“We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities, and even in Washington …
“We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated) …
“A ‘Cuban-based, Castro-supported’ filibuster could be simulated against a neighboring Caribbean nation …
“It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama, or Venezuela.”
Kennedy and McNamara told the Joint Chiefs that direct, conventional military assault on Cuba was out of the question, so Operation Northwoods was shelved and the CIA was empowered to escalate its covert war. Over the next two decades, CIA operatives and CIA-supplied rebels and saboteurs strafed and bombed Cuban cities from the air, made war on Cuban troops and militia, torched crops and dynamited factories, attacked hotels, refineries, and coastal villages, and blew up civilian aircraft. The CIA even subcontracted assassination work to the Mafia but still never managed to kill Fidel Castro.
More important, the United States’ sustained campaign of terror failed to persuade Cuba to submit to yanqui dominion. In its earliest, most intense phase, during and just after the Triggerfish Bay invasion, the terror offensive convinced Castro that a full-scale military invasion could come at any time. Only a Soviet-supplied nuclear deterrent could prevent it. The secret war on Cuba helped bring on the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962—the closest mankind has come to nuclear war.
Amazingly, even that near-miss at Armageddon didn’t persuade the United States to stop attacking Cuba. Our agents, presently employed or ostensibly freelance, never stopped the harassment, the sabotage, the assassination attempts, and the killings. Our government has directed, sponsored, subsidized, or turned a blind eye to decades of mayhem. As of a 2001 report to the United Nations, Cuba blames the United States for nearly thirty-five hundred deaths due to terrorism.
Far from weakening the Castro regime, our fifty-plus years of war on the Revolution have given Cuba’s armed forces and police a compelling raison d’être. The terrorism we condone has persuaded even the most Castro-weary Cubans that the U.S. government knows only two ways to behave toward Cuba: control it or attack it.
Our long, low-intensity war against Cuba has been such a godsend to the regime, it’s enough to make one wonder. Either we’re too dumb or too crazy or too politically cowardly to notice that our actions aren’t achieving the desired results, or … maybe these are the desired results.
Maybe Fidel is useful to U.S. politicians in the same way that U.S. politicians are useful to Fidel.
Presidents and senators and representatives can always point across the Straits of Florida and earn cheap strong-on-defense points by accusing Cuba of drug smuggling, terrorism, and plotting invasion.
There’s little hard evidence to support such fears.
But Cuba does spy on us.
And we catch Cuba’s spies. That’s why that day’s opening game was dedicated to los Cinco Héroes, “the Five Heroes” of the Wasp Network.
Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and René González: los Cinco are almost as much a part of today’s official Cuban iconography as Che and Camilo. The typical los Cinco billboard frames each of the intelligence officers’ cheerful faces in a star, una estrella—not in a Hollywood sense, it seems, but as in, “Wishing on a …” Every cubano who reads, listens to the radio, or watches television is familiar with each of the prisoners’ life stories, family members, heartaches, and medical problems, as well as every detail of their trials, drastic sentences, and ongoing appeals.
The youngest of them was thirty-two when they were arrested in 1998, the oldest forty-two. Their current sentences range from fifteen years to two life terms plus fifteen years. The first of them to be released—assuming that the United States releases any of them—not a certainty, since 9/11—will be the oldest, René González, a pilot, flight instructor, and veteran of Cuba’s expeditionary force in Angola. He’ll be fifty-seven when he’s due to be released in 2013. Like two other estrellas, he has not been allowed visits from his wife or daughter. Two others of the five are Angola vets. A couple have diplomatic training. One’s an economist, another an airfield construction engineer who helped expand the runways at Santiago’s Antonio Maceo International Airport. The engineer, Antonio Guerrero, was born in Miami. He’s a painter and a poet; one of his books is titled Décimas for Antonio Maceo; another, Confidential Poems. He’s in for life plus ten.
These prisoners were never convicted of actual spying. In fact, the how and why of the Five’s crimes, capture, and trial are issues as divisive, internationally, as Helms-Burton.
Cuba maintains that los Cinco weren’t spying on the United States, but on the Cuban exile terrorists who freely stockpile arms and train and stage missions from the United States. Los Cinco were sent, Cuba says, in response to an escalating campaign of infiltrations and attacks made by Miami-based groups such as Alpha 66, which in 1993 held a press conference to announce that it considered any tourist visiting Cuba an enemy and a legitimate target in its ongoing war. Cuba says it shared intelligence gathered by los Cinco with the United States, hoping for cooperation against terrorism, but that the FBI only used the shared intel to crack down on the Wasp Network.
However it happened, there’s no question that the Wasp Network was rolled up, while numerous organizations and individuals in the Greater Miami area continue to boast of their past and projected terror attacks on Cuba.
The United States accused los Cinco of espionage, but only in the vaguest possible terms. At their trial, which began in November 2000, the only charges pressed on all five defendants were “general conspiracy” and “conspiracy to act as a nonregistered foreign agent.”
General conspiracy boils down to making an agreement to do something illegal. Not committing any acts, just conspiring. Three of the agents also were accused of conspiracy to commit espionage: an agreement to spy at some time in the future. Not actual spying. Three were charged with falsifying their identities.
There were no breaches of national security systems to steal nuclear secrets. No bombs planted in post office parking lots. There was no scouting of invasion beaches. To judge by the charges, there was no spying at all.
But their trial was conducted in a Miami courthouse besieged by the same angry exile community that had, just months before, made an emotional horror show out of returning little Elián González to his father. They demonstrated noisily outside the courthouse every day of the seven-month trial. The prosecution eliminated all jurors who failed to express hostility toward the Cuban government. Local TV cameras followed the jurors outside the courtroom, making sure their license plates were known to anyone who might care to discuss the case with them.
And the prosecution charged one of the five—Gerardo Hernández, the senior agent—with conspiracy to commit murder in the Brothers to the Rescue shoot-down.
Despite its crowd appeal, the murder-conspiracy charge seemed shaky. The Cuban government could have learned the Brothers’ plans from various sources, including that defecting Brothers pilot. The order to shoot was given by a Cuban Air Force commander. The planes were shot down in international airspace. As the judge instructed the jury, Hernández could only be convicted if “the killing occurred within the special maritime or territorial jurisdiction of the United States.” No jurisdiction, no crime—at least, none that the United States could prosecute.
Before the trial was over, the prosecution submitted an Emergency Petition for Writ of Prohibition to a higher court, asking that the trial judge be prohibited from instructing jurors on jurisdiction. Exposing the jury to such instructions would, in the prosecution’s words, present “an insurmountable hurdle … and will likely, result in the failure of the prosecution on this count.”
The petition was denied. The Miami jury heard t
he instructions—and ignored them.
Los Cinco were found guilty on every charge. The sentences—delivered after a months-long delay, in a new, post-9/11 political reality—were astonishingly harsh, unprecedented in relation to the vague espionage charges and minimal evidence. Three of the five received life sentences for conspiracy to commit espionage, the only life sentences in U.S. history for “spies” who had not been accused of handling any classified documents, trespassing on any restricted sites, or passing on any state secrets whatsoever.
The trial was such a mess that in 2005 a panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals tossed the whole thing out and ordered a new trial somewhere far from Miami. The government appealed and won a reversal of the new-trial, new-venue ruling, but in 2008 another Eleventh Circuit appeals panel called for new sentences in several of the verdicts, noting that no “top-secret information was gathered or transmitted” in the case. The appeals process went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case. Some of their sentences were recently, slightly reduced, but most are in for a long time to come.
Nations we count among our best friends and allies have petitioned us to retry the case or reconsider the sentences. The Five have received awards in absentia from human rights organizations; a U.N. investigative panel has labeled their detention “arbitrary”; and a group of Nobel Prize winners, including Desmond Tutu, has asked the United States to let los Cinco go home.
Many far more serious espionage cases, including some tense Cold War and post–Soviet Union confrontations, have ended in prisoner swaps or no-strings deportations. No matter what precedents one considers, it’s clear that we’ve treated the Cuban Five with a severity unjustified by their alleged crimes, the evidence against them, or the alleged consequences of their acts. This case isn’t about justice or espionage; it’s about the George W. Bush administration’s indebtedness to Miami Cuban conservatives for their crucial aid in blocking the 2000 election.
Back on the bus, the women of the chorus and their supporters seemed more than satisfied with the day’s tour: El Cobre’s feminine mystique, lunch on the sun-dazzled cliffs, El Morro’s grim legends, their initiation into the cult of handmade tabacs. The afternoon was waning as we rolled back toward Santiago. Faribundo snoozed in the seat behind Luis, who hadn’t touched a drop and drove with don’t-wake-the-baby care. Indeed, even uptight Marina seemed about to drop off, and about half the passengers were slumped one way or another, cheeks resting on lovers’ shoulders or smushed into smoked window glass.
I was ready but unwilling to fade away. All that clambering and staring out to sea had helped me visualize Sampson’s cordon of ships, the Merrimac’s run, Reina Mercedes’s cover behind La Socapa, and Cervera’s predicament. Maneuvers and dilemmas I’d been reading about for years made real, solid sense now, leaving me with just one unanswerable question: How could Sampson have imagined that the Army could clamber up those cliffs and take El Morro by storm?
I’ve never been a soldier, but I’m always trying to imagine how soldiers read landscapes. It’s a mental game I started playing as a kid, when I began to share my father’s passion for military history. It was my father’s copy of The West Point Atlas of American Wars, Volume I, 1689–1900, that first set me to wondering about Papa O’Brien’s war. The old atlas wasn’t intended for a general audience. It was a textbook produced by the academy’s Department of Military Art and Engineering, designed—as President Eisenhower noted in a letter that served as the book’s foreword—to instruct and inspire “the minds of those whose profession it will be to defend the frontiers of the Free World against all enemies.”
Of the volume’s 158 maps, 138 are devoted to the Civil War, six to the Revolutionary War, four to the Mexican War, three to the War of 1812, and three to all the colonial conflicts up through the French and Indian War. The Spanish-American War claims the final four map pages. Four doesn’t seem quite enough for a war that sent ships scurrying through all four hemispheres, with land and sea battles on opposite sides of the globe. Yet it was, for all its world-circling scope, a tiny war.
In 1775, shortly after the Battle of Bunker Hill, George Washington took command of sixteen thousand militiamen besieging Boston—several hundred more soldiers than General William Shafter commanded in the 1898 invasion of Cuba. Civil War armies dwarfed Shafter’s command: Grant set off for the Wilderness on May 4, 1864, in the company of the Army of the Potomac’s 119,000 troops; as the Union’s super-general, he was in overall command of 550,000 men.
The Spanish-American War was war in miniature, but only because it didn’t last. The West Point Atlas frowns on the whole affair, declaring that the success of the hastily improvised, chaotic Santiago expedition “can only be regarded as fortuitous.” The Spanish had overwhelming forces available in Oriente, and if they’d only concentrated them at Santiago, “it is likely that Shafter’s V Corps—the better part of the Regular Army—would have been destroyed.” The United States would have had to start over again, training, arming, and sending off some of “the almost 275,000 men mobilized through public pressure.”
The West Point Atlas packs a lot of feeling into its highly compressed narratives. The authors rarely speak ill of the dead, but they make their preferences clear. The Atlas finds space to praise John Parker, a West Point lieutenant whose daring and skill saved the day at San Juan Hill. By contrast, the Atlas never once mentions a certain former assistant secretary of the Navy who commanded a famous volunteer cavalry regiment in that same battle.
The Atlas observes that the Navy “called for assistance from the Army,” which arrived off Santiago on June 20. In conference with Shafter, the authors note, “Sampson urged a landing on the eastern side of the harbor mouth and the storming of the fortifications—up a steep, 230-foot bluff.”
Now that I’d seen the cliff up close, I shared the Atlas authors’ understated amazement. How could Sampson imagine that the fort would fall to amphibious assault? His plan required open boats crammed with helpless riflemen to brave the shelling he believed would sink his battleships. The only landing points were narrow rock ledges swept by point-blank cannon fire; any survivors would climb a precipice that could be defended just by dropping stones on their heads. What was the admiral thinking?
Perhaps Sampson’s scheme indicated a lot less about the ostensible conflict—Sampson’s ships versus El Morro’s guns—than it did about much broader concerns.
In baseball, when a pitcher deliberately throws wide of the strike zone, it’s called a pitchout. The catcher steps way off to one side of the plate, and catches enough balls to walk the batter. The trick robs a formidable batter of the chance to hit. It’s a pretense of pitching, but it’s really about what has already happened: the runners on base, the score, the batter on deck. It doesn’t matter if the pitcher “loses” by giving up a walk. The real game is much bigger than this at-bat.
Sampson wanted the infantry to win his proposed assault of El Morro, but he must have known that a slaughterous defeat was far from unlikely. Some other concern must have justified the risk. Likewise, he was willing to risk Hobson and the Merrimac crew in a Rube Goldberg attempt to plug the channel; risk a passive naval strategy that might condemn thousands of soldiers to die of disease in a summer land campaign. Those lives didn’t matter enough to risk a single U.S. battleship or cruiser. The decision to blockade Santiago suggests that the war, the real war, was never about avenging the Maine or ending Cuba’s suffering or sinking Spain’s navy. Vengeance, chivalry, and fear were pitchout throws. The real game was about ambition.
To become a world power, the United States needed a world-class navy. To justify the expense of a world-class navy, expansionists and admirals needed a quick, guaranteed-winnable war. A war with Spain would win us island bases in two oceans, access to the China coast, and secure approaches to a future Central American canal. For such prizes, the empire boosters would gamble with taxpayer treasure and blood—but not with their few modern warships. The
Navy’s construction program, invigorated by Assistant Secretary Roosevelt and fast-tracked by the Fifty-Million Bill, would eventually produce a surplus of big battleships, but in 1898, every one of the fleet’s few capital ships was precious.
It didn’t matter how long it took for Cervera to come out, how many Rough Riders or Cuban mambises died of bullets or fevers, how many civilians starved to death in reconcentración camps during the blockade. These considerations had nothing to do with the United States’ true war aim. Sampson was under orders not to take the slightest unnecessary risk with his major vessels. To leaders intent on directing the United States to a new destiny, time and money, soldiers and civilians were expendable. The battleships Texas, Oregon, Iowa, Indiana, and Massachusetts were irreplaceable.
The U.S. Navy would not lose a single ship of any size in the war—unless, of course, you count the Maine. But all of its big new ships would be needed to claim the United States’ postwar global empire.
Chapter 7
WARS OF THE SPIRIT
The crowded schedule of the International Choral Festival claimed the Feminine Tone, and I put in day after day crisscrossing the city on foot, conducting interviews, visiting archives and museums, hitting significant sites of 1898 and the 1959 Revolution. I walked because my budget wouldn’t cover taxis and because the city only reveals itself to pedestrians. Each block offered its gift: a plaque honoring an obscure mambi general, a dance troupe practicing in a crumbling Belle Epoque ballroom, a shirtless old man sitting on the sidewalk and selling a heap of saffron-yellow fruit laid out on a clean red kerchief. I walked until my feet were blistered, sterilized a needle with a match, popped and bandaged the blisters, kept walking.
Whenever I checked in at the hotel, I looked for e-mails or faxes from the Reverend Onyegoro. He missed his promised Sunday show date, didn’t make Monday or Tuesday. By Wednesday I gave up hoping he’d ever show up, with or without the Jamaican head tax payback. I retreated to the future, pestering his Overwater Missions staff only for the license extensions that Maricel, Walter, and I would need to stay longer than the chorus’s single week. Kind-voiced staffers promised to fax the extensions right away.
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