has sown the seeds of his own destruction.” The words “United States” do not appear; there is no hint of any US contribution to the “hilarious” trials of the average Cubans, or to the “failed system” or Castro's mad course of self-destruction. The “hard logic of power” is simply a fact of nature, evoking none of the passion aroused by Castro's evil nature. The norms are universal; Cuba is just a special case. Surveying the terrible decline of Nicaragua after the US-backed government took over, Constable writes that “Two problems underlie the disaster gripping this poor, tropical nation”: “lingering hostility” between the Sandinistas and the right, and corruption. Could the rampages of a terrorist superpower have had some marginal effect on the “collapsed socialist economy” and US efforts to recreate the glories that preceded? The idea cannot be expressed, probably even thought, at the dissident extreme of the commissar culture.
The same book is reviewed in the
New York Times
by Clifford Krauss. Again, Cuba's plight is attributed to the crimes and lunacies of the demon alone. The US does receive an oblique mention, in one phrase: Castro (not Cuba) “has survived a host of calamities: the missile crisis, the trade embargo, the Mariel exodus, repeated harvest shortfalls and endless rationing.” That concludes the US role. Oppenheimer is praised for describing Cuba's travail “with insight and wit”âodd, how amusing it is to watch our victims sufferâbut more importantly, for having unearthed hitherto undreamt-of iniquity. Insatiable in his quest for power and love of violence, Castro sent “experienced officers” to train Nicaraguans to resist the terrorist army the US dispatched from its Honduran bases with orders to attack “soft targets” such as health clinics and agricultural cooperatives (with explicit approval of the State Department and left-liberal opinion, in the latter case). The monster even considered retaliation “in case the United States under Ronald Reagan invaded Nicaragua,” and he was “far more involved than we knew” in supplying the army of Panama “in anticipation of the United States invasion.”