Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

by Gjelten, Tom

  With his bankrolling of RECE on top of his other activities, Pepín Bosch had become as closely identified with the Cuban counterrevolution as any single exile leader, and he had done so while simultaneously running his rum company. “What extra time there is, I help Cuba,” he told Miami Herald reporter Don Bohning in August 1964. “I am one of the few Cubans who has a prosperous enterprise. It is my feeling that we have an obligation to our country. When a man’s country is at war, everyone is obligated to do what he can. If I were a younger man and not a cripple, I would take a more active part.” The leg injury he had suffered in his 1946 boating accident was causing Bosch ever more pain and slowing his gait considerably. Bohning was impressed by Bosch’s humble manner, and in his account of the interview he noted that Bosch appeared to be “neither a millionaire nor a revolutionary but perhaps a retired gentleman likely to be found in Bayfront Park feeding the pigeons.”

  As a directorate that was to act on behalf of the entire Cuban exile community, RECE proved to be a bust. It did serve, however, as a launching pad for two of the most important and controversial figures to emerge from the Cuban exile world, Jorge Mas Canosa and Luis Posada Carriles. One went on to become the most powerful single player in the Cuban-American community, with contacts and clout that were the envy of every lobbyist in Washington. The other became notorious as a violent anti-Castro saboteur, regarded by the United States and other governments as a criminal terrorist and by Fidel Castro himself as a mortal enemy.

  The RECE story was supposed to unfold differently. In August 1964, the RECE directors boldly announced they were organizing a “Cuban Liberation Force” that was to return to the island and fight to free Cuba from Fidel Castro’s rule, as soon as the funding and logistical support could be arranged. Two of the five RECE directors—the military chief, Erneido Oliva, and the “foreign relations” chief, Ernesto Freyre (the former Havana labor lawyer)—left shortly thereafter on a tour of Latin American countries in search of military aid and a place to organize RECE combat operations. They headed first to Brazil, hoping that Pepín Bosch’s contacts with the new military government there might prove useful, but they came away with little to show for their efforts beyond the Brazilian generals’ sympathy and moral support. In Panama they asked President Marco Robles if volunteer RECE pilots could use local airstrips for training purposes. Robles said he would have to “think it over.” In Nicaragua the Cuban exiles met with former president Luis Somoza but were unable to see his brother Anastasio, the strongman general best positioned to make things happen. In Costa Rica, according to a CIA report, Oliva and Freyre saw no one in a position of authority and “were refused any cooperation of the Costa Rican government.” The two men returned to Miami without a single commitment.

  Pepín Bosch, who had agreed to lead a RECE fund-raising drive within the Cuban exile community, fared no better. Discouraged by the poor response to his appeal, he began cutting back on his own financial support for RECE activities. Bosch continued to allow his aide Polo Miranda to serve as the RECE office manager while drawing a Bacardi company paycheck, but he was unwilling to bankroll the entire RECE organization to the extent he had during the period of its formation. Frustrated by the difficulties they were encountering, RECE directors Oliva and Freyre went to Washington to seek U.S. government support. For President Lyndon Johnson and his administration, the top U.S. foreign policy concern was the situation in Vietnam, not the Castro threat in Cuba. Oliva and Freyre secured only a one-time contribution of twenty-one thousand dollars from the CIA, with a commitment from the Agency to secretly provide eight hundred dollars a month to keep the RECE office open.19 The CIA funds fell far short, however, of what RECE would need to organize a new exile army or sustain guerrilla operations inside Cuba. In March 1965, the directors announced they could not carry out “the projected military effort” and offered to refund all exile contributions.

  RECE did, however, play an important function as the foundation for the remarkable political career of its youngest director, Jorge Mas Canosa, the former student activist and Bay of Pigs volunteer who worked during the day as a milkman. Mas Canosa owed his RECE position largely to his uncle, Polo Miranda, who managed the organization for Pepín Bosch, but he quickly emerged as a fiery RECE spokesman on his own, showing up at public rallies to denounce Fidel Castro and appearing regularly as a commentator on Spanish-language radio stations. With his tinted horn-rimmed glasses, open-collared shirts, and full head of wavy black hair, the brash young Mas was a refreshing contrast to the older Cuban men in business suits and pencil-thin mustaches who dominated the south Florida exile elite at the time.

  Between his U.S. Army training and Bay of Pigs experience, Mas had just enough military preparation to make him yearn for more action. His organization might not have been able to raise the funds for a full-scale invasion of Cuba, but Mas would settle for an occasional commando operation or act of sabotage. In May 1965, two months after RECE announced it was abandoning the “military effort,” Mas arranged for an RECE operative to throw two homemade bombs into the Mexican-Russian Cultural Relations Institute, a pro-Soviet organization in Mexico City. According to a subsequent FBI report, Mas boasted that his RECE agent had managed to travel to Mexico and back to Miami without being bothered by U.S. authorities, even though his actions were “common knowledge” in the exile community. Anxious to plan more missions, Mas sought assistance from Luis Posada Carriles, a fellow Bay of Pigs veteran whom he had met when they were both at Fort Benning in Georgia. Posada had trained as a demolitions expert, and Mas wanted to use him for special sabotage missions. Unbeknownst to Mas, however, Posada had secretly signed on with the CIA and was keeping the Agency informed of all RECE projects. When he reported in June 1965 that Mas had given him five thousand dollars to blow up a Cuban ship anchored in the port of Veracruz, Mexico, Posada’s CIA handlers ordered him to “disengage” immediately.

  According to one of Posada’s CIA reports, Pepín Bosch in mid-1966 was channeling as much as five thousand dollars a month to RECE from various sources, including Bacardi. By then, however, Bosch had no interest in little sabotage missions. His new priority was public relations. He asked Mas to take charge of the monthly RECE newsletter, with the idea of making it an important news and opinion outlet for the exile community. Mas was a born propagandist, and the assignment suited him perfectly.

  He needed to earn some money to support his growing family, however. Working through his RECE connections, Mas secured a position at a Puerto Rico-based telecommunications construction firm. In 1971 he borrowed fifty thousand dollars from a friendly Cuban exile banker and purchased the firm’s Florida branch. Building again on his extensive contacts in the exile community, Mas began securing lucrative contracts, and his company was soon bringing in a million dollars a year.

  Mas was meanwhile continuing to promote his uncompromising anti-Castro message through the pages of the RECE newsletter. Along with most other exile activists, he had finally concluded that Castro’s well-defended regime was unlikely to be overthrown by military attacks from outside Cuba, and he turned his attention instead to political action. Forswearing violence, Mas became an ace lobbyist on behalf of the anti-Castro cause. His first target was U.S. Senator Richard Stone, a Florida Democrat whose candidacy Mas had vigorously backed. At Mas’s personal urging, Stone persuaded more than a dozen other senators to join him in cautioning the Ford administration against any relaxation of the Cuba trade embargo.

  It was the opening engagement of what Mas would later call “La Batalla de Washington.” In 1981, at the urging of senior officials in the new Reagan administration, Mas founded the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), largely building on the old RECE framework and sustained by the same base of exile support, Bacardi money included. By the time he reached fifty, the former milkman and exile firebrand who owed his career to Pepín Bosch and Bacardi was one of the most powerful and influential lobbyists on the U.S. political scene. He had turned the old “Platt me
ntality” of Cuban politicians on its head. Like them, he saw the route to change in Havana as going through Washington, but Jorge Mas Canosa never deferred to members of Congress or cabinet secretaries. Instead, he mobilized his fund-raising network and his political machine to convince Washington politicians that they should serve his interests. “We have used the Americans,” he said in an interview shortly before his death in 1997, “but we have never left the initiative for Cuban issues in the Americans’ hands. That’s what happened with the Consejo Revolucionario and the Bay of Pigs.”

  Mas’s old RECE cohort Luis Posada Carriles, meanwhile, headed in the opposite direction. While Mas presented himself as a responsible businessman and lobbyist, Posada—whom the CIA had once regarded as less of a “warrior” than Mas—vigorously and openly embraced armed struggle as the proper way to oppose the Castro regime. Unlike Mas, Posada had never been comfortable in public work; undercover activity and bomb making were his specialties. After leaving RECE, Posada moved to Venezuela, where he became a senior official in the state intelligence service, responsible for tracking down Cuban intelligence agents in the country. While he was in that position, the CIA reestablished contact with Posada, though the nature of his relationship with the Agency was a secret. He became associated with Orlando Bosch (no relation to Pepín), another Cuban exile leader who had once been close to RECE and who in later years also turned to increasingly violent methods. The two men were subsequently linked to two of the most serious terrorist acts of their time, the assassination of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his U.S. research associate in downtown Washington in September 1976 and the midair bombing of a Cubana civilian airliner two weeks later, killing seventy-three people.

  Though he and the Bacardi corporation were fiercely criticized later for having sponsored a “dirty war” against Castro’s Cuba, Pepín Bosch did not promote terrorist acts.20 During the period when he helped to finance armed action against the Castro regime, Bosch backed only those operations that had a relatively low risk of causing human casualties, such as bombing oil refineries or sinking ships while they were anchored in port. Bosch insisted that he never approved an assassination attempt against Fidel Castro. Jorge Mas Canosa may have been involved in planning one such mission, but only marginally, and no RECE operation during the “military” phase of its history was any dirtier than the violent actions carried out by Fidel Castro’s own July 26th Movement during the anti-Batista struggle. The 1960s were a time of “liberation” wars and “revolutionary” commando actions on both the left and the right.

  Still, there was something sad about the counterrevolutionary activism of Pepín Bosch and his Bacardi and RECE associates. Born of a love for Cuba and a pride in their own role in its history, their patriotism was narrowed and made more spiteful as a consequence of exile. Pepín Bosch was determined to show the world there was more to Cuba than Fidel Castro’s revolutionary makeover of the island and to fight to free Cuba from Fidel’s grasp. This man of moderate politics and classic liberal views would no doubt have preferred to spend the rest of his active years promoting hydroelectric power, native industry, labor-management harmony, and generous welfare legislation,21 but instead he found himself bankrolling bombing missions and paramilitary operations.

  Like other Cuban exiles, Pepín Bosch developed a permanent enmity toward Fidel Castro and a deep hatred of Communism. Fidel was the man who destroyed the idea of Cuba that had inspired Bosch and who effectively denied Bosch any role in Cuba other than to be a cheerleader for Fidel’s own revolutionary ideas. The Communist ideology Fidel implanted in Cuba was being promoted at the time from Southeast Asia to Africa, and Bosch later supported anti-Communist movements in those lands almost as fervently as he did the anti-Castro struggle in Cuba. His political activism became more ideological and less practical.

  One of the few occasions when he offered his opinion on an issue unrelated to Cuba or Communism was in August 1984, in the midst of a presidential campaign, when Bosch weighed in on the debate over supply-side economics between President Ronald Reagan and his challenger, Walter Mondale. In a commentary for Diario Las Américas titled “Memories of an Ex-Finance Minister,” Bosch warned that budget deficits resulting from insufficient tax revenue would in time erode savings and pensions and disproportionately hurt “workers, the poor, and middle class families.” President Reagan at the time was a hero to Bosch and other Cuban exiles for his firm anti-Communist stance, but Bosch did not hesitate to criticize Reagan’s tax cut policies for unduly favoring the upper-income class. “It seems to me,” Bosch wrote, “that Mr. Reagan should impose on the rich the same sacrifices he is obliging the rest of the society to suffer. So far, this government has not caused me any sacrifice whatsoever.... To me, this doesn’t seem right.”

  Chapter 19

  Socialist Rum

  By the time Fidel Castro showed up at the construction site of the new Santiago power plant that steamy July afternoon, he had already visited a nearby dam-building project and eaten lunch with road crews at work on a highway linking Santiago with agricultural areas to the west. He spent hours at each location, cajoling the workers to be more diligent and dedicate themselves more earnestly to their revolutionary assignments. Unable or unwilling to offer a material reward, Castro relied on moral suasion to boost the workers’ productivity. He and Che Guevara and their followers were trying to build socialism in Cuba, and the project could succeed only if workers focused on the needs of their nation and not just on their individual circumstances.

  “Are you satisfied with your production?” Castro asked the Santiago power workers. “It seems to me it has been a little weak.” About eight hundred workers were gathered under a burning sun for an impromptu meeting with the comandante himself. Castro was dressed in his rumpled fatigues, a beret on his head and a pistol on his belt, surrounded by an entourage of government officials and local Communist Party bureaucrats. He told the workers they were “honorable, fighting, and strong people,” but the more he talked, the more obvious it became that Fidel was not happy with the progress on the new power plant. He jabbed the air with a long, thin finger as he spoke, sweat beading on his forehead.

  “If the working class does not construct its own economy, who do you think is going to come and do it for them?” he asked. “The people want housing. Everybody is asking for a house. Do you think the houses are going to build themselves? Do you think the bourgeoisie are going to come back and build houses for you, if they didn’t do it before? All they left behind for you were tenements and slums!” Many of his meetings with Cuban workers went like this, with Fidel alternately teasing and scolding. He told the power plant workers that they weren’t doing as well as the highway crews he had met with earlier. “They show a real spirit for work,” he said. “They face their tasks as soldiers would when they have to seize a trench.”

  Castro rarely made a speech without some reference to war or combat. It was July 1963, just nine months after the Kennedy-Khrushchev missile confrontation. Cubans had not realized at the time how close the world was to nuclear war, but they had been told that a massive U.S. attack on the island was imminent, and Castro warned them repeatedly afterward that Cuban counterrevo lutionaries in Miami were plotting another invasion. The Cuban revolution, he emphasized, was still in a life-or-death struggle. “We must take this fight to every part of the country,” Castro told the workers, his voice rising. “That is the task ahead for all of us: work. If a man is milking three cows, he must be told to milk twenty. Farm work is hard. Cutting sugarcane is hard. This work you’re doing here is hard. But it’s necessary to spend all these hours under the sun.” With the Santiago carnival days coming later that month, the workers’ discipline would soon be tested. “Then we will really see how absenteeism goes,” Fidel said, “because you Santiago people are known for carousing.”

  His mention of the carnival apparently reminded him of the Santiago rum company that for such a long time had been associated with the July cel
ebrations. “Next, I’m going to the Bacardi factory,” he told the power plant workers, “to check out the quality of the production there.” Though the Bacardis themselves had been gone from Cuba for nearly three years, the facility on Matadero Street still bore their name, and the rum produced there still carried a Bacardi label.

  The lives of Cuban workers, however, had changed under socialism. The high labor standards established by Cuban unions in prior years were voided, with workers regularly asked to stay on the job for ten hours or longer without overtime pay. Food was rationed. Each person was limited, among other staples, to a quarter pound of butter, a pound and a half of beans, and just five eggs per month. Many consumer goods, especially those coming from outside Cuba, could no longer be found, and store shelves were often empty. Standing in line for an hour or more—to pick up food rations, buy shoes, or wait for a bus—was a daily routine. Since February 1962, the economic problems had been aggravated by the U.S. trade embargo, which denied the country U.S.-built supplies and replacement parts. Castro often highlighted the costly effects of the embargo in his meetings with workers, while emphasizing the benefits the revolution had brought. He reminded the Santiago power workers, for example, that their health care was now assured, that their wives now had maternity benefits, and that new hospitals and schools were being built around the country.