A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  The currents of vitality radiated out of the White House, flowed through the government and created a sense of vast possibility. The very idea of the new President taking command as tranquilly and naturally as if his whole life had prepared him for it could not but stimulate a flood of buoyant optimism. The Presidency was suddenly the center of action: in the first three months, thirty-nine messages and letters to Congress calling for legislation, ten prominent foreign visitors (including Macmillan, Adenauer and Nkrumah), nine press conferences, new leadership in the regulatory agencies and such dramatic beginnings as the Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps. Above all, Kennedy held out such promise of hope. Intelligence at last was being applied to public affairs. Euphoria reigned; we thought for a moment that the world was plastic and the future unlimited.

  Yet I don’t suppose we really thought this. At bottom we knew how intractable the world was—the poverty and disorder of Latin America, the insoluble conflict in Laos, the bitter war in Vietnam, the murky turbulence of Africa, the problems of discrimination and unemployment in our own country, the continuing hostility of Russia and China. The President knew better than anyone how hard his life was to be. Though he incited the euphoria, he did so involuntarily, for he did not share it himself. I never heard him now use the phrase ‘New Frontier’; I think he regarded it with some embarrassment as a temporary capitulation to rhetoric. Still even Kennedy, the ironist and skeptic, had an embarrassed confidence in his luck and in these weeks may have permitted himself moments of optimism. In any case, he knew the supreme importance of a first impression and was determined to create a picture of drive, purpose and hope.

  I had gone to the White House for dinner a few nights before leaving for South America. It was a small party for Sam Rayburn and his sister. The Vice-President and his wife were there, the Fulbrights, the Arthur Krocks, Mrs. Nicholas Longworth and myself. The historian looking around the table could not but be impressed by the continuities of our national life—Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who had lived in this house sixty years before; Rayburn, who had come to Congress fifty years ago; Krock, who had covered Washington for forty years; Johnson, who had drawn his inspiration from the second Roosevelt; Fulbright, who had served the country so well since the Second World War; and then Kennedy, younger than any of them, courteously enjoying their stories, soliciting their counsel, and all the while preserving his easy domination of the evening and seeming almost to pull the threads of history together in his hands.

  Perhaps the sense of possibility had its gayest image in a party the Kennedys gave for the Radziwills in the middle of March. Eighty guests sat around small tables in the Blue Room, and there was dancing till three in the morning. Never had girls seemed so pretty, tunes so melodious, an evening so blithe and unconstrained. The President, who rarely danced, moved from one group to another, a glass of champagne in his hand (the same glass most of the evening—he rarely drank either), while the music played lightly on. The glitter of that night remained in slightly ironic memory for a long time.

  3. THE SHADOW OF CASTRO

  In the meantime, the Central Intelligence Agency was training 1200 Cuban exiles at a coffee finca high in the Sierra Madre mountains on the Pacific coast of Guatemala, and Kennedy was confronting the first drastic decision of his administration.

  The circumstances which brought these Cubans to alien shores and desperate designs were mixed. In the main, they had not been adherents of Fulgencio Batista. Some had fought with Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra, many more had welcomed Castro’s entry into Havana. They were less opponents than casualties of the Cuban Revolution.

  Much has been written about that revolution, its origins and its objectives. Jean-Paul Sartre and C. Wright Mills, who visited Cuba in 1959–60, later proclaimed that the revolution was a peasant uprising, caused by conditions of intolerable poverty and despair in a wretchedly underdeveloped country. In fact, as more careful writers like Theodore Draper and Hugh Thomas have pointed out, Cuba was hardly in so hopeless a shape. It was, indeed, the perfect test of the Eisenhower theory that unhampered private investment was Latin America’s road to salvation. It stood fourth among Latin American nations in per capita income, fifth in manufacturing, first in per capita distribution of automobiles and radios. It ranked near the top in education, literacy, social sendees and urbanization. These aggregate statistics, however, concealed shocking disparities in the distribution of wealth, especially as between city and countryside and between white and Negro. There was enough wealth about to reveal to all how agreeable wealth might be. The statistics also—along with the popularity of Havana cigars—concealed the extent to which the Cuban economy depended on a single industry, sugar, which not only was at the mercy of world markets but was itself then in a state of decline. Still, if Cuba had serious economic problems and, compared to the United States, a low standard of living, it was quite well off compared to Haiti or Bolivia. The immediate motives behind the revolution were as much political as economic, and the revolutionaries themselves were members of the middle class rather than peasants or workers.

  Cuba’s history as an independent republic had been a drama of acute and chronic political frustration. One crowd after another had come to power on promises of progress and regeneration only to go out in orgies of graft and plunder. Dr. Carlos Prío Socarrás, who had presided over a genial regime of social reform and political corruption until Batista overthrew him in 1952, once visited my office in the White House and observed with a certain dignity, “They say that I was a terrible president of Cuba. That may be true. But I was the best president Cuba ever had.” That may be true too. By the late 1950s a feeling was spreading through the intellectual community and the professional and even business classes that life was becoming intolerable—the sugar industry was deteriorating, the educational system was decaying, illiteracy was increasing, and Batista was keeping himself in power only by a mounting use of repression, corruption and violence.

  This feeling of political and social disgust produced a passion for change. In its origins, the Cuban Revolution was led by professional men and intellectuals (like the Castro brothers and Ernesto Guevara, the Argentine physician) and subsidized by businessmen and landowners. As Bias Roca, secretary of the Cuban Communist Party, admitted in 1959, “The armed struggle was initiated by the petty bourgeoisie.”* The avowed aim was to establish a regime pledged to carry out the liberal constitution of 1940, which provided for free elections, civil liberties and agrarian diversification and reform. This aim enlisted wide backing throughout the country. At the start of 1957 Castro had been the leader of a beleaguered band of a dozen men hiding out in the hills; at the end of 1958 he entered Havana in triumph. He did this, not because he defeated Batista’s 40,000 soldiers on the battlefield—at the moment of victory, his own force numbered less than two thousand men—but because of the withdrawal of support from Batista’s government on the part of most of the people and most of the army. The Havana underground, brilliantly organized by a radical young engineer named Manuel Ray, completed the work Castro had begun in the Sierra Maestra.

  To what extent did Castro at this point conceal secret communist purposes? He later said that he hid radical views in order to hold the anti-Batista coalition together, and this was probably true. But, though a radical, there is no conclusive evidence that he was then a Communist or even a Marxist-Leninist. Whatever he later became, he began as a romantic, left-wing nationalist—in his own phrase, a “utopian Socialist.” He had tried to read Das Kapital at the University of Havana but, according to his own account, bogged down on page 370. When he made his first assault on the regime—the attack on the Moncada barracks on July 26, 1953—the Partido Socialista Popular, the Cuban Communist Party, still had relations with Batista. It should not be forgotten that in 1943 Batista had appointed to his cabinet the first avowed Communists ever to hold cabinet posts in any American government; one of them—Carlos Rafael Rodríguez—was in Castro’s government twenty years later. Even
when the Communists broke with Batista, they continued to condemn Castro as “bourgeois” and a “putschist,” adolescent and irresponsible. They refused to believe the situation ‘ripe’ for revolution. Javier Pazos, the son of Castro’s first head of the Bank of Cuba, who served as an officer on Castro’s staff in the Sierra Maestra until he was captured by Batista in early 1958, wrote, “The Fidel Castro I knew . . . was definitely not a Marxist. Nor was he particularly interested in social revolution. He was, above all, a political opportunist—a man with a firm will and an extraordinary ambition. He thought in terms of winning power and keeping it.”*

  Some time in 1958 the Communists began quietly to cooperate with Castro’s 26th of July Movement. When Castro came to Havana in January 1959, the Communists were firmly installed as part of the coalition behind him. The next months were critical. Fidel was accustomed to running a guerrilla band, not a government. He had slogans but no program. He was an exciting figure, with his black beard, his flashing eyes, his inexhaustible flow of pungent and philosophical rhetoric, his sympathy and his audacity, and he had an adoring personal following, but a personal following was no substitute for an organization. Hugh Thomas has pointed out the institutional softness of Cuba—the absence of any body of solid democratic experience, of traditions of political continuity and party responsibility, the vulnerability of the system of justice, the civil service, the army, the trade unions, even the Church.* In the clamor and confusion, one group stood out as experienced, disciplined, effective, possessed of both revolutionary ideas and the capacity to execute them. This was the Communist Party. Fidel’s younger brother Raúl and Guevara, who had long had close relations with the Communists, no doubt helped move Fidel in this direction. Now that he had won his power, the Communists offered him the means of keeping it and using it.

  The next months brought widespread and largely beneficial social cleansing and reform. Castro spoke eloquently about a “humanist” revolution which would avoid the errors of both capitalism and communism. But all the while the Communists were filling every available vacuum, until the revolution had become in large measure their own. This process can be dated with some precision. In January Castro asked José Figueres of Costa Rica, whose gifts of arms and money had kept him going in the early days in the Sierra Maestra, to come to Havana. Figueres could not accept the invitation until March. On his arrival, he later told me, he found the atmosphere curiously sullen and hostile. Castro put off seeing him, but they finally met at a great mass meeting of the Cuban Trade Union Confederation. When Figueres called on the revolution to keep its independence and not become the instrument of extracontinental powers, David Salvador, the secretary-general of the confederation, rushed to the microphone and denounced him as a lackey of Wall Street. Castro himself followed with a bitter speech against the imperialists. By July Castro forced the resignation of Manuel Urrutia, the president of the provisional government, for having criticized communism in a television speech. In October, when Major Huber Matos, one of the heroes of the Sierra Maestra, warned against communist penetration of the government, he was arrested and, after a heated cabinet meeting dissuaded Castro from having him shot, he was sentenced in December to twenty years in prison. In November, Manuel Ray, now Minister of Public Works, Felipe Pazos, head of the national bank, and other representatives of the democratic wing of the revolution resigned from the cabinet. By the end of the year the Communist Party alone enjoyed freedom of political action. (And in a few months more, David Salvador himself who, though fiercely anti-Yanqui, was not a Communist, was seized while trying to escape from Cuba and sent to one of Castro’s prisons.)

  It cannot be said that there was a fight between the Marxist and democratic wings of the revolution, because the democrats allowed themselves to be picked off one by one; perhaps, as Hugh Thomas has suggested, some felt half the time that, given the record of betrayal by previous reform regimes, they could not now object to an excess of zeal. Nor can it be said that the fusion of the Communist Party and the Castro Revolution was ever complete. The Communists succeeded in breaking their only organizational rival, the 26th of July Movement; but tensions remained—of generations and of temperaments—between the middle-aged bureaucrats of the party and the youthful beatniks of the revolution. To a degree, these tensions may have come to correspond with the widening gap between Russia and China. The men of the Sierra Maestra—Che Guevara, for example—could identify themselves more easily with the Chinese Revolution, which like their own claimed a peasant base, utilized guerrilla methods and expelled foreign imperialism, than with the Bolshevik Revolution, which had emerged from a quite different experience. Though Fidel came to boast of his Marxism-Leninism, he himself never joined the Communist Party. As the revolution careened along, the Communists may even at times have served as a restraining force, espedally in foreign affairs. Yet, despite the jostling for position between Communists and Fidelistas, the year 1959 saw the dear commitment of Castro’s revolution to the establishment of a Marxist dictatorship in Cuba and the service of Soviet foreign policy in the world—a commitment so incompatible with the expressed purposes of the revolution as surely to justify the word betrayal.

  4. WHO LOST CUBA?

  Was all this inevitable? Or was it the result of mistaken United States policy which left Castro no alternative? No legend is more enduring than the notion that Washington ‘forced’ Cuba into the arms of Moscow. In fact, the revolution was very popular in the United States in the early months of 1959. When Castro visited this country in the spring, his journey had aspects of a triumphal procession. I met him at the Harvard Faculty Club in Cambridge, jaunty in his olive-green fatigues, and heard him speak that evening to several thousand students in the Harvard Stadium. He gave a fluent harangue, memorable chiefly for a disarming ability to make jokes in English. The undergraduates were delighted. They saw in him, I think, the hipster who in the era of the Organization Man had joyfully defied the system, summoned a dozen friends and overturned a government of wicked old men.

  Even the Eisenhower administration hoped for a while they could do something with him. Official policy toward Castro, it must be said, had been in a more than usual state of confusion. Eisenhower’s first ambassador, Arthur Gardner, was strongly pro-Batista; his successor, Earl E. T. Smith, hoped that Batista would leave quietly; while the State Department was sure that the dictatorship was doomed. Arms deliveries to Batista were stopped as early as March 1958, but the United States military mission remained—a compromise which displeased both sides. When Batista fled the country, Washington gave the revolutionary government prompt recognition. In March 1959 it sent a new ambassador to Havana—Philip Bonsai, a skilled and liberal-minded professional who had earned the deep dislike of the Rojas Pinilla dictatorship in Colombia and then had won the confidence of the leaders of the Bolivian Revolution. When Castro reached Washington in April, the State Department set up meetings with the economic members of his delegation to discuss an aid program.

  But Castro had instructed these officials, to their astonishment, not to raise the question of assistance. Rufo Lopez Fresquet, his Finance Minister, saw Secretary of the Treasury Anderson and Assistant Secretary of State Rubottom and, as he later wrote, “feigned polite aloofness” when economic cooperation was mentioned. Castro himself loftily informed the American Society of Newspaper Editors that, unlike other foreign leaders who came to Washington to sell their souls, “We did not come here for money.” As early as the spring of 1959, Castro seems to have decided to cast the United States in the role of enemy of the revolution. The hostility of Washington would provide the all-purpose excuse to cancel elections, eliminate political opposition and tighten internal controls. It is notable that Castro himself never then or later used the argument so dear to Castro sympathizers outside Cuba that rejection in Washington drove him to Moscow. Che Guevara denied in 1964 that Castro could ever possibly have been seduced by American blandishments.

  Castro’s evident pleasure in shooting Batistia
nos after circus-like trials shocked opinion in the United States; this reaction, in contrast to the earlier North American ennui over Batista’s terror, shocked Cubans. The State Department grew obsessed with the problem of getting American citizens proper indemnification for expropriated land and business; Havana construed this as the anticipated enmity of American business to Cuban reform. Washington became disturbed over Castro’s nonstop anti-Yanqui orations; Havana complained about exile bombing raids apparently launched from private airfields in Florida. These recriminations only confirmed Castro in a course set for other reasons. Bonsai, for all his friendliness to the revolution, had increasing trouble even getting in to see Castro. On May 8, he requested an interview; the request was not granted till June 13. On July 23 Bonsai sought another meeting—not arranged till September 5. By November, when Manuel Ray and others left the government, Bonsai decided that Castro had no wish for any sort of understanding. But Bonsai still advocated a policy of moderation in order to make it more difficult for Castro to rush to the other side. If the United States played the role Castro had cast for it, Bonsai felt, it would only fulfill Castro’s purposes.

  Others in Washington—especially Vice-President Nixon, who had met Castro during his Washington visit and distrusted him from the start—wanted a more aggressive policy, if only on a contingency basis. But as late as January 1960 the United States government made a new effort to reach an understanding, using Dr. Julio A. Amoedo, the Argentine ambassador to Havana and a personal friend of Castro’s, as the intermediary. There appears to have been still another attempt in March through Rufo Lopez Fresquet. On the morning of March 17, 1960, President Dorticós rejected this last United States overture. Lopez Fresquet responded that he had remained as Finance Minister only on the assumption that the Cuban government wanted to compose its differences with Washington; if Castro thought no reconciliation possible, then, Lopez Fresquet said, he wanted to resign. Dorticós immediately accepted his resignation. On the same day in Washington President Eisenhower agreed to a recommendation from the CIA to train a force of Cuban exiles for possible use against Castro.