Yankee Come Home

by William Craig

  ¡¿Que?! “What?” Faribundo couldn’t believe his ears. “You don’t what?”

  “I don’t drink alcohol.”

  “That’s okay,” he said, giving his friend a look that said he knew how to handle the loony. “This isn’t ‘alcohol,’” he explained. “It’s rum.”

  Faribundo held the glass out to me.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t even drink rum.”

  “Yeah,” he said, puffing up like a father about to lecture a lazy child, “but this isn’t ‘rum.’ It’s Cuban rum.” He stared into my eyes. “Rum … from … Cuba. Guillermo, these are the tears of God!”

  At that, he and his pal started cackling, slapping hands, and sharing God’s tears. I was dismissed, my failure forgiven.

  Everyone went back to watching the game, and soon we were all roaring to celebrate a jonron by the great J. C. Linares. Santiago’s Wasps were stinging Havana’s pride. The stands were stamping to a conga beat. An announcer reminded us that the game was dedicated to the Nineteenth Congress of the national Workers’ Central Union and to los Cinco Héroes secuestrados por el imperio, “the Five Heroes imprisoned by the empire.”

  The Five Heroes, known Stateside as the Cuban Five, are Cuban intelligence agents who spied on Florida-based Cuban exile groups. They’ve been held in U.S. prisons since 1998. Their cell was part of a larger operation code-named la Red Avispa, which means—of all things—the Wasp Network. Their job was to report on terrorist or terror-supporting groups such as the Cuban-American National Foundation, Alpha 66, and the F4 Commandos. Some of the cell’s spies got menial jobs at the Key West Naval Air Station and reported on the base’s layout, structure, personnel, and flights.

  Los Cinco also infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue, an organization founded in 1991 with the nonviolent mission of helping Cuban rafters arrive safely in Florida. In 1995, when changes in U.S. immigration policy discouraged rafters, the Brothers gave themselves a new mission: flying small planes into Cuban airspace and dropping anti-Castro leaflets.

  The founder of Brothers to the Rescue, Santiago native José Basulto, is a CIA-trained counterrevolutionary, spy, and terrorist who boasts of having fired a boat-mounted cannon at a Havana-area hotel. Critics of the Brothers’ new mission observed that the easing of the rafter crisis had caused a drastic drop in donations. What was the point of flying into Cuban airspace, other than garnering publicity for Basulto’s organization—and needlessly heightening tensions in the Straits of Florida?

  Little point, unless you see a connection between the Brothers’ provocative actions and the passage of the Helms-Burton Act.

  The collapse of the Soviet Union inspired Congress to reexamine the embargo on Cuba. In 1992, the embargo was thirty years old, but rather than take the anniversary as an opportunity to lift the trade ban, Congress decided to make it much more severe.

  The decision seemed counterintuitive. The Iron Curtain had just fallen because millions of Eastern Bloc citizens demanded freedoms and consumer goods they’d known only through Western engagement and trade. Now that the Soviets weren’t subsidizing the Cuban economy, surely there was no force for change more likely to succeed in democratizing Cuba than a sudden flood of glad-handing contact and almighty dollars. But that’s not how Congress saw it. In Congress’s collective opinion, since thirty years of tough sanctions had failed completely, this was the time to get tougher.

  In 1992, Congress approved the Torricelli Act, named for sponsor Robert Torricelli, a Democratic representative from New Jersey. The Torricelli Act—officially, the Cuban Democracy Act—tightened the old, near-total blockade to eliminate a pernicious loophole allowing limited, licensed sale of food and medicine. The loophole’s original purpose had been to spare the United States embarrassing comparison to the Soviet Union, which denied West Berliners food and medicine in the infamous blockade of 1948–49. We didn’t want to look like the bad guy, but now that there was no bad guy—no Soviet Union—the good guy could get tough.

  The Torricelli Act outlawed all trade in food and medicine, except for the OFAC-licensed delivery of humanitarian aid. It was signed into law by George H. W. Bush, who was doing everything he could in that election year to please Miami’s Cuban exile community. Two years earlier, he had even ordered the release of Orlando Bosch, a CIA-trained terrorist who admits responsibility for numerous attacks, assassinations, and bombings, including the 1976 destruction of Flight 455, a Cuban passenger plane flying from Barbados to Jamaica. The plane carried seventy-three people, including kids on the Cuban national fencing team; all were killed, and Bosch had declared, “All of Castro’s planes are warplanes.” He also participated in bombing campaigns in Miami and other U.S. cities, and was in violation of his parole for firing a bazooka at a Polish freighter in Florida. Despite protests from the Justice Department, which noted that Bosch “repeatedly expressed and demonstrated a willingness to cause indiscriminate injury and death,” then-President Bush simply set Bosch free.

  Proponents of the Torricelli Act predicted that it would bring about the collapse of the Castro government within weeks.

  Republicans regained control of Congress in 1994, and conservatives were eager to reinforce Torricelli’s failure. Helms-Burton—officially, the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act—was sponsored by two powerful Republicans, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Representative Dan Burton of Indiana. The bill called for a variety of anti-Castro measures, such as beaming TV propaganda at Cuba and increased support for dissident groups. It declared the United States’ commitment to fostering “a peaceful transition to a representative democracy and market economy in Cuba,” and prohibited recognition of any transitional government that included Fidel Castro or his brother Raúl.

  But none of this was hardball enough for Burton and Helms. Since Torricelli had closed the last loophole on U.S. citizens’ trade with Cuba, the only thing left to forbid was … foreigners’ trade with Cuba.

  The Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act threatened non-U.S. companies with punishment for “trafficking in confiscated property claimed by United States nationals.” Any foreign company doing serious business with the Cuban government—such as the Spanish Meliá hotel chain—may well be making deals involving commercial real estate, equipment, facilities, or services once owned by U.S. businesses or by people who were or are now U.S. citizens. Helms-Burton calls any such involvement “trafficking,” and puts the power of the U.S. government behind the former owners’ suits, not only against Cuba, but also against those foreign entities. Foreign companies that “traffic” with Cuba could find their officers barred from entering the United States. The bill also calls on the president to persuade the United Nations to adopt the U.S. embargo and implement sanctions that would cut Cuba off from the entire world.

  Helms-Burton further specified that the United States would not recognize any new Cuban government that didn’t compensate U.S.-certified claims against property confiscated by the Revolution. Not all property; specifically, all nonresidential property valued at more than fifty thousand dollars in 1959.

  In other words, corporate assets.

  Even many hard-core Republicans in the Miami Cuban community objected to this abandonment of ordinary people’s grievances in favor of big business interests. Such protests were predictably weak, however, in comparison to the conservative exiles’ ferocious approval of any measure intended to strike at Fidel.

  Most of the United States’ allies and the international community objected to the bill’s bizarre claim of extraterritorial authority over other nations’ governments, citizens, and businesses. These objections only encouraged House Republicans, who pushed Helms-Burton through with ease.

  The Senate was less welcoming, however, and the bill was successfully filibustered by key Democratic senators—a sure sign that even some Republican senators had strong doubts. As of late 1995, the Senate version had been stripped of the sections attempting to assert U.S. control over other nations. E
ven that version was tabled and seemed likely to be defeated in hearings scheduled for March 1996.

  Then Brothers to the Rescue stepped up its campaign of well-publicized flights into Cuban airspace.

  On February 23, 1995, a member of the group appeared in Havana and accused the Brothers of planning attacks on military bases and other Cuban targets to provoke trouble between Cuba and the United States. The former Brother pilot claimed not to have been a Cuban spy, but it was obvious that Cuba might know all about the Brothers’ plans, equipment, and routes. More ominously, Cuban authorities might believe that any Brothers plane could be carrying bombs.

  The Brothers flew the next day anyway. On February 24, Cuban fighter jets shot down two unarmed Brothers to the Rescue planes in international airspace, killing four volunteers.

  Shortly after the killings, Helms-Burton was reintroduced to the Senate with its most ambitious and internationally offensive provisions restored. It also incorporated a new section praising Brothers to the Rescue and condemning the Cuban aerial attack. Helms-Burton passed Senate muster on March 5 and was signed into law by President Clinton on March 12.

  The new law declared that the Brothers had only been searching for rafters on February 24, which is hardly true; at least one Brothers plane deliberately entered Cuban airspace, where it couldn’t have offered rafters any aid. It is true that those planes were pursued into international airspace, where they had every right to be. The Cuban Air Force clearly identified them as civilian aircraft and shot them down anyway, without offering a chance to surrender. However one balanced its rights and wrongs, the shoot-down was a heart-wrenching story with the power to influence public policy.

  In 1739, England’s Parliament was persuaded to escalate a trade rivalry into a war by appeals to avenge the mutilation of mariner Robert Jenkins. Jenkins had apparently been smuggling, in violation of a treaty that Englishmen regularly flouted. Spanish officer Julio León Fandiño boarded his ship off Havana and delivered summary justice, robbing and torturing Jenkins before slicing off his ear. The bold Spaniard allegedly ordered Jenkins, “Go, and tell your King that I will do the same, if he dares to do the same.” Jenkins testified before the House of Commons, with his ear—according to some accounts—on display in a jar of spirits. Despite its origins in smuggling and treaty-cheating, the War of Jenkins’ Ear was sold to Parliament as a defense of national honor and rights at sea. Unfortunately for England, the war was a series of disasters, climaxing in Admiral Vernon’s hesitation before El Morro and General Wentworth’s defeat by guerrillas and mosquitoes in the forests east of Santiago.

  Some emotional appeals prevail, while others don’t. Senator Jesse Helms was notably immune to the travails of Americans infected with HIV and the suffering of people with AIDS. His 1987 amendment to the Supplemental Appropriations Act directed Ronald Reagan to bar people infected with HIV from entering the country for any purpose. Though health officials opposed the ban and Congress reformed immigration law in 1990, giving presidents the power to take HIV off the mandatory exclusion list, Helms orchestrated a nationwide campaign to keep George H. W. Bush from doing so. Until Barack Obama lifted the ban in 2009, the United States was the world’s only industrialized nation demonizing foreigners infected with HIV.

  While the Brothers to the Rescue shoot-down caused Congress to accept the tightened blockade favored by angry Miami exiles, it didn’t change the international community’s opinion of the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act. Mexico, Great Britain, and the European Union passed laws or resolutions declaring their citizens free from Helms-Burton’s presumption of extraterritorial reach and outlawing compliance.

  Canada’s Parliament even considered a parody bill, the American Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Loyalty) Act, proposing “to permit descendants of United Empire Loyalists who fled the land that later became the United States of America after the 1776 American Revolution to establish a claim to the property they or their ancestors owned … that was confiscated without compensation.” Millions of Canadians are descended from Loyalist refugees; the Stateside land and property they lost to theft and seizure could easily be worth billions now. Following Helms-Burton’s logic, the bill empowered Canada to keep traffickers in pre-1776 Loyalist assets from entering the country. It barred their spouses and kids, too. Canadian law-makers let the Loyalty Act die, but passed a law protecting their own people from Helms-Burton.

  While Helms-Burton made it even harder for U.S. citizens to visit or trade with Cuba, Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush found it necessary to sign waivers that suspended most of the law’s extraterritorial provisions. The presidents wanted to maintain good relations with U.S. allies and trading partners, and there was considerable uncertainty as to whether those provisions were enforceable under international law.

  Whatever its effect on Congress and commerce, the Brothers to the Rescue incident demonstrates the complexity of all things Cuban-American. Far from being a straightforward tragedy—bold humanitarians’ nonviolent protest, totalitarian government’s savage overreaction—it’s a mystery crisscrossed with too many suspects, motives, and clues. The courage and idealism of Brothers pilots, Basulto’s CIA connections, the push for Helms-Burton, alleged FBI informers among the Brothers, reports that the Brothers were planning to smuggle arms into Cuba: it’s hard to know what to believe about the organization’s actions and aims. Maybe some Brothers were playing a more complex game than others.

  It’s equally difficult to assess Cuba’s reaction. There’s no excuse for using deadly force on peaceful civilians, but did Cubans have reason to fear that the Brothers were no longer noncombatants?

  In the mid-1970s, Senator Frank Church chaired the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. The Church Committee uncovered a shameful history of CIA violations of civil rights in the United States and violent attacks on other nations, including an embarrassing litany of attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro using exploding cigars, poisoned pens, and Mafia snipers. The dark comedy of these fumbled murders overshadowed revelations of CIA operatives’ attacks on ordinary Cubans, a campaign of terror dating back to the beginning of Castro’s Revolution.

  The CIA began arming saboteurs and counterrevolutionary guerrillas just months after Castro took power on January 1, 1959. Its depredations may have been intended as a stick motivating Cuba to take the carrot offered by the State Department, but sabotage and insurgency gave los barbudos little confidence in Washington’s promises of cooperation and compromise. By year’s end, CIA agents including future Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt were busily recruiting an invasion force composed of anti-Castro Cuban exiles. Based in the Miami area, the fifteen-hundred-man force was given infantry, tank, and air war training at military bases in the United States and Panama and at secret CIA facilities in Guatemala.

  President Dwight D. Eisenhower formally approved the invasion plan in March 1960, and John. F. Kennedy ordered a modified version to be put into action in April 1961. In the run-up to the actual landing, Cuban exiles and other CIA agents intensified their bombing and arson campaign, and CIA-supplied aircraft attacked Cuban airfields. The invasion force sailed in CIA-chartered ships registered in Liberia, but were escorted by a U.S. Navy task force including aircraft carriers, destroyers, and submarines. On April 17, thirteen hundred Cuban exiles landed on a beach called Playa Girón in the Bahía de Cochinos on Cuba’s southern coast. Norteamericano accounts would refer to the bahía as the Bay of Pigs, mistranslating cochinos, which can mean “pig” but also is a common name for a fish, Sufflamen verres; a better translation for the invasion area is Triggerfish Bay.

  The invasion was a spectacular failure. The exiles were defeated in the first twenty-four hours, but held out another couple of days before surrendering. Their airplanes inflicted heavy casualties on Cuban soldiers, militia, and civilians, and their obvious dependence on U.S. military support further discredited their cause. The unpro
voked invasion by what was essentially a U.S. armada united most Cubans behind the Revolution, which Castro no longer shied away from describing as “Marxist-Leninist.” Cuba denounced the United States as a deceitful aggressor, and much of the international community sympathized.

  Kennedy blamed the CIA, and heads rolled, including that of CIA director Allen Dulles. The U.S. military, the CIA, the Kennedy administration, and the surviving CIA-trained Cuban exiles began a complex exchange of recriminations, grudges, and shifts of allegiance that affected policy and politics throughout the Vietnam War, in the composition of the Nixon White House’s Watergate burglary team, and in the 2000 Florida vote recounts, and that still haunts JFK assassination theorists.

  The only thing most of these Stateside groups could agree on was the need to get tougher with Cuba.

  Public opinion ruled out a straightforward U.S. invasion. The Joint Chiefs of Staff would not accept this limitation, and in 1962 forwarded to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara a plan they called called Operation Northwoods, designed “to develop a Cuban ‘provocation’ as justification for positive U.S. military action.”

  Hidden for decades, the declassified Northwoods documents are deeply disturbing. The proposals include a “series of well-coordinated incidents to take place in and around” the U.S. base at Guantánamo. “Friendly Cubans” could be dressed in Cuban uniforms and smuggled “‘over the fence’ to stage attacks on base.” The Navy could capture “Cuban (friendly) saboteurs inside the base,” or have friendlies start fake riots at the base’s main gate. From these bloodless scams, the Chiefs escalate to much more sinister ideas. “A ‘Remember the Maine’ incident could be arranged in several forms,” they suggest, starting with the simplest: “We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantánamo Bay and blame Cuba …