These manoeuvres appalled ‘Bobbety’ Salisbury, the Cecil family dynast after whose grandfather the Southern Rhodesian capital was named. Salisbury liked Welensky and white Rhodesians in general, even as he grew to dislike the slippery Macmillan and Macleod, whom he regarded as a Scots cardsharp. After Welensky had supplied Salisbury with confidential correspondence from Macmillan, the Prime Minister put his former colleague under MI5 surveillance. Salisbury himself formed a covert Watching Committee to subject Macmillan to a war of attrition. He also sought to counteract the liberal Conservatism of the Macmillan/Macleod variety by patronizing the ultra-reactionary Monday Club. On 7 March 1961, the aged Salisbury roused the House of Lords from its usual torpor with a vitriolic defence of the white man in Africa. Although the speech was remembered for his ‘too clever by half’ comment about Macleod, its target was really Macmillan. At times the speech turned truly personal:
It is not considered immoral, or even bad form, to outwit one’s opponents at bridge. On the contrary, the more you outwit them, within the rules of the game, the better player you are. It almost seems to me that the Colonial Secretary, when he abandoned the sphere of bridge for the sphere of politics, brought his bridge technique with him. At any rate, it has become, as your Lordships know, the convinced view of the white population in Eastern and Central Africa that it has been his object to outwit them, and that he has done so successfully.69
There was some truth in this: Macleod’s approach to politics was indeed as a game he played to win. While Macmillan and Salisbury eventually restored outward civilities – though it was ‘Dear Prime Minister’ rather than ‘My dear Harold’ thereafter in correspondence – Macmillan decided that Macleod was a liability and dumped him. Under his successor, Reggie Maudling, the Federation was dissolved in 1963 and a year later Nyasaland metamorphosed into Malawi and Northern Rhodesia into Zambia, led by Hastings Banda and Kenneth Kaunda respectively. There was general confidence that having these moderate African states in the Commonwealth (and hence truly out of South Africa’s dangerous orbit) outweighed anything the aggrieved white Rhodesians could manage. That proved a false calculation with the rise of the Rhodesian Front and its dogged leader, Ian Smith, who in 1965 declared Unilateral Independence to defend a way of life, with its barbecues and swimming pools, more American than British if my memories of the 1960s are at all accurate. While the Americans tended to regard Africa as a British thing, or at least the parts of it we have been considering (other than Algeria), in their own hemisphere their policy had always been to prevent outside interference. Sometimes this involved their own aggressive interventions.
15. BACKYARD BLUES: CUBA
Mare Nostrum
The US has always felt proprietary about Latin America and in particular the Caribbean basin. It proclaimed hemispheric hegemony in the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, seven decades before it had the navy to enforce it. During the US imperialist spasm under Presidents William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt, Cuba and Puerto Rico were taken from Spain in 1898, and in 1903 Panama was detached from Colombia to ensure US ownership of the planned inter-oceanic canal. The US intervened five times in the isthmus before 1903 and further four times in the next fifteen years. In 1905, after he had placed the Dominican Republic under ‘customs receivership’ to protect creditors, Teddy Roosevelt declared the US to be ‘the policeman’ of the Caribbean and sent the Marines into Honduras, the first of five such interventions over the next twenty years.
Successive presidents ordered US military interventions in the ‘backyard’, although the ‘Progressive’ Democrat Woodrow Wilson was much the most robust in coercing democracy. US troops were sent into Cuba in 1906–8 and 1912, and they were a more or less permanent feature in Honduras (1905–25), Nicaragua (1912–33), Haiti (1915–34) and the Dominican Republic (1916–24), while the Mexican port of Vera Cruz was shelled and occupied in 1914. The failure of direct interventions to bring about any permanent change in what one under secretary of state called ‘rotten little countries’ led President Franklin Roosevelt to announce the ‘Good Neighbor’ policy in 1933, a switch to informal methods of control, with dollars replacing bullets and stability ensured through local strongmen.1
There is no question that the cascade of US military interventions sits heavily on the historical record. The fact that they were wrapped in paternalist verbiage (Wilson’s ‘a world fit for democracy’ springs to mind) simply added insult to injury. The maverick Marine Major-General Smedley Butler, one of the most decorated soldiers in US history, had this to say about his own career:
I spent 33 years in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class thug for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the Banking House of Brown Brothers. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.2
By 1960, US direct investment in Latin America totalled over $8 billion, which represented a quarter of all US overseas investment. US capital was preferentially invested in extractive enterprises, although North Americans also had large land-holdings and ranches too. Latin America also accounted for 20 per cent of US foreign trade, and in the case of Cuba the US bought 74 per cent of the island’s exports and supplied 65 per cent of its imports.3 In many parts of Latin America US ambassadors were potentates in the land, often the second most important persons after the presidents. New embassy buildings employed a lot of plate-glass frontage, engraved with the bald eagle, to suggest modernity, transparency and power. But the money actually expended on policy initiatives in Latin America suggested that the Eisenhower administration did not really believe in the Communist threat there. Compelling evidence of Soviet activity in the Western hemisphere in the 1950s was minimal. Indeed the Russians were barely present, for until 1960 Moscow maintained embassies only in Argentina, Mexico and Uruguay. Trade with the Soviet Union was a very modest 2 per cent of Latin America’s annual total, and did not compete with US interests at all, since Americans did not need grain or beef from Argentina or Uruguay.4
The Duck Test
At his confirmation hearings, Foster Dulles compared the situation in Latin America in the 1950s with China in the 1930s: it was not going to be ‘lost’ on his watch.5 In mid-March 1953 National Security Council document 144/1 outlined US policy towards the region: to ensure continued Latin American support for the US within the UN; to encourage orderly economic and political development; to guarantee the flow of commodities and strategic raw materials; and to combat Communism, both internally and through joint hemispheric defence. The more detailed annexe said that ‘overriding security interests’ might require unilateral US intervention even though ‘this would be a violation of our treaty commitments, would endanger the Organization of American States (OAS) . . . and would probably intensify anti-US attitudes in many Latin American countries’.6
In March 1954, Dulles received overwhelming backing at the Tenth Inter-American Conference at Caracas to extend ‘the Monroe Doctrine to include the concept of outlawing foreign ideologies in the American Republics’. This was a restatement of the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, under which Teddy Roosevelt had arrogated a right to ‘stabilize’ regimes in the region by sending in the Marines to pre-empt European interference in their revolutions, civil wars and debt crises. Seventeen governments approved Dulles’s proposal; Argentina and Mexico abstained. Guatemala’s President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán was the naysayer.7
Although he had not been expressl
y named, Árbenz was the target of what he called Dulles’s ‘internationalization of McCarthyism’ for in truth he was scarcely a threat to the US. Árbenz was the first leader in Guatemala’s 130-year history to benefit from a peaceful and legitimate transfer of power. But his agrarian reforms brought him into conflict with the United Fruit Company, known to local opponents as ‘the Octopus’. The tentacles were very long. Ann Whitman, Eisenhower’s personal secretary, was married to Ed Whitman, United Fruit’s chief Washington lobbyist, while as a corporate lawyer Dulles himself had represented the company on many occasions. Árbenz effectively flunked what in 1950 the US Ambassador in Guatemala City described as the ‘duck test’: ‘Suppose you see a bird walking around in a farmyard. This bird wears no label that says “duck”. But he certainly looks like a duck. Also, he goes to the pond and you notice he swims like a duck. Then he opens his beak and quacks like a duck. Well, by this time you have probably reached the conclusion that the bird is a duck, whether he’s wearing a label or not.’8
Apparently free to topple governments around the world, and emboldened by the overthrow of Iran’s Mossadeq, the CIA repeated the trick in Guatemala with Operation PBSUCCESS in June 1954. Like Mossadeq, Árbenz suffered a loss of nerve and failed to rally the popular support that would have called the bluff of the minimal forces deployed against him. A year after the coup, CIA officers were still vainly combing Guatemala’s government records for any evidence of Communist infiltration of the overthrown regime; however Árbenz’s wife did say that her husband believed ‘the triumph of Communism in the world was inevitable and desirable’. What Guatemala got instead was a gang of right-wing thugs – and the US a puppet. ‘Tell me what you want me to do and I will do it’ were the first words the figurehead of the coup, Colonel Carlos Armas, said to Vice President Nixon when he came to Washington to pay his respects.9
The US Information Agency and the Inter-American Organization of Workers were the principal tools for combating ‘Communist’ subversion. USIA flooded Latin American newspapers and radio stations with comic strips and radio scripts, and the IAOW backed labour leaders of the right cast of mind, but neither was a big budgetary item. Nor, intriguingly, was the military assistance budget: $400 million was appropriated, but very little of it translated into weapons deliveries. The co-ordination of hemispheric defence was viewed as pointless and the State Department was adamant that Latin American nations should be discouraged from wasting money on modern weapons.
Much more crucial were the personal bonds forged between Latin American military officers and their US counterparts – not least because of the prevalence of military dictatorships in the hemisphere. The ones in the ‘backyard’ tended to wear comic-opera uniforms and to have their chests emblazoned with self-awarded medals, often just for murdering their own people. The Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo was known as ‘Chapitas’ (Bottletops) because of this habit, although he was also referred to as ‘the Goat’ because of his relentless exercise of a latter-day droit de seigneur. Trujillo was a product of the National Guards trained by the Americans to maintain political stability after they withdrew their Marines. He ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his death in 1961 at the hands of assassins given sniper rifles by the CIA. Killing him was primarily a balancing act so that Latin sympathies would not be so outraged when the CIA organized the death of Fidel Castro.10 Another dictator to emerge from a National Guard was Anastasio Somoza, who ruled Nicaragua with what really involved an iron fist from 1936 until his assassination twenty years later.11
In February 1953 Foster Dulles recommended to Eisenhower, ‘you have to pat them a little bit and make them think that you are fond of them’.12 Both Manuel Odría (dictator of Peru) and Marcos Pérez Jiménez (dictator of Venezuela) received the Legion of Merit, the highest award the US confers on foreigners. The fawning conduct of some US ambassadors towards corrupt tyrants was embarrassing. As in the case of Pakistan’s Ayub Khan, uniform spoke unto uniform, in this case strongmen like Paraguay’s General Alfredo Stroessner.
Despite the absence of a Communist threat, the administration used its second major review of policy towards the region to widen the scope for intervention along the lines of Guatemala. In September 1956, NSC 5613/1 included the ominous warning that, ‘if a Latin American state should establish with the Soviet bloc close ties of such a nature as seriously to prejudice our vital interests, the United States would be prepared to diminish governmental economic and financial cooperation with that country and take any other political, economic, or military actions deemed appropriate’. No sooner had the administration adopted this line than its major figures effectively denied the basis for it. In November 1957 Foster Dulles told journalists: ‘we see no likelihood at the present time of Communism getting into control of the political institutions of any of the American Republics’. The following year his brother Allen testified to Congress that Communism in Latin America was not ‘a situation to be frightened of as an overall problem’.13
There was considerable, if episodic, evidence that many people did not love the US. In May 1958, during a state visit to Venezuela, where Pérez Jiménez had recently been overthrown, the limousine carrying Vice President Nixon and his wife Patricia was spat on and attacked by rioters in Caracas. This was a blow to the American belief that they were universally respected, and some 85,000 Washington bureaucrats were given time off to line the streets when Nixon returned, brandishing placards saying ‘Don’t Let Those Commies Get You Down, Dick’.14 The experience resulted in a curious bifurcation of US policy, although top policy-makers remained convinced that excitable Latins loved (or at least needed) authoritarian men on horseback.15
The term ‘Latin America’ dates from the French attempt to install an emperor in Mexico during the US civil war, when they dreamed of establishing a Latin empire to counter the ‘Anglo-Saxons’. Plus ça change . . . European critics are even more prone than the citizens of that part of the continent that has appropriated the word ‘America’ for itself to facile generalizations about the other nations of the hemisphere. Chile has experienced only three coups d’état since 1830, whereas its neighbour Bolivia has had a blur of them. The ethnic mixes are just as varied, ranging from all-African Francophone Haiti, through largely Amerindian Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay, to virtually all-European Argentina and Uruguay, and (pre-Castro) Cuba, where blacks and mulattos were a quarter of the population. Paradoxically, the foundations for the remarkably untroubled modern history of little Costa Rica were laid by José ‘Pepe’ Figueres, who seized power from a democratically elected president in 1948 and promptly abolished the army, nationalized the banks, and granted women and blacks the vote. Despite being a rancher, he also instituted land reform. What he did not do was indulge in strident anti-yanqui rhetoric, for he had studied at MIT and had two successive American wives, with the result that, although balefully regarded by the CIA, he was the poster boy of the State Department, and Costa Rica became an island of peaceful democracy surrounded by variously extreme anti- and pro-US guerrilla movements and dictators. The State Department ensured that Somoza did not kill him.16
In August 1958 Eisenhower, despite the indignities endured by his Vice President, welcomed the Ambassador of newly democratic Venezuela with the words: ‘authoritarianism and autocracy of whatever form are incompatible with the ideals of our great leaders of the past’. These fine words were not matched with economic assistance, however much they represented a rhetorical departure from traditional US policy – Ike’s belief in free trade over taxpayer-funded aid was too strong for that. Latin Americans wanted a regional Marshall Plan, as though over a century of self-government had produced a situation akin to a Europe devastated by war. When Brazilian President Juscelino Kubitschek called for a $40 billion Operation Pan America in 1958, the response was an Inter-American Development Bank, with the US providing 45 per cent of its one-billion-dollar capitalization. It was a relatively small beginning
; nonetheless Eisenhower would claim paternity rights over the more ostentatious aid programmes of his successor John Kennedy.17
Gangster Island
The duck test was at the heart of the US response to a mounting crisis in Cuba during the last years of the Eisenhower administration. The Platt Amendment to the constitution imposed on Cuba in 1901 had symbolized the island’s subordination to the US, curtailing its ability to conduct an independent foreign policy and to contract unsupervised loans. The US also acquired long leases on two naval bases, including Guantanamo Bay. While Franklin Roosevelt rescinded the Platt Amendment in 1934, and Cuba became one of the most prosperous Hispanic American republics, the relationship with the US remained neo-colonial and a burning affront to Cuban nationalists.
Unfortunately, although the island could boast a culturally vibrant and generally free society, Cuban politics were stunningly corrupt and, especially in the autonomous national university, extremely violent. It was ruled dictatorially from 1952 onwards by the mulatto Fulgencio Batista, a former army sergeant who had cunningly taken over a US-sponsored revolution in 1933 against the dictator Gerardo Machado and acted as kingmaker in the elections that followed. In 1940 he won the presidency for himself in fair elections, with the full backing of Cuba’s labour unions and the tiny Communist Party (which he had legalized), and promulgated a constitution inspired by collectivist ideas that was considered the most ‘progressive’ outside the Soviet Union. There were two Communists in his government, though that did not unduly discommode the Americans. The constitution forbade him to succeed himself and he retired to Florida’s Daytona Beach in 1944.18
Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965 Page 49