A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  But Washington still declined to use the weapons of economic pressure which lay so easily at hand. It was not until July 1960, long after Castro had effected the substantial communization of the government, army and labor movement and had negotiated economic agreements with Russia and China, that the United States took public retaliatory action of a major sort. The suspension of the balance of Cuba’s 1960 sugar quota (that same quota which Guevara had already denounced in March as “economic slavery’’) was the conclusion, and not the cause, of Castro’s hostility. Or rather it was not quite the conclusion. Washington did not finally break off diplomatic relations until January 3, 1961, and then because of Castro’s scornful demand that the staff of the Havana Embassy be reduced to eleven people in forty-eight hours.

  Once Castro had taken power, it is hard to see that any different United States policy, short of invasion, could have averted the capture of the revolution. The policy of the Eisenhower administration lacked both imagination and consistency, but it was certainly not one of purposeful hostility. Castro took the revolution east for his own reasons. In doing so, he drove many Cubans who had opposed Batista and still held to the original principles of the revolution from their homeland. Some of these men were now drilling on the coffee plantation in Guatemala.

  The perversion of the Cuban Revolution was evident enough to leaders of the democratic left in Latin America, like Betancourt, Figueres and Haya de la Torre. It was less evident, however, to left-wing intellectuals in North America and Europe. In spite of a score of disillusionments in Russia, eastern Europe and China—so many eggs broken and so few omelettes—many still cherished the hope that sometime, somewhere, revolution would at last achieve the dream of a truly just and joyous society. “The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished,” Proust has written; “as it was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them; they can aim at them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one after another, without interruption into the bosom of a family, will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician.” Among the pilgrims Cuba for a moment rekindled emotions which had not burned with such purity since the Spanish Civil War.

  And it was true that revolutionary Cuba had a reckless and anarchic verve unknown in any other communist state, that it had abolished corruption, that it was educating and inspiring its people, that it had exuberantly reclaimed a national identity, that it was traduced and slandered in the foreign press—and these truths blotted out harsher truths and subtler corruptions. So C. Wright Mills, after stating the revolutionary case in an angry book: “Like most Cubans, I too believe that this revolution is a moment of truth.” So Jean-Paul Sartre: “I do not see how any people can propose today a more urgent goal nor one more worthy of its efforts. The Cubans must win, or we will lose all, even hope.” As Castro’s dictatorship within Cuba was a fact, so too was the faith men of good will outside Cuba vested in him.

  5. CASTRO AND KENNEDY

  Cuba was not a new issue for Kennedy, nor had his view of Fidel Castro been wholly negative. Early in 1960, writing of the “wild, angry, passionate course” of the Cuban Revolution in The Strategy of Peace, he described Castro as “part of the legacy of Bolivar,” part too “of the frustration of that earlier revolution which won its war against Spain but left largely untouched the indigenous feudal order.” He had no doubt, as he said later in the year, that “the brutal, bloody, and despotic dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista” had invited its own downfall; and he freely declared his sympathy with the motives behind the revolution and with its expressed objectives. He even raised the question in The Strategy of Peace whether Castro might not have taken “a more rational course” had the United States government not backed Batista “so long and so uncritically” and had it given Castro a warmer welcome on his trip to Washington. But he had no question now that Castro had “betrayed the ideals of the Cuban revolution” and transformed Cuba “into a hostile and militant Communist satellite.”

  How much was the Eisenhower administration to blame for all this? Cuba, of course, was a highly tempting issue; and as the pace of the campaign quickened, politics began to clash with Kennedy’s innate sense of responsibility. Once, discussing Cuba with his staff, he asked them, “All right, but how would we have saved Cuba if we had the power?” Then he paused, looked out the window and said, “What the hell, they never told us how they would have saved China.” In that spirit, he began to succumb to temptation.

  He made his most extended statement in a speech at Cincinnati in early October. He began by appearing to adopt the thesis that the State Department should have listened to its pro-Batista ambassadors and recognized the revolution as a communist conspiracy from the outset. This differed markedly from his interpretation in The Strategy of Peace. Doubtless it was campaign oratory. Though Earl Smith was an amiable gentleman and old friend from Palm Beach, Kennedy did not regard him as an oracle on Cuba. He had remarked at Hyannis Port in August, “Earl Smith once said to me that the American Ambassador was the second most important man in Cuba. What a hell of a note that is! Naturally those conditions couldn’t last.” (Smith also made his remark about “the second most important man in Cuba” publicly, stimulating President Dorticós of Cuba to congratulate a Cuban audience on now having “the privilege of living in a country where the United States Ambassador means little.”)

  The more substantial part of the Cincinnati speech—and the part which I believe more faithfully reflected Kennedy’s views—condemned the Eisenhower policy toward Cuba on quite different grounds. In the years before Castro, Kennedy charged, the administration had declined “to help Cuba meet its desperate need for economic progress”; it had employed “the influence of our Government to advance the interests and increase the profits of the private American companies, which dominated the island’s economy”; and it had given “stature and support to one of the most bloody and repressive dictatorships in the long history of Latin America.” He concluded: “While we were allowing Batista to place us on the side of tyranny, we did nothing to persuade the people of Cuba and Latin America that we wanted to be on the side of freedom.”

  What could be done about Castro now? Kennedy had told me at Hyannis Port, “We can’t do anything except through the OAS, and most of the members of the OAS don’t want to do anything at all. Our best hope is to stop the spread of Castro’s influence by helping genuine democracy elsewhere in the continent.” This also was his theme in Cincinnati: “For the present, Cuba is gone. . . . For the present no magic formula will bring it back.” Only by extending “the hand of American friendship in a common effort to wipe out the poverty and discontent and hopelessness on which communism feeds—only then will we drive back tyranny until it ultimately perishes in the streets of Havana.”

  Two weeks later, the Kennedy staff, seeking to take the offensive after his supposed ‘soft’ position on Quemoy and Matsu, put out the provocative statement about strengthening the Cuban “fighters for freedom.” These words were no more than a rhetorical flourish. Neither Kennedy nor his staff knew about the secret Cuban army in Guatemala, and they had no enterprise of this sort in mind themselves. Nixon, however, knowing that Allen Dulles had briefed Kennedy about Cuba, assumed that the briefing covered operations as well as intelligence. He therefore incredibly concluded—or so he later said—that Kennedy was trying to claim credit for the idea and that the secrecy of the project was now in jeopardy. When the fourth television debate took place the next day, Nixon—in the interests, he suggested subsequently, of national security—accused Kennedy of advocating what was in fact his own plan and went on to attack that plan as “probably the most dangerously irresponsible” recommendation made in the campaign. It would, he said, violate the United Nations Charter and five hemisphere treaties;

  if we were to follow that recommendation . . . we would lose all
of our friends in Latin America, we would probably be condemned in the United Nations, and we would not accomplish our objective. . . . It would be an open invitation to Mr. Khrushchev to come in, to come into Latin America.

  In his response, Kennedy said nothing more about strengthening the fighters for freedom, only noting that economic sanctions against Cuba, to be successful, would have to be multilateral and that “the big struggle will be to prevent the influence of Castro spreading to other countries.” For the rest of the campaign, he left Cuba alone.

  Immediately after the election, his concern was with an affirmative program for Latin America rather than with Cuba. On November 14 he asked John Sharon for estimates of the effectiveness of the trade embargo against Cuba and of the possibilities of a rapprochement. Four days later Dulles and Richard Bissell of CIA informed him for the first time about the Guatemalan project.

  6. PLANNING IN THE SHADOWS

  The Eisenhower decision of March 17, 1960, had two main parts. On the political side, it directed the CIA to bring together a broad range of Cuban exiles, with Batistianos and Communists specifically excluded, into unified political opposition to the Castro regime. On the military side, it directed the CIA to recruit and train a Cuban force capable of guerrilla action against that regime.

  When Nixon first proposed the use of exiles against Castro in the spring of 1959, United States action would have inevitably been pro-Batista; only Batistianos were then available. A year later the situation had improved. Thousands of disenchanted Cubans who had disliked Batista and at first welcomed the revolution were now streaming into Florida and Central America, some flying boldly out on commercial airlines, others stealing onto small boats and disappearing into the Caribbean night. Many were lawyers, doctors and businessmen, accustomed to political expression. By the end of 1959 Miami was alive with anti-Castro political activity of an unorganized and feckless sort. Every time two or three refugees gathered together a new unión or movimiento was likely to emerge.

  The political leaders of this second migration were men who had served neither Batista nor Castro. They were characteristically identified with the old Cuba of the traditional parties, of progressive intent and ineffectual performance. Some were decent men; others were racketeers who had found politics a lucrative way of life. They wanted the restoration of political ‘democracy’ as they had known it before Batista, but they saw no need for far-reaching social change. Their objectives were compatible with the interests of North American investors and with the prejudices of the Eisenhower administration. If this had not been the case, they would gladly have modified their objectives; for they were men long habituated to automatic deference to the United States. They stood for the Cuba of the past.

  The CIA turned first to such men when it began to organize the political front in the early months of 1960. In June five leading groups were cajoled into forming the Frente Revolucionario Democrático. Three of the five members of the new committee represented pre-Batista Cuba; Manuel Antonio de Varona, who had been prime minister under Prío Socarrás, was typical. Varona promptly declared that the post-Castro government would restore properties seized by the Castro regime to their United States and Cuban owners. The other two members of the Frente had briefly served the revolutionary government. Dr. Justo Carrillo, an honorable man of liberal views, had been president of the Bank for Industrial and Agricultural Development under both Prio and Castro and had taken part in a plot to overthrow Batista in 1956. The fifth member, a young lieutenant named Manuel Artime, had joined Castro at the end of 1958 and later worked for Castro’s National Institute of Agrarian Reform. Soon after he broke with the regime in November 1959, the CIA brought him out of Cuba. His youth, his military experience, his political inexperience and his personal tractability all recommended him to the CIA field operatives. He became their man on the Frente and soon the only Cuban link between CIA’s political and military operations.

  The Frente was appropriately named: it was a front and nothing more. While its members talked among themselves, CIA was engaged in a recruiting drive among Cuban refugees in Florida and Central America. It had also persuaded President Ydígoras of Guatemala to permit the establishment of a secret training camp and air base in the Guatemalan mountains. By midsummer the Cubans began to arrive. It was the rainy season, and they had to build their own camp in sticky volcanic mud five thousand feet above the sea. In their spare time, they received training from a Filipino colonel who had organized guerrillas against the Japanese during the Second World War.

  The first CIA plan was to form small groups designed to slip into Cuba and establish active centers of resistance. Arms and supplies flown in from outside would enable these bands to enlarge their operations until, like Castro himself, they could enlist enough popular support to challenge the regime. In August President Eisenhower approved a budget of $13 million for this project. It was explicitly stated at this point that no United States military personnel were to take part in combat operations. But in the meantime the military conception was beginning to change. The CIA people began to doubt whether the guerrilla theory would work. It is true that several hundred guerrillas were presently hiding out in the Escambray Mountains and that Manuel Ray was reactivating his underground in the cities; but the CIA found it hard to make contact with the Cuban resistance. Efforts to parachute supplies into the Escambray were not very successful. The CIA people feared that the guerrilla bands had been penetrated by Castro’s agents. Certainly Castro, who knew all the tricks himself, was a master at counterguerrilla action. Moreover, his army was being strengthened by Soviet equipment, and his control was tightening over the civilian population: all this made him a far more formidable opponent than the Batista of 1958. For these reasons, as the Escambray resistance began to fade out, CIA now reconsidered its original plan.

  This, at least, now seems to me what happened, though it is fair to say that some exiles place a more sinister interpretation on these events. They believe to this day that the CIA disliked the guerrillas and the underground groups on the island because it could not control them, that its efforts to help were never more than nominal, and that it ignored the urban underground and folded up the Escambray resistance in order to make way for the Guatemalan brigade. One representative of Ray’s organization who came to Miami said later, ‘‘When we began to make the necessary contacts, we were referred immediately to mysterious persons who always turned out to be agents of the CIA, and who had their own plans as to how Castro was to be toppled and who were the ones to do it.”*

  In any case the men of Washington were moving on to a new and drastically different conception: the idea of a direct assault on Castro by landing a force of exiles on the Cuban coast. Since amphibious operations required air cover, it seemed reasonable to equip the prospective invaders with a few B-26 planes left over from the Second World War. Perhaps the memory of the successful CIA coup against the Arbenz regime in Guatemala in 1954 played its part; Castro too might collapse under the shock of an attack in force. By the time of the United States election in 1960, the CIA conception had definitely shifted from guerrilla infiltration to a beachhead assault. The guerrilla exercises came to a virtual stop; the Filipino colonel went away; and a new United States team came in to train the Cubans, now numbering almost 500 men, along conventional lines as a pocket army, complete with artillery and air support.

  7. AGENTS AND PATIENTS

  In the meantime, a new wave of refugees had begun to arrive in Florida. This third migration was led by men who had done more than passively applaud the revolution. They characteristically had conspired against Batista, fought with Castro and served in the revolutionary government. They opposed Castro not for having brought about a social revolution but for having delivered it to the Communists. They sought not to reverse the revolution but to redeem it. Their inspiration was Huber Matos, now in Castro’s jail. Their strongest figure was Manuel Ray, who, after resigning from Castro’s government, formed the Movimiento Revolucio
nario del Pueblo (MRP) and spent most of 1960 in Cuba organizing an underground against Castro, as he had done two years before against Batista. The men of this third migration tended to be politically radical and nationalist, personally proud and defiant.

  In November Ray himself escaped from Cuba and made his way to Miami. He brought a new thesis to which he hoped the new American government might be responsive: that Castro had to be overthrown from within, that the Cuban people must be the means, and that an uprising would succeed only if its clear purpose was to rescue the revolution from the Communists and resume the revolutionary task of building a new and progressive Cuba. Ray’s arrival confronted the CIA with a difficult problem.

  It is sometimes essential for a state, even for a democratic state, to undertake clandestine operations, as I learned in OSS during the Second World War. But, when such operations are undertaken, it is important never to forget that the relationship between an intelligence agency and its instruments tends to be a corrupting one. The agency has a natural desire to control its operations as completely as possible and therefore a natural preference for compliant people. If people are not compliant to begin with, they are made so. The very process of recruitment begins the process: Artime, for example, was subjected to hours of interrogation, to psychological testing, even to a lie detector. Exiles are typically friendless, moneyless, jobless in a strange land; often they do not even speak the language. They become increasingly dependent on the agent. They know that, if they refuse to take his orders, he can cut off their income and expel them from their organizations.