Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

by Gjelten, Tom

  After a few months, the Kennedy administration reactivated its covert anti-Castro program, albeit this time intending only “to obstruct or slow down the pacification of the population and the consolidation and stabilization of the Castro Communist regime.” The new program would only support “autonomous Cuban exile groups and individuals.” There would be no more CIA managed operations with fully controlled agents. It was time to give the Cuban exiles relatively free rein to do what they wanted to do.

  Shortly after arriving in Miami, Pepín Bosch agreed to the CIA’s request that he join the Frente Revolucionario Democrático, later rechristened as the Consejo Revolucionario Cubano (Cuban Revolutionary Council), but he was never impressed by the directorate’s work, and he skipped a lot of meetings. In the first two years after he left Cuba, Bacardi business took almost all his time. He and his lawyers were battling in courts around the world to defend the family’s ownership of the “Bacardi” rum brand. He was overseeing the construction and operation of new production facilities in Brazil and Mexico and the relocation of the corporate headquarters to the Bahamas. He was helping family members and veteran employees resettle outside Cuba and finding jobs for those who needed income. The operation in Brazil occupied so much of Bosch’s attention, in fact, that he acquired Brazilian citizenship, a step he never bothered to take in the United States.

  With so many of the exile leaders quarreling among themselves, Bosch gained prestige by staying above the fray, becoming known in south Florida mainly as a benefactor of the Cuban exile cause and as the chairman of Bacardi. The company enjoyed a place of honor among exiled Cubans, not only because of its history but also because it survived Fidel Castro’s confiscation and emerged even stronger for the experience. In late 1961, when Fidel Castro was demanding an “indemnity” payment in exchange for the release of the 1,200 Bay of Pigs prisoners, Bosch offered to donate up to one hundred thousand dollars in Bacardi money to a private fund in order to purchase the prisoners’ freedom. “Bacardi cannot turn its back on the patriots who were taken prisoner at the Bay of Pigs for defending the Cuban cause,” he declared.

  By the end of 1962, Bosch was ready to take a more active and personal part in the anti-Castro struggle. The resolution of the missile crisis in October had brought an end to U.S. government-sponsored sabotage activities, but Bosch remained convinced that Castro could be overthrown only through the use of force. In his single most brazen and reckless act as an exile leader, Bosch secretly decided to finance and organize a military action of his own in Cuba. His thirty-six-year-old son, Carlos, learned about the plan only incidentally. At the time, Carlos was trying to start an air cargo service in Miami, having purchased on old DC-4 transport plane and hired pilots to haul freight to and from the Caribbean and South America. To his frustration, however, the U.S. government repeatedly denied him permission to initiate the operation. When he told his father about his problems with the aviation authorities, Pepín nodded knowingly.

  “Hmmm,” he said, “maybe it’s because of the plane I’m keeping in Costa Rica.” Carlos had no idea what his father was talking about, and he was flabbergasted when he found out: Bosch had a plan to bomb oil refineries in Cuba from the air. Such a mission, he reasoned, could be carried out with a minimum risk of civilian casualties. Power plants that depended on oil for fuel would have to be shut down, cutting off the flow of electricity across the island. Daily activities would come to a standstill, and the stage would be set for an uprising. Without informing anyone, including his CIA contacts, Bosch discreetly purchased a Douglas B-26 bomber, using an insurance company as his purchasing agent, and had it flown to Costa Rica, whose government at the time was accommodating of Cuban exile plotting against the Castro regime. The next step was to hire a pilot willing to fly the bombing mission. It should not have been difficult. B-26 aircraft, known as Invaders, had been extensively used during both World War II and the Korean War, and Cuban exile pilots had flown them on a series of bombing runs two days prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion.

  On March 1, 1963, an unidentified person (not Bosch) approached a Cuban exile pilot named Gaston Bernal and offered to pay him to carry out the refinery mission. He was not told who was putting up the money. Bernal was working with the CIA-organized Consejo Revolucionario Cubano at the time, and he immediately informed the Consejo military chief, who in turn relayed the information to the CIA. According to a CIA report, Bernal was told that the bombing mission should take place during the last two weeks of March, though the exact date and target were to be left to Bernal’s discretion. The mission was to be carried out with the help of officials in Costa Rica, who had promised to provide accommodation for the pilot, and with the Nicaraguan air force, which was to provide a crew that would install twelve rocket mounts on the aircraft and supports for six 260-pound bombs. When the mission was completed, Bernal was told, the anonymous sponsor would assure a safe return to his home base. Such assurances were apparently not enough to convince Bernal, however. The CIA report noted that Bernal rejected the offer, saying he considered the mission “suicidal.”

  The CIA quickly determined that Pepín Bosch was behind the refinery bombing plan. (It was no wonder that his son Carlos was blocked from starting an air freight business out of south Florida; U.S. authorities may have wanted to be sure it was not tied to his father’s bombing plans.) Agency officials, however, did not immediately intervene to halt Bosch’s operation from going forward. If carried out successfully, it would have been a good example of the “autonomous” exile activities the Kennedy administration had decided to allow, if not patronize. At a White House discussion of the new covert program, the participants had specifically concluded that “refineries and power plants seem to be particularly good targets.” In the end, however, Bosch’s bombing idea never materialized. Neither a volunteer pilot nor the necessary munitions could be found, and after Costa Rican officials began getting nervous about the mission, Bosch gave up his idea and surrendered his B-26 Invader to the local authorities.18

  The notion of a respected Cuban businessman privately purchasing an attack aircraft and organizing a bombing raid on an oil refinery in his native land would subsequently strike some observers as outrageous, but in the context of the broad opposition to Fidel Castro in 1963, Pepín Bosch’s activism was seen as responsible behavior. Many other patriotic and progressive Cuban exile leaders, including former presidents Carlos Prío and Manuel Urrutia and former members of Castro’s own government, were undertaking similar projects or at least supporting them. By 1963, “counterrevolutionary” activities were viewed approvingly within U.S. anti-Communist liberal and intellectual circles, where Bosch was personally well connected.

  Even as he plotted the bombing mission, Bosch was providing the bulk of the funding for the establishment of a “Citizens’ Committee for a Free Cuba” in Washington, D.C., an organization founded in April 1963 with the objective of initiating “a nationwide discussion on the problem of Cuba, the threat its Communist regime poses to the Americas, and the measures that must be taken to put an end to it.” The committee members included such leading public figures as the playwright, journalist, and diplomat Clare Boothe Luce, professors Sidney Hook and Hans Morgenthau, Admiral Arleigh Burke, lawyer (and Kennedy family friend) William vanden Heuvel, the physicist Edward Teller, and Jay Lovestone, a top official of the AFL-CIO labor federation. Within months of its organization, the group was advocating “aid to the Cuban freedom fighters” and lobbying—according to the notes of its secretary—on behalf of “the forces inside the [Kennedy] Administration who wish it to adopt an active liberationist policy” with respect to Cuba.

  With its high-profile membership, the “Free Cuba” committee soon caught the attention of members of the U.S. Congress. Some administration officials were not pleased, however, by what they saw as an effort to inflame what was already a sensitive internal government debate over Cuba policy. The committee’s weekly newsletter, compiled largely from exile accounts, often include
d unsubstantiated allegations about what was going on inside Cuba. The State Department’s Miami-based liaison with the exile community, John Crimmins, told a congressional committee he was “frankly disappointed” by the newsletter contents. “I have found that it repeats essentially what I would call the usual kind of report from exile sources,” Crimmins said. “There have been factual errors.”

  In his congressional testimony, Crimmins revealed that Pepín Bosch was the committee’s key backer, identifying him as “one of the principal figures in the [Cuban] exile community from the standpoint of financial substance and influence.” In the next few years, in fact, FBI agents and CIA officers saw Bosch’s name come up again and again in their exile activity reports. The Bacardi chairman was one of the few exiles to come out of Cuba with money in the bank, and he was willing to spend large sums on the anti-Castro cause. CIA officials warned the White House in April 1963 that the new policy of supporting “autonomous” exile operations inevitably meant that “acts will be performed which are not in conformity with current U.S. policy.” As a well-known freelancer, Pepín Bosch was one of those whose moves the CIA felt needed to be monitored. Ideologically, the Bacardi boss remained loyal to the progressive political vision for which the Bacardi family and firm had long been known in Cuba, but Bosch was now consumed by his determination to see Fidel Castro removed from power, and that obsession on occasion took him to the edge of illegal activity.

  In November 1963, the United States was deeply shaken by the assassination of John F. Kennedy. His killing shattered the spirit of optimism he had inspired and left the nation traumatized. Rumors of a Cuba connection abounded. Fidel Castro was said to have ordered Kennedy killed in retaliation for the plots the Kennedy administration had initiated against him. Another theory focused on Cuban exiles, outraged by Kennedy’s last-minute abandonment of the Bay of Pigs operation and his subsequent agreement after the missile crisis to halt all invasion planning. In any case, Americans were in no mood to hear about more shadowy plots. Pepín Bosch and other Cuban exile leaders found their conspiratorial activities coming under even closer scrutiny.

  In May 1964, one of the CIA’s Cuban informants alerted the Agency to an exile plan to pay the Mafia $150,000 to have Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro, and Che Guevara assassinated. Pepín Bosch was identified as a possible sponsor. The informant, who worked for Cuban shipping magnate (and Bosch acquaintance) Teofilo Babún, formerly of Santiago, reported that Babún had been approached by a fellow shipping executive named Byron Cameron, and that Cameron had hinted that he was in touch with people who could arrange the assassinations. Babún allegedly agreed to help raise money for the hits, and in April he sent one of his employees to the Cuban industrialist deemed most likely to contribute funds for the operation—Pepín Bosch. A second exile informant allegedly privy to the plotting reported that Bosch agreed to put up fifty thousand dollars on his own. The informant said Bosch “believes that a quick change for the better in the Cuban situation can be brought about only by the physical elimination of Fidel Castro and that his elimination is well worth $150,000.” The CIA report on the plot said Bosch “hoped he could get the balance of the money from the United States government or from other sources.”

  The prominent mention of Pepín Bosch in the alleged assassination plot was an attention grabber, and the subsequent report shot straight to the top of the CIA bureaucracy. A memorandum on the findings, signed by deputy CIA director Richard Helms, was sent in June to the White House, the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. White House aide Gordon Chase forwarded a copy of the memorandum to his boss, McGeorge Bundy, President Lyndon Johnson’s national security adviser, with a sensational subject line: “a plot to assassinate Castro which would involve U.S. elements of the Mafia and which would be financed by Pepín Bosch.” Within a week, the State Department told its Miami officer, John Crimmins, to put a stop to the plot, and Robert Kennedy ordered the FBI to investigate Bosch and anyone else involved in the affair. If the plot proceeded under Bosch’s sponsorship, he could possibly be exposed to conspiracy charges.

  In July, FBI agents went to see Bosch at the Bacardi offices in Miami, advising him that he was not required to make any statements, that anything he said could be held against him in court, and that he was entitled to consult an attorney before speaking with them. Bosch said he needed no such legal protections, and he volunteered what he knew of the assassination plot. Two Cuban exiles had come to see him, he said, with a story that the Mafia was willing to arrange the Castro brothers’ assassination. Bosch told the FBI agents that he would not have assisted in any murder or assassination plot “under any circumstances,” but he also said he told the two Cubans who visited him that he would “consider” their request for funds. He did so, Bosch explained, in order to buy him time to report the assassination plot to the CIA, which he said he promptly did.

  The Agency station chief in Miami, Ted Shackley, was by then a close associate of Pepín Bosch, having been one of those who encouraged Bosch to take part in the CIA-directed Consejo Revolucionario Cubano. For his part, Shackley confirmed that Bosch came to see him about the Castro assassination plan, though he did not quite recall Bosch being especially horrified by it. Indeed, Shackley remembered Bosch suggesting that the CIA help finance the proposed Mafia hit, as the original exile informants had also reported. No evidence was ever produced, however, to indicate that Bosch gave the Mafia offer any additional thought.

  Pepín Bosch had long been a maverick operator, but by 1964 he was reconsidering his old ways, and the alleged assassination scheme did not fit with his latest thinking about how Castro should be opposed. The failure of his plan to bomb Cuban oil refineries a year earlier had taught Bosch an important lesson: Individual ventures would not work. If Cuban exiles were to have any chance of overthrowing Castro, they would have to unite. The only operation with any prospect of success, Bosch concluded, would be one undertaken on behalf of the entire anti-Castro opposition.

  It would not be easy. The Consejo Revolucionario Cubano had effectively fallen apart after its leaders claimed the U.S. government had reneged on a promise to support a second invasion of Cuba. To replace it, Bosch proposed the designation of a civilian leadership, democratically chosen by the exiles themselves, which would then supervise all military operations deemed necessary for Cuba’s “liberation.” His idea was to convene an assembly of several dozen exile leaders who would then nominate five people to serve as representatives of the whole Cuban population outside Cuba. The exile community, identified through a census, would then vote in a certified postal referendum on whether to endorse or reject the proposed slate. If approved, the nominated exile representatives would be constituted as a directorate authorized to supervise military actions and deal with the U.S. administration and foreign governments on behalf of the entire Cuban exile population. Bosch would personally underwrite the referendum project with a fifty-thousand-dollar contribution.

  The Bacardi boss first presented his plan in November 1963 during a packed press conference in a banquet room at the Everglades Hotel in downtown Miami. Standing behind a table, flanked by his twenty-member “referendum committee,” the bald, bespectacled businessman could have been addressing a Rotary Club luncheon. Now sixty-five, his voice had grown even softer, though his gaze was still steady and penetrating, and his slightly imperious manner was as evident as ever. He spoke slowly and seriously, choosing his words carefully. “This new organism,” he whispered into the microphone, “will demonstrate our unbreakable will and our dream of reestablishing the freedoms that were snuffed out by the Red tyranny.” A reporter asked whether Bosch himself might serve as an exile representative. He smiled slightly and took out a cigarette. “I won’t,” he said, pausing to light the cigarette. “For one thing, I’m the one pushing the idea. For another, I’m getting too old to manage a hectic schedule.”

  Four months later, Bosch convened his assembly, consisting of sixty Cub
an men and a single woman, all chosen by Bosch’s referendum committee. After a nine-hour meeting at the new Bacardi headquarters on Biscayne Boulevard in downtown Miami, the assembly chose five men to be constituted as the Representación Cubana del Exilio (RECE), Cuban Representation in Exile, and act on behalf of the Cuban diaspora. The military chief would be thirty-one-year-old Erneido Oliva, a black Cuban and professional soldier who had been second in command during the Bay of Pigs invasion. The other nominated representatives included a former labor lawyer, a union leader, and an accountant. The fifth representative, selected only after another nominee dropped out, was twenty-four-year-old Jorge Mas Canosa, the handsome and energetic nephew of Pepín Bosch’s assistant Polo Miranda. Mas was just a Miami milkman at the time, but after his experience in the Bay of Pigs invasion, he had received eight months of U.S. Army training at Fort Benning in Georgia, and he was anxious to take part in some exile military activities. A year earlier, Bosch had asked Mas to help with some of the arrangements for the B-26 bombing mission out of Costa Rica.

  Bosch’s “referendum committee” had collected the names and addresses of about seventy-five thousand Cuban exiles across the world, and all were sent ballots. After two months, about forty-two thousand had been returned. The results resembled those of Fidel Castro’s elections: 40,905 ballots were marked in favor of the proposed exile representatives, with just 979 against. Critics of the process were quick to speak up. Some members of the defunct Consejo Revolucionario Cubano called it a “pseudo-referendum,” because the exile voters were given no choice other than “to approve or reject the authority of Sr. Bosch.” The right-wing exile newspaper Patria, identified with pro-Batista elements, ridiculed the referendum outcome and raised the sensitive issue of Bosch’s past fund-raising work on behalf of Fidel Castro. “Pepín Bosch’s referendum showed that with his money, or with that of the Bacardi firm, he could do just as he felt like doing and make a fool of the exiles,” Patria commented. “Now we have one more exile organization of which Pepín Bosch will be the treasurer, just like he was the 26th of July treasurer.” The RECE directors nevertheless moved swiftly to demonstrate their seriousness, holding press conferences in Miami and Washington, D.C., and emphasizing their willingness to work on behalf of all exiles, no matter their politics. The RECE leaders appealed to the Organization of American States (OAS) for military aid and said they would organize commando raids inside Cuba as soon as they were able to finance them.