Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence
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Opening to the United States
Even though President Richard Nixon signed a strategic arms control treaty with the Soviet Union and opened talks with Communist China, he resolutely rejected proposals to reduce tension with Cuba at the start of his first term. But necessity intervened to overcome dogmatism as US officials sought to end a wave of airline hijackings, many of which landed in Cuba.
Cuba also had an interest in discouraging air piracy. In September 1969, the government announced that it would prosecute or extradite hijackers, but that extradition would occur only to countries with which it had an anti-hijacking agreement. Cuba’s policy led to negotiations with the United States in November 1972, facilitated by Swiss diplomats in Havana. In February 1973, the two governments signed a reciprocal “memorandum of understanding” against hijacking that included boats.2 Secretary of State William P. Rogers, though, emphasized that the accord did not “foreshadow a change of policies” toward Cuba overall.3
Rogers’s statement did not deter some House members and senators from pursuing a policy change. The moderate Republican Wednesday Group in the House had just issued a report that called for an end to the US embargo against Cuba.4 (The report’s author was Bill Richardson, a young staffer who went on to become a Democratic representative from New Mexico, governor of New Mexico, US ambassador to the UN, and secretary of energy.) In the Senate, the chair of a Foreign Relations subcommittee—Senator Gale McGee (D-WY), an outspoken anti-communist and hawk on Vietnam—began a set of hearings on US-Cuba relations in March 1973 with a clear warning to the executive branch: “Judging from statements that any number of my colleagues have been making in the Congressional Record lately,” he said, “perhaps the time is ripe, maybe a little late, for a reexamination of what our Cuba policy both is and perhaps should be.”5 Indeed, in September 1973, when Henry Kissinger became secretary of state and was forced to take Congress into consideration in ways he had not while he was national security adviser, he worried that the legislature might preempt the executive in trying to change US policy.6
In June 1974, as President Nixon was beginning to lose his grip on power due to the Watergate investigation, Kissinger appointed William D. Rogers as assistant secretary of state for Latin America. A prominent lawyer and Democrat, Rogers was a member of the Commission on United States-Latin American Relations (commonly known as the Linowitz Commission, after its chair, former US ambassador to the OAS Sol M. Linowitz). The commission’s 1974 report urged “that the United States act now to end the trade embargo” in order to achieve “a normal relationship with Cuba.”7 In July 1974, Kissinger initiated secret talks with Cuba, and six months later sent two emissaries (Lawrence Eagleburger and Frank Mankiewicz) to meetings with two Cuban representatives (Ramón Sánchez-Parodi and Néstor García) in a coffee shop at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. The talks were a closely held secret; even President Gerald Ford was given only limited details.8
Meanwhile, Congress continued to move on Cuba policy. In September 1974, two senior senators—Republican Jacob Javits of New York and Democrat Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island—met with Fidel Castro in Havana. The first elected US officials to go to Cuba since 1960, the two senators reported that the Cuban leader appeared open to negotiations and concluded that “the time is ripe for beginning the process of normalization.”9 In 1975, Republican Representative Charles Whalen (OH) traveled to Cuba, as did Democratic Senators George McGovern and James Abourezk (SD). At the same time, a House subcommittee on trade held televised hearings on ending the embargo, as a way to foster a more favorable public attitude toward a new policy.10
As a signal of its intention to move the process forward, the United States supported an OAS resolution in the summer of 1975, declaring that all countries in the hemisphere had the right to conduct relations with Cuba in any “form that each State deems desirable.”11 The measure was tantamount to ending the 1964 hemisphere-wide embargo. President Ford then significantly relaxed the US embargo so that subsidiaries of US corporations in third countries could trade with Cuba. The measure had two goals: to place the United States in compliance with the OAS resolution and to satisfy US companies that wanted to sell to Cuba via their foreign subsidiaries. In particular, Ford and Chrysler wanted to sell their Argentine-made cars to Cuba and were pressuring the administration for authorization.
But at almost the very moment that the United States eased the embargo, Cuba introduced a resolution in the UN Committee on Colonialism calling for the independence of Puerto Rico, even though US officials had warned Cuban emissaries with whom they had been meeting that the Cuban resolution could dismantle the nascent rapprochement.12 Three months later, in November 1975, Cuba sent troops to Angola to support the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) government there. Kissinger saw the Cuban move as a direct assault on US-Soviet détente and a slap in the face after his moves to end the embargo. In December 1975, Ford announced that Cuba’s Angola operation “destroys any opportunity for improvement of relations with the United States.”13
Kissinger’s Two Views about Cuba in Angola
Former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger was perplexed. Why would Castro send troops to Angola in November 1975, he asked, when he was making progress on normalizing relations with the United States? Three months earlier, he noted, the United States had essentially lifted the embargo by allowing US subsidiaries in third countries to trade with Cuba.
Kissinger was talking to a small group of scholars—including Philip Brenner—at the palatial Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills, New York, in 1993.* The academics offered several possible explanations for Castro’s behavior, and one in particular struck Kissinger as the most likely. Castro must have assessed, Kissinger agreed, that he could get no more concessions from the Ford administration than those he had obtained already. Further, Castro may have assumed that the war in Angola would be over by the beginning of 1977, and that he could resume the dialogue with a new presidential administration.
Yet in his 1999 memoir, Kissinger argued that Castro sent troops to Angola “because he considered a normal relationship with the United States incompatible with his self-appointed role as leader of the revolutionary struggle.” He added that “Castro needed the United States as an enemy to justify his totalitarian grip on the country and to maintain military support from the Soviet Union.”†
* * *
* A report of the meeting is provided in Peter Kornbluh and James G. Blight, “Dialogue with Castro: A Hidden History,” New York Review of Books, October 6, 1994.
† Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 785, 786.
Despite the hostile US public posture toward Cuba, secret talks did continue early in 1976.14 But these were soon overwhelmed, in an election year, by right-wing pressure on President Ford to harden his stance against Cuba. Then, in October 1976, terrorists linked to the United States blew up Cubana Airlines flight 455 off the coast of Barbados.15 The explosion killed all 73 people aboard the Cuban civilian airliner, including the two dozen members of Cuba’s Olympic fencing team. Cubans reacted with an outpouring of grief at a mass funeral, at which Castro announced he was suspending the 1973 hijacking accord and charged that the CIA was ultimately responsible for the terrorist bombing.
In fact, the US intelligence community had learned of a possible terrorist attack against a Cuban airliner and did not notify Cuban officials. Luis Posada Carriles, one of the bomb plotters, worked for the US Central Intelligence Agency in the 1960s as a demolitions trainer, and remained in contact with operatives in Latin America. A Venezuelan prosecutor had indicted Posada Carriles for planning the Cubana bombing, but he “escaped” in 1985 from prison (led out the front door by the warden) and turned up in El Salvador. There he served as chief of the contra supply operation, transporting weapons for the US covert war against Nicaragua.16
Cuba in Africa
Figure 15.1. Cuban troops and weapons supported the MPLA in 1975. Photo by Arnaldo Santos, courtesy of Granma.
Cuba had begun its involvement in Africa more than a decade earlier, when it provided medical assistance to Algerian rebels in January 1962, as historian Piero Gleijeses details in the first of his masterful two-volume study of Cuba’s Africa policy, Conflicting Missions. Cuba’s commitment to African anti-colonial struggles then continued in 1964 and 1965, when it sent troops to Zaire and began supporting independence fighters against the Portuguese in Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Angola.20
It was no surprise, then, that the MPLA sought Cuba’s help in the civil war that broke out in Angola after a new Portuguese government announced in 1974 that it would be granting independence to its African colonies. Two other groups challenged the MPLA’s claim to rule the country. The National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) was supported largely by the United States, and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) received support from the United States, the People’s Republic of China, and later from South Africa. The MPLA’s call to Cuba became urgent in mid-1975, when South African troops entered Angola essentially to help UNITA.
US policymakers and black African leaders viewed the battle for Angola in a strikingly similar way. They understood that the outcome could destabilize the South African apartheid regime. The South African government feared that an MPLA-ruled Angola would likely become a safe haven for fighters of the South West African Peoples Organization (SWAPO), who were struggling for the independence of Namibia, which was then called Southwest Africa. South Africa had been defying a UN demand to give up control over Namibia, believing that once independent, it would become a safe haven for African National Congress (ANC) insurgents who sought to overthrow South Africa’s white minority-ruled government. In effect, there was a shared view that the result of the Angolan conflict could have a domino effect, leading to the end of the apartheid regime.
Though many US officials may have preferred a more virtuous ally than South Africa, the regime had the singular “virtue” of being decidedly anti-Soviet. On the other hand, some of the ANC and SWAPO leaders seemed to be sympathetic toward the Soviet Union. From the US perspective, Cuba had entered a major battle on the “wrong” side in a region that the United States perceived was a vital location in its Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union.
By mid-1976, there were more than 30,000 Cuban troops in Angola. Meanwhile, Castro also had been cultivating positive working relationships with the leaders of other newly independent African states, such as Julius Nyerere, president of Tanzania, and Ahmed Sékou Touré of the Republic of Guinea. Cuban support for anti-colonial movements and newly independent governments raised its international standing significantly. In particular, its armed support against South Africa led the NAM to select Cuba as the site for its 1979 summit.
Cuban troops had enabled the MPLA to secure control of much of the country, and in early 1977, Havana announced it would be withdrawing its forces from the region. This provided newly inaugurated President Jimmy Carter with the opportunity to follow his inclinations and endorse the recommendations of the Linowitz Commission regarding Cuba.21 On March 15, 1977, Carter signed Presidential Directive/NSC-6, which stipulated that the United States “should attempt to achieve normalization of our relations with Cuba.”22 This followed on the heels of a State Department announcement that the president would not renew the ban on travel to Cuba by US citizens.
Notably, Carter’s principal Latin America specialist on the NSC staff, Robert Pastor, had been executive director of the Linowitz Commission, and he may have been influential in shaping Carter’s initial views about Cuba. For example, in a memo to National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, Pastor urged “that we try to use a different term to refer to the Cubans other than ‘Soviet puppet.’” He argued that “puppet” suggests that the Soviet Union was controlling what Cuba did, which, he explained, “is not the case.”23 Dismissing the threat Cuba posed to US interests in southern Africa, another prominent Carter adviser, UN ambassador-designate Andrew Young, asserted that Cuban troops brought “a certain stability and order.”24
These decisions altered the rationale for the US embargo, which had been premised on the alleged threat that Cuba posed to the United States. Instead, the sanctions were justified as a bargaining chip in an attempt to improve human rights in Cuba, to discourage Cuba’s foreign intervention, and to gain compensation for expropriated property.
For his part, Fidel sent positive signals about engaging diplomatically with the Carter administration. In January 1977, Cuba proposed negotiations with the United States over fishing boundaries. On February 8, in an interview broadcast on CBS, the Cuban leader said “he believes President Carter is a man with a ‘sense of morals’ who may bring an end to 16 years of hostility between the United States and Cuba.”25
Carter also approved negotiations with Cuba over maritime boundaries and fishing rights and an agreement was finalized in April 1977. In September, the two countries expanded the opportunities for diplomatic engagement by reopening their old embassy buildings as “interests sections” and staffing the offices with Cuban and US diplomats, respectively. (When two countries do not have diplomatic relations, a third country typically handles the interests of the other two in its own embassy. Such interests, for example, might be helping a traveler to recover a lost passport. From 1961 to 1977, Czechoslovakia had an office for Cuban interests in Washington, and Switzerland had one for US interests in Havana.)
However, Brzezinski did not think US-Cuban relations should be isolated from the US-Soviet rivalry, and he relentlessly urged the president to interpret Cuban behavior in that context. Carter later acknowledged the influence Brzezinski had on his thinking. “I was an eager student,” he wrote, “and took full advantage of what Brzezinski had to offer. As a college professor and author, he was able to express complicated ideas simply.”26
The national security adviser also used the media to press his point of view. For example, State Department officials were surprised in November 1977 to find the New York Times featuring a major front-page story that suggested Cuban troops had been deployed throughout Africa as a stalking horse for Soviet advancement on the continent.27 Insiders immediately guessed, correctly, that the leak of this top-secret analysis came from Brzezinski. And a close look at the map revealed that in several instances the Cuban deployment was merely a handful of security advisers, technicians, or medical personnel.
As Brzezinski and the State Department waged their internal struggle to shape Carter’s worldview, Cuba’s decision to send troops to Ethiopia tilted the balance in the national security adviser’s favor. The United States had supported the Ethiopian government under the long rule of Emperor Haile Selassie, who was deposed in a September 1974 coup. When General Mengistu Haile Mariam, the leader of the military junta that took over, consolidated his power in 1977, he declared Ethiopia to be a socialist state and asked the United States to leave. At the time, Ethiopia was engaged in two wars, one with neighboring Somalia over disputed territory in the Ogaden Desert, and the other with Eritrean secessionists trying to separate their province from Ethiopia. Cuba had provided some support for the Eritreans when they were fighting against Selassie
and the Soviet Union had been backing Somalia.
In response to Mengistu’s moves, the Soviet Union shifted its support from Somalia to Ethiopia and asked Cuba to divert 20,000 troops from Angola to Ethiopia. Castro initially attempted to mediate a ceasefire between the two countries. But when that effort failed, he complied with the Soviet request.
The Ethiopia case seems quite different from Angola, and scholars have not yet been able to explain adequately Cuba’s motives for sending troops to the Horn of Africa. Mengistu already had become a brutal, corrupt dictator who was doing little to improve the lives of Ethiopians and was not widely respected in Africa. The conflict with Somalia did not threaten the regime’s viability and focused on a section of desert land that held no mineral wealth. While Cuba refused to support Ethiopian military actions against Eritrean separatists, they in effect provided indirect support by freeing up several Ethiopian divisions. Cuba’s decision, thus, seems based on a response to Soviet pressure, because the action did not clearly serve Cuban interests and was inconsistent with Cuba’s general practice.
In his memoir, Brzezinski expressed no doubt that the Soviet Union was using Cuba as a “military proxy” in Ethiopia.28 As the president adopted Brzezinski’s worldview, he repeatedly painted himself into rhetorical corners. He responded to each new Cuban “challenge” with a tough stance, even when the reality turned out to contradict the allegations.29 Wayne Smith, who was in charge of the State Department’s Cuba desk at the time, recalled Cuba made sincere efforts to be cooperative in 1978 and 1979. But the White House rebuffed those efforts. When Smith tried to provide the president with a “balanced assessment” of Cuba’s role in Africa, noting that Cuba had “contributed to peaceful solutions and had been helpful to us,” a National Security Council aide informed him that the NSC was interested only in emphasizing how “the Soviets and the Cubans are the aggressors.”30