Cuban-US Relations in the Reagan Years
Several Reagan officials had advocated harsh measures against Cuba long before they assumed office. In 1981, Cuba quickly became the focal point of their anti-communist crusade, as they pursued a “get tough” policy. Secretary of State Alexander Haig set the tone in February 1981, declaring that the United States must “deal with the immediate source of the problem [in El Salvador]—and that is Cuba.”11 Arguing that Cuba had been fomenting strife throughout Central America and was the source and principal support of civil unrest and revolution in Nicaragua and El Salvador, he reportedly recommended that the United States turn “that fucking island into a parking lot.” Senior Reagan officials were appalled by the suggestion and rejected it out of hand.12
Still, the 1983 US invasion of Grenada was the kind of action Cuban officials could not dismiss lightly. Under the pretext of saving US medical students on the island, the United States sent more than twenty thousand marines to gain control of this small country of 100,000 people. The invasion was triggered by dissension within the ruling party that led to the assassination of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. President Reagan had charged earlier that Grenada was a threat to US security because eight hundred Cuban construction workers were building an airport on the island. Using top secret surveillance photos that mimicked those taken in 1962 of Soviet missiles in Cuba, the president claimed that the airport was intended as a layover port for Soviet bombers. In fact, the airport construction itself was a tourist attraction not hidden from public view and the Cubans used architectural plans created by USAID for the previous government. Grenada lacked an airport at which standard Boeing 737 planes could land, which hobbled its potential for tourists. Otherwise, its only source of income was sugar and nutmeg, a “strategic” spice used in making pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving celebrations.
In many ways, the Reagan administration’s policy was a carryover from previous administrations. Its goal was to isolate Cuba from the international community and undermine the Cuban government’s legitimacy domestically. In practice, the policy involved: threats to confiscate imported goods that contained Cuban nickel; pressure on European allies not to renegotiate Cuba’s outstanding loans; and reinstatement of the ban on US citizens traveling to Cuba that President Carter had chosen not to invoke.13 In addition, the US Navy demonstrated a show of force in the Caribbean reminiscent of military exercises just prior to the 1962 missile crisis. Called “Ocean Venture 82,” the three-week set of maneuvers involved forty-five thousand troops, 350 airplanes, and sixty ships, and included an exercise to evacuate noncombatants from the Guantánamo Naval Base. Cuba responded by placing the country on full military alert.
Prior to 1981, Cuban-Americans had not relied much on traditional lobbying to achieve their aims. President-elect Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy adviser, Richard Allen, sought to fill this vacuum with a group to which the administration could claim it was responding as it shaped a hardline policy against Cuba. Allen sent a team to Miami immediately after the 1980 election to meet with Jorge Mas Canosa and other former Bay of Pigs veterans to discuss creating the new lobby. Thus was born the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF).14
It was no surprise, then, that Mas Canosa found a ready welcome at the White House in 1981, as Allen had become President Reagan’s first national security adviser. The Reagan administration’s encouragement of the CANF was more than mere lip service. It funneled construction contracts, federal grants, and program funding to CANF board members who plowed money back into the organization, as well as congressional campaigns. At Allen’s urging, CANF staff members reportedly received coaching from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, one of the most influential lobbying organizations in Washington.15
When Mas Canosa called for a radio propaganda station aimed at Cuba, he was pushing on an open door. The idea had been proposed in a 1980 advocacy paper by the archconservative Committee on Santa Fe. One of its authors was Roger Fontaine, the first Latin America director of Reagan’s National Security Council.16 The station was supposed to function in the way Radio Swan did twenty years earlier, when the CIA created the propaganda outlet as a way to support the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. But Congress forced the administration to place the operation, named Radio Martí, under the Voice of America’s nominal supervision.
Still, Radio Martí was headquartered in Miami and Mas Canosa served as its first advisory board chair. The station began broadcasting its twenty-four-hour mix of music, soap operas, slanted news, and anti-communist propaganda in 1985. Though Cuba tried to jam the station’s short- and medium-wave broadcasts, its soap operas were popular on the island (though in 1994 the station changed its format to all “news”). Cuba has been more successful in blocking the signal from TV Martí, which was launched five years later. The US General Accountability Office reported in 2009 that less than 2 percent of the Cuban population ever listened to Radio Martí and less than 1 percent to TV Martí.17
Cuba attempted to find ways to engage the Reagan administration positively. One time it even prevented an assassination attempt against Reagan that Cuban intelligence agents uncovered. But the responses from the United States were repeatedly negative. Wayne Smith, who served as chief of the US Interests Section in Havana from 1979 to 1982 and courageously resigned in protest, observed that “the administration cared not a whit about the facts or the objective evidence.” Its policies in Central America and toward Cuba, he said, were based on “ideological preconceptions and would not be budged from that policy no matter what the Cubans and Nicaraguans might do.”18 Though Smith was generally recognized as perhaps the most knowledgeable Cuba expert in the government, the Reagan administration did not even inform him about a planned meeting between Haig and Cuban vice president Carlos Rafael Rodríguez in November 1981.
A Dialogue of the Hearing Impaired
The Haig-Rodríguez meeting was the first of four times Cuba and the United States engaged in negotiations during the two Reagan administrations. Arranged by Mexican president José López Portillo, the first encounter was more like a dialogue of the hearing impaired than a negotiation. After issuing barely veiled threats of possible US actions against Cuba during the meeting, Haig asserted that the United States was most concerned that Cuba was acting as a stalking horse for the Soviet Union to create unrest in Central America and harm US “vital interests” by sending troops to Nicaragua and El Salvador. Rodríguez responded at length. He denied that there were any Cuban soldiers in Central America and affirmed that while Cuba’s foreign policy at times may have coincided with Soviet policy, Cuba was a sovereign country that acted independently on the global stage.19
Analyst Peter Kornbluh notes that the two men came away from the meeting with contradictory assessments. Haig, he wrote, “appears to have interpreted the meeting as evidence that US pressure on Castro was working.” Rodríguez viewed Haig as more level-headed than he had believed before, and “reasonably intelligent.” He was impressed that “Haig was willing to send [Lt. Gen. Vernon] Walters . . . as an envoy to continue the talks.”20
Walters had served as deputy director of the CIA in the Nixon administration and became US ambassador to the UN in 1985. A close confidant of President Reagan, he was a “roving ambassador” in March 1982 when he went to Cuba. But Walters arrived “with a preconceived conviction that Castro’s ideological commitment to communism foreclosed any prospect of compromise. . . . Even Cuba’s suspension of aid to the Sandinistas [Nicaragua’s governing party] and the Salvadoran guerrillas was discounted as ephemeral.”21 Thus, the second instance of negotiations came to naught.
As we discussed in the previous chapter, the third engagement came in 1984 over migration. The United States agreed to accept up to twenty thousand Cuban émigrés annually. Cuba agreed to accept the return of some 2,700 exiles whom US authorities deemed excludable. But the success of these talks did little to mitigate the Reagan administration’s antagonism
toward Cuba or Cuba’s fear of a US attack.
The focus of Reagan’s animus toward Cuba was Central America. In 1982, the United States included Cuba on its list of state sponsors of terrorism, largely because of Cuba’s relationship “with the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, and with the on-going guerrilla movement led by the FMLN in El Salvador.”22
State Department Propaganda Report on Central America
The Soviet Union sees in the region [Caribbean basin] an excellent and low-cost opportunity to preoccupy the United States—the “main adversary” of Soviet strategy—thus gaining greater global freedom of action for the USSR. . . . The Soviet Union and Cuba have worked effectively toward the objective of establishing additional Marxist-Leninist regimes in Central America and the Caribbean. Although Castro has become more calculating in his export of violence and exploitation of poverty, his aims remain as they were in the 1960s. . . . For its part, the Soviet Union has intensified its efforts to create chaos or conflict near the United States to divert US attention and resources from Soviet challenges in other critical areas of the world.*
* * *
* US Departments of State and Defense, “The Soviet-Cuban Connection in Central America and the Caribbean (Washington, DC: March 1985), 2, 10.
Repeatedly, the president charged the civil wars in the region were due to a “Soviet-Cuban connection” that manipulated the populace’s anger over their poverty. A 1984 presidential commission on Central America—commonly known as the Kissinger Commission after its chair, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger—even devoted a section of its report to the “Cuban-Soviet Connection.”23 In 1985, the State and Defense Departments issued a propaganda pamphlet entitled, “The Soviet-Cuban Connection in Central America and the Caribbean.” It was produced by the Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD), an agency with a benign-sounding name housed in the State Department’s Latin America bureau. Later, OPD was caught up in the Iran-contra scandal because of its illegal diversion of US government funds to election campaigns against members of Congress who opposed the US-backed contra war.24
By 1987, US-Cuban relations were at their lowest ebb since the 1962 missile crisis. In March, the United States forcefully pursued passage of a resolution in the UN Human Rights Commission accusing Cuba of persecuting political dissenters. (It failed when Latin American members of the commission supported Cuba.) In July 1987, Cuba countered with a television documentary that detailed espionage activities by personnel in the US Interests Section.25
Yet in January 1988, representatives of the two countries met for the first time to discuss the conflicts in Angola and Namibia. Until then, the United States had refused to attend any meeting about Angola with Cubans present. One factor that moved the United States was the victory of Cuban military forces at Cuito Cuanavale, Angola.
Cuito Cuanavale is a small town in southeastern Angola. The departure point for a failed July 1987 attack by Angola against South African forces, it was the location at which South Africa hoped to achieve “the total destruction of the enemy forces north of the Lomba [River],” in effect securing its control over Namibia.26 The South African Defense Force (SADF) assembled the largest set of ground and air forces for a single operation since World War II. It combined with units from UNITA, one of the two guerrilla groups fighting against the Angolan government. Angola’s military was supported by 1,500 Cuban troops and some Soviet advisers, as well as Cuban engineers and construction workers who built airstrips south of the conflict zone from which MIG-23s could threaten important dams. Fighting lasted four months and ended on March 23, 1988.
The four-party (Angola, South Africa, Cuba, and the United States) negotiating sessions occupied the better part of a year and led to a historic accord: Cuba agreed to withdraw troops from Angola and South Africa agreed to withdraw from Namibia and allow free elections there. Namibia gained its independence in 1990, and all South Africans were able to vote in April 1994 elections held under the rules of a new non-apartheid constitution.
Cuba’s cooperation and initiatives turned out to be essential for success. The chief US negotiator later remarked, “We might still be at the table today were it not for the Cuban factor.”27 Cuban officials hoped their positive contributions would moderate US policy in the new administration of George H. W. Bush. But from the new president’s perspective, Cuba had ceased to be a country of significant interest. The Cold War was winding down and the United States had achieved its particular objectives vis-à-vis Cuba when Cuban troops withdrew from southern Africa, Nicaraguan 1990 elections removed Cuba’s Sandinista allies from power, and negotiations ended the civil war in El Salvador. So Bush turned Cuba policy over to Congress, where CANF-backed anti-Castro members took charge, and Cuba policy moved from the foreign to the domestic realm.
Cuban-Soviet Relations
Good relations between the Soviet Union and Cuba progressively deteriorated in the 1980s. The falling out began with a trip to Moscow by Raúl Castro in September 1981. In reaction to “the Reagan Administration’s aggressiveness toward Cuba,” he told an interviewer in 1993, he was seeking Soviet reassurance of military support in the event of a US attack.28
The Soviet response embittered and chastened Cuba’s leadership. Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet premier, reportedly told the Cuban vice president, “In case of US aggression against Cuba, we can’t fight in Cuba. . . . We’d only get a thrashing.” The message was clear. Cuba was utterly alone—“alone, as we had always waged our wars of independence,” Raúl remarked in the interview. His attitude echoed Fidel Castro’s 1968 comment to the first full meeting of the PCC’s Central Committee, when he described his perception of Soviet abandonment at the end of the missile crisis. “We realized,” he explained, “how alone we would be in the event of a war.”29
Cuban leaders called the Soviet position “the Pandora case,” and sought to keep knowledge of it as secret as possible. They feared that if the United States learned about Soviet unwillingness to protect Cuba, the Reagan administration would be emboldened to commit aggression. In order “to disinform the enemy,” Raúl Castro said, Cuba’s public posture toward the Soviet Union remained cordial and even improved. At the same time, Cuba’s leaders requested more modern military equipment from the Soviet Union, built tunnels beneath Havana where people could go in case of an American attack, and expanded its recently created Territorial Troop Militias (MTT).
The MTT was intended to provide Cuba with the capability of countering a US invasion with protracted warfare by citizen-guerrillas, which Cuba calls a “War of All the People.” Fidel described the change to editors of the Washington Post in 1985. “Every citizen in this country knows what to do” if there were an invasion, he said. “It would be very costly for us. . . . But it would be very costly for the aggressors.”30 In 1981, half a million Cubans were enrolled in the MTT. Once the rapid build-up began, its size grew quickly. By 1984, it had 1.2 million members, more than one-tenth of the country’s population.31
Cuba and the Soviet Union also disagreed over support for El Salvador’s insurgent organization, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), and Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Despite Reagan administration charges that Cuba and the Soviet Union were supplying weapons to the Salvadoran guerrillas, the communists within the FMLN coalition actually lost some influence when Moscow turned down their appeal for assistance. The Soviet Union also tried to keep its distance from Nicaragua. Fidel did not attend the 1985 funeral of Soviet president Konstantin Chernenko as a way of showing his displeasure with the Soviet Union’s low level of aid to Nicaragua.32
Cuban Internationalism in Central America and Africa
Cuba continued to support the Sandinista government in the 1980s by sending some of its own materiel, especially once the contra war heated up in 1982. It also deployed military advisers to Nicaragua. Yet Castro advised Nicaragua’s leaders to avoid some of the errors he believ
ed the Cuban Revolution had made in its early years, especially antagonizing the United States needlessly. In 1984, he urged them to work with other countries in the region trying to end the US-sponsored internal conflict by supporting the Contadora proposals.33
Political scientist Jorge Domínguez wrote in 1978 that “Cuba is a small country, but it has a big country’s foreign policy.”34 In one sense, the assessment accurately captured a distinguishing feature of Cuba’s international behavior. Unlike great powers, small countries tend to focus narrowly, on their immediate neighborhoods and not on the globe. Great powers with large military forces can act with a greater sense of freedom than small countries, because they perceive that only another great power can truly threaten them. Despite its size, Cuba focused globally.
Cuban leaders shared with Fidel Castro a vision that their country should lead a revolution on behalf of poor people everywhere. Party-controlled newspapers such as Granma and state-run radio and television stations covered world events extensively. Generally, these outlets are no more informative than in-house corporate public relations newsletters. But their depth of information about international topics—which is not commonly found in most US media—has enabled ordinary Cubans to identify with the struggles of people in other third world countries, as well as to understand global affairs better than most Americans.
Even though Domínguez reformulated his summary description in 1985, many observers of Cuba’s foreign policy—especially critics—stayed with the early version. It includes a subtle denigration of Cuba’s behavior as being inappropriate for the country’s size—as if Cuba were a child trying to wear an adult’s shoes. Yet the old formulation overlooks a key difference between Cuba’s international orientation and those of most great powers. Cuba has not sought to dominate and control other countries, nor has it exploited the resources of another country for Cuba’s exclusive benefit. There is an altruistic quality to Cuba’s internationalism, even as it may have served Cuba’s interests.
Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence Page 29