Guantánamo

  By the time Ryan returned to the U.S. naval base, seven months after departing, Buehlman and Garvey and their families had long since shipped out. Ryan’s parents awaited him in Jacksonville, Florida. Ryan remembers being interviewed for a meager five minutes at the base, after which he was taken to directly to the airport, under tight guard, dressed in a suit, white shirt, and dark glasses. Only the Cubans on the base knew his identity. More than anything, he remembers wanting a cigar. The guards weren’t authorized to give him anything. Then a disturbance broke out in an adjacent hangar at the airport, and with the guards distracted, a case of Churchills sailed across the waxed floor, in his honor, a wink from the Cubans sealing the deal with thanks. Ryan was escorted onto an empty C-47 transport plane, where the pilot and copilot, ignorant of his identity, befriended him, and next to whom he sat, side by side, as the plane flew low over the water following the underwater cable all the way to Jacksonville.

  While Ryan was in the mountains, his father told an interviewer that he would be happy if his younger son were as committed to a cause as his older one, and as ready to follow a dream. Like his son, Ryan’s dad spoke Spanish, knew the local countryside, was friends with many Cubans, and hence had not feared for Ryan’s life. Privately, Ryan’s dad didn’t speak much about his son’s time with the rebels, though Ryan himself does not doubt that his mountain sojourn effectively sealed his father’s career. Charles Sr. never received another promotion.

  Arriving in Jacksonville in October 1957, Ryan was detained by Naval Intelligence, who copied the letter that Castro had given him (“Ryan is my representative in the United States”) before turning him over to his parents. He did not remain long at home. Short on money, sick (“with every kind of parasite”), he made straight for New York, where he began speaking and raising money for the Cuban resistance.

  Ryan did not like his time in New York. The revolutionary community in Brooklyn lacked the circumspection he had come to take for granted in Cuba. (“For seven months in the mountains I never spoke above a whisper.”) He was easily recognizable on the streets, where his presence would elicit pro-Castro and anti-Batista exclamations, all but making impossible the gun (and money) running that had brought him to New York. Only the FBI’s own naïveté consoled him. “They stood out worse than I did,” Ryan reports. “In 1957, FBI agents looked like U.S. Marines in civilian clothes.” Ryan spent much of his time simply trying to keep the Cubans quiet. “When that boat full of guns sails,” he warned them, “we’re going to get picked up.” And so the Cuban supporters and their boat full of guns did, just out of Galveston, Texas. By which time Ryan had long since jumped ship. “The Cubans in the U.S. were not together mentally,” Ryan recalls. “And everywhere I looked I saw FBI.” And so he faced another choice. He could continue making speeches and raising money among the zealots in New York, or he could go back to Cuba, where he had never felt so comfortable and where his life had taken on meaning that it had previously lacked. Ryan returned to Cuba.

  It is tempting to conclude that Ryan’s gun running out of the U.S. naval base kept Castro going at a time when he was all but destitute of arms. Ryan rejects the notion. “The thing Victor, Michael, and I delivered to the Revolution was publicity at an opportune time.” “You guys got us $5,000,000 worth of publicity for nothing,” Castro told Ryan. “We couldn’t have paid an ad agency for that.”27

  In June 1958, Raúl Castro, brother of Fidel and one of the leaders of the Twenty-sixth of July Movement, captured a busload of U.S. Marines on liberty off the U.S. base, taking them to the scene of an alleged government massacre of Cuban peasants. The kidnapping coincided with a Cuban military offensive against Castro’s rebels, which included a bombing and defoliation campaign in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. Raúl Castro justified the kidnapping as retaliation for the U.S. Navy’s allowing Batista’s bombers to refuel at the base, which, if true, would have violated a U.S. arms embargo of Cuba instituted on March 14.28 The previous night, Commander Hal Sacks, on shore patrol at Guantánamo City, remembers his busload of sailors and marines being shot at by rebels as it returned to the base; one of the Americans was slightly wounded. In his report of the incident, Sacks warned navy officials against allowing future liberty parties until the violence in eastern Cuba subsided.

  Sacks’s superiors ignored the warning. The next night, June 28, Raúl Castro’s forces seized twenty-seven U.S. sailors and marines returning from Guantánamo City to the base—until this day the last U.S. liberty party in Cuba. Two days later, Castro contacted the U.S. ambassador, Earl Smith, promising to release his U.S. and Canadian captives if the United States stopped providing military equipment, including spare parts, to Batista, and stopped allowing his pilots to refuel on the navy base. Meanwhile, that same day, the commander of the naval base, Admiral R. B. Ellis, wrote a memo to Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke outlining U.S. options. Among the actions considered were an airlift of several hundred marines to Guantánamo “accompanied by full fanfare,” a roundup of the base’s many Cuban workers sympathetic to Castro and their relinquishment to Cuban authorities, a threat to support Batista’s forces against the resistance, and finally a threat to bar Cuban employees from the base. The last three options were likely to backfire on a base already unpopular among many Cubans; the first was likely to be ineffectual.29

  While U.S. officials in Guantánamo Bay and Washington reacted with shock at the kidnapping, Americans on the ground in Caimanera found it less of a surprise. From his home at the Oasis Hotel, Rex Lake, for one, had witnessed a notable increase in the size of the Cuban Army presence in the towns around the bay. Surely, amid what was becoming an increasingly bitter struggle, an outside occupying military force allied to the Cuban government while harboring some sympathy for the rebels was unlikely to be able to remain above the fray. As early as the spring of 1957, Lake reports, “the political situation was heating up in Cuba,” so much so that American servicemen and their families living in Caimanera were “confined to our homes in the evening and a navy boat stood by at the local pier to take us to the base if any hostilities began between the rebel and government forces.” Nor was it “unusual to hear gunfire during the night and the electricity was continually going off because the rebels were cutting the power lines outside of town.”30

  Summer 1957 saw a palpable escalation in the civil war. With the fourth anniversary of Castro’s failed assault on the Moncada Barracks outside Santiago approaching, naval officials warned families such as the Lakes to be on alert in town and to be ready to evacuate to the base if necessary. Sure enough, on July 26, Lake reports, “a young child” attending a movie in Guantánamo City “was given a bag … which was supposed to be filled with candy. The bag blew up in the theater, killing the child and injuring some other people.” At the same time, “unknown forces also blew out the front of the post office.” The next month “a labor strike was called by the rebels and all stores in Caimanera were padlocked in support,” leading Cuban Army troops to force open the doors, as if to force local citizens to break ranks with the rebels. While the Lakes and other American families remained shuttered at home, gunfire became a regular feature of summer nights—and not just of the nights. “Soldiers fired shots over the heads of a crowd of people at our local market place, just one block from the house,” Lake recalls. “We were seeing more soldiers coming into town than usual. The Cuban navy headquarters just 1/2 block from our apartment was reinforced with four new machine guns and piles of sandbags out in front of their building.” Barricades went up all over the little town. “On August 7, three bodies were found in the local cemetery, supposedly killed by the rebels. One soldier shot another soldier to death about 200 feet from where Janice [Lake’s wife] was having her hair cut and a bus ran a roadblock set up by the rebels and was shot full of holes.”31

  By April 1958, with violence mounting in the towns around the bay, the U.S. Navy recalled servicemen living in Guantánamo City to the U.S. base, sending their families stateside. In Caiman
era itself, evacuation remained an option through April 13, when, Lake reports, the violence literally came home. “The day started out calmly enough.” Then, “at 7:15, I was sitting at the dining room table writing a letter and Janice was playing with Terry and Kenny in the living room near the front door. The door was open because of the hot tropical evening. Without warning, the rat-a-tat-tat of a submachine gun broke the stillness of the evening. Instantly, it was joined by another and another, then by shotguns, rifles and hand grenades.” Momentarily frozen in disbelief, Lake was “brought back to reality” by “an exploding hand grenade near the back entrance to our apartment.” Stuffing his family under a bed, he was greeted minutes later by a gun barrel moving through his newly demolished back door. “Instantly, I threw up my hands and yelled ‘Americano,’” he reports. “I was forced back into the bedroom which soon became crowded with heavily armed men wearing arm bands which read ‘26 de Julio’”—emblem of the Castro resistance. “Then I understood what was taking place. This was the rebel war charge of Castro’s forces … . Our apartment was near Batista’s local naval headquarters and these men of Castro’s rebel forces were using our apartment to stage their attack. In broken English, one of the soldiers told us not to be frightened.” In the end, the Lakes’ apartment “proved to be too exposed for [the rebels’] purposes,” and they withdrew, ultimately defeating the government forces in a two-hour battle.32

  Caught by surprise at the kidnapping of U.S. servicemen, American officials were in no position to do much about it. Raúl Castro’s accusation that the United States was still providing arms to Batista months after the embargo was supposed to have gone into effect was proved by a U.S. requisition form dated May 28 for rocket heads and fuses bound for Batista. Forced to acknowledge the transfer of arms, the State Department insisted that it was meant to replace an earlier shipment made in error, before the embargo went into effect. The rebels also possessed photographic evidence of a Cuban military aircraft refueling at the base, prompting the State Department to make yet another confession: Yes, we did let one Cuban military plane refuel on account of its being low on fuel.33

  Meanwhile, Castro’s men paraded the hostages, along with Park Wollam, U.S. consul at Santiago, around the Sierra Maestra, showing them incontrovertible proof of the damage wrought by Batista’s planes. Wollam had gone up into the mountains to negotiate the hostages’ release. Among the evidence the hostages were shown were fragments of U.S.-manufactured bombs and the burn victims of napalm firebombing. 34 In a note to Havana, Consul Wollam lent credence to the rebels’ claims of civilian persecution at the hands of government forces. “The Cuban bombing affects mainly civilian population,” Wollam wrote U.S. ambassador Earl Smith. “Rebels themselves have lost few men by this but claim that many civilians have suffered … . Populace generally afraid of planes and I can realize why after being subject to a similar incident in vicinity of a small church.” Indeed, Wollam conceded, the Cuban Army had “been its own worst enemy.”35

  U.S. officials were forced to concede to the rebels’ terms: “(A) No more shipment of arms. (B) Complete assurance that naval base will not be used for supplying arms and munitions. (C) An observer to assure compliance” with the arms embargo.36 If there was an upside to all of this, it was that the contact between Wollam and the rebels allowed the Americans to take the measure of the rebels’ Communist sympathies. “Rebels claim program based on Jose Marti but it is not clearly defined and they mainly have fanatic determination get rid of Batista. Believe probably some Communist influence although Castro volunteered at length that the movement was not.” Castro had said the same to Charles Ryan. An American familiar with the rebels was informed that they consisted of “people of all stripes.” Wollam did “not think at this moment that movement is definitely Communist but probably subject infiltration [sic].”37

  By July 8 the rebels had released sixteen civilian hostages, leaving them with thirty military personnel and four civilians, thirty-four out of the original fifty hostages held. As the days became weeks, U.S. officials grew increasingly frustrated at the standoff, none more so than Arleigh Burke. “It is my opinion,” Burke wrote the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “that so long as the hostages provide the insurgents protection from air attack, they will not be released, or released one or two at a time over a protracted period.” Meanwhile, “the prestige of the U.S. throughout Latin America has been seriously damaged”—damage that Burke viewed as “almost irreparable if strong measures” weren’t taken soon to secure the release of the U.S. personnel.38 Burke wasn’t the only one talking tough. A few days later, after Fidel Castro, operating in a distant part of Oriente province, agreed to intervene with his brother and demand the release of the hostages, Ambassador Smith worried that, barring some show of force on the part of the United States, the Castros would continue to take hostages. By rebel standards, this had been a complete success. The kidnappers “have accomplished their immediate objectives,” Smith noted: “(A) Gained publicity (B) Being able to deal directly with the US (C) Suspend air and military action on part of GOC [Government of Cuba].”

  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.

  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 Árbenz 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.40 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 Rodríguez, 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 Rodríguez to the naval base in the trunk of his car, past checkpoints manned by Batista’s soldiers. Meanwhile, the smugglin
g 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.” 43 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.44

  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