Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  Castro was always keen to stress that the Revolution was olive green, the colour of guerrilla battledress. What made it red instead was that the 26 July Movement was simply too disparate and amorphous to serve as a platform for Fidel’s unbounded ambition. Knowing that confrontation with the US was inevitable, Fidel needed the backing of the USSR. In addition, the Cuban Communist Party (Partido Socialista Popular, or PSP) was not only a uniquely well-organized and disciplined body amid the chaos of Cuban politics, it was also ripe for picking after having backed Batista. Fidel could have ordered the prosecution of the leading Communists as collaborators with the hated dictator, but instead chose to co-opt them. Barring a foolish, Soviet-inspired attempt to reassert the ‘leading role of the party’ in 1968, which ended with Party Secretary Aníbal Escalante and several others sentenced to long periods of imprisonment, the Party became and remained as servile as any in the Soviet Bloc.

  Shortly after his return to Havana, Castro presented the cabinet with a draft Agrarian Reform Law, which they were not allowed to discuss. Land over a thousand acres was to be expropriated, in return for interest-yielding government bonds, which in the event were never issued. A National Agrarian Reform Institute (INRA) would run the land as co-operatives or grant sixty-seven-acre plots to individual families. Foreigners could no longer own shares in sugar plantations, and ownership of refining mills was separated from the plantations. Young INRA officials with degrees but no practical experience took over virtually all the livestock farms, fecklessly butchering laying hens and dairy herds, and even a prize pedigree bull worth $20,000. Castro dismissed cabinet members who protested against the folly, and thereafter the cabinet became irrelevant as the real business of government was conducted by decree.27

  Criticism of the growing influence of Communists was not tolerated. Fidel sacked Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz, the head of the Revolutionary Air Force who had flown in arms and ammunition for the revolutionaries in 1958, and deposed President Urrutia in favour of Osvaldo Dorticós, a wealthy closet Communist. He made himself prime minister by ‘popular acclaim’, for monster rallies styled as direct democracy had become his preferred means of claiming to express the popular will. By the autumn there were more people in prison than had ever been the case under Batista, and the death penalty, abolished in 1940, was restored for counter-revolutionaries. Brother Raúl, starting with military intelligence or G2, merged the guerrillas with what was left of the army to create the new Revolutionary Armed Forces. One of his first acts was to make a secret request to the Soviets to send a mission of Spanish Communist exiles who had served in the Red Army. Five KGB officers arrived to train a new secret police.28

  Shortly afterwards, when Díaz Lanz flew an aircraft over Havana dropping anti-Castro leaflets, improperly fused anti-aircraft shells fired by Cuban gunners burst on return to the ground and Fidel accused the US of complicity in ‘terror bombing’. The remaining liberals in the government were forced out, and Guevara was appointed director of the National Bank, triggering financial panic and a run on the banks. Investors withdrew over US$50 million in days. In October, Huber Matos, the military commander of Camagüey Province, attempted to resign along with forty of his officers because of Communist infiltration of the army. He was tried for ‘betraying the revolution’ and sentenced to twenty years in jail. In November the regime suspended habeas corpus indefinitely and the following month all Cubans were encouraged to become informers and to report any overheard criticism of the regime. Eventually this was institutionalized by enrolling 800,000 people in Committees for the Defence of the Revolution.29

  And on it went, an avalanche of decrees that often contradicted each other, whether by accident or design making the normal conduct of business impossible as managers spent all their time trying to comply. There was also a Kulturkampf against black social clubs and Santería religious rituals – which fused folk Catholicism with Yoruba traditions from West Africa – as well as against all private clubs and associations. Santa Claus and Christmas trees were proscribed and rock and roll music banned. The labour unions, cringingly aware that their support for Batista was a sword hanging over their heads, were taken over by the Communists, who promptly requested the abolition of the right to strike. They muffled the freedom of speech that Batista had never dared to suppress by censoring all publications. All radio and TV stations were subsumed into a state corporation. Meanwhile the militarization of Cuban society proceeded apace with the creation of a 100,000-strong militia.30

  Thorn in the Flesh or Mortal Threat?

  It was not US business interests or dispossessed American landowners who decided that Castro had to go, for they lived in hope that they could negotiate compensation for their lost assets; it was an administration worried about US loss of international face and domestic charges of being weak on Communism, aided and abetted by a vociferous exiled Cuban lobby in Miami. Specifically, Eisenhower worried that Castro would inveigle the whole of Latin America into an emerging Third World neutralist camp, to the detriment of global US influence. In February 1959 a secret NSC policy statement stated that ‘A defection by any significant number of Latin American countries to the ranks of neutralism . . . would seriously impair the ability of the United States to exercise effective leadership of the Free World, particularly in the UN, and constitute a blow to US prestige.’31

  As early as mid-March 1959, before Fidel’s visit to New York, Eisenhower had approved CIA contingency planning to arm and train Cuban exiles, and to support guerrillas operating on the island. Nixon and the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke, were early anti-Castro hawks. In July, after Esso, Shell and Texaco had refused (for dubious technical reasons) to process Soviet crude oil in their Cuban refineries, Castro expropriated them. Eisenhower stepped up the pressure by cutting the annual US Cuban sugar quota by 700,000 tons, only to see the Soviets and Chinese step in to increase their forward purchases of sugar. In the autumn Castro expropriated all remaining US-owned agricultural, industrial and banking interests. Corporate America had lost $1 billion in investments, but felt it less keenly than the Mob, which had lost $100 million invested in casinos and hotels, as well as the enormously profitable Cuban connection for heroin.32

  The reds came out from under the bed with Soviet Foreign Minister Anastas Mikoyan’s mission to Cuba in February 1960. To compensate for the US cancellation of the sugar quota, Fidel and Mikoyan signed a treaty whereby the Soviets would purchase a million tons of sugar a year for the next four years. The Soviets would also loan Cuba $100 million, and provide oil, steel and fertilizers. It was not enough to compensate for the economic chaos created by the doctrinaire Guevara, who ordered all foreign commercial and industrial enterprises expropriated. Following the mass emigration of managers and technicians, he discovered that not only his team of young industrial engineering graduates but also the Soviets lacked the expertise to run them.

  Initially arms were not part of the new treaty, as the Soviets were cautious about the likely US reaction. The Castros bought them from European suppliers instead until on 4 March 1960 a Belgian ship called La Coubre loaded with ammunition blew up in Havana harbour, causing widespread devastation. It was on this occasion that the photographer Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, better known as Alberto Korda, took the iconic picture of Guevara that has adorned countless student walls and gained a new lease of life as a fashion accessory. The explosion was almost certainly the product of negligence, but Fidel clamorously insisted that it was sabotage and demanded Soviet arms to defend the revolution against rising US aggression. Whether they believed it or not, the incident persuaded the Soviets to deepen their commitment. They not only paid for arms shipments from Poland and Czechoslovakia, but also started paying Fidel a personal subsidy in the form of exorbitant fees for the right to reprint his speeches and writings.33

  Though Khrushchev was keen to maintain peaceful coexistence with the US, there was a countervailing consideration. Competition with Mao’s China for leade
rship of Third World revolutions led Khrushchev to up the ante, lest Cuba follow Albania into the anti-Soviet camp. Speaking to an audience of Moscow teachers on 9 July 1960, Khrushchev said:

  It should be borne in mind that the United States is now not at such an unattainable distance from the Soviet Union as formerly. Figuratively speaking, if need be, Soviet artillerymen can support the Cuban people with their rocket fire should the aggressive forces in the Pentagon dare to start intervention against Cuba. And the Pentagon could be well advised not to forget that, as shown at the latest tests, we have rockets which can land precisely in a preset square 13,000 kilometres away. This, if you want, is a warning to those who would like to solve international problems by force and not by reason.34

  This was a bluff. Two years earlier, Khrushchev had tried it on with Senator Hubert Humphrey during a rambling eight-hour conversation in the Kremlin. He had gone up to a wall map of the USA, and asked Humphrey where he was born. He then circled Minneapolis with a blue pencil, saying, ‘That’s so I don’t forget to order them to spare the city when the rockets fly.’ The reality was that the Soviet planned economy was in semi-permanent crisis, selling gold to purchase imported butter. And worse, when in October 1960 the Soviets tested the new R-16 ICBM, it blew up, killing a hundred technicians and Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, chief of the new Soviet strategic rocket forces. The R-9 also flopped during flight tests. By this date the US had something of the order of 18,000 nuclear warheads.35

  In July 1960 Raúl Castro had his first meeting with the Soviet leadership in Moscow. He must have impressed his hosts. The KGB changed the codename for the Castro regime from Youngstye (Youngsters) to Avanpost (Bridgehead) to reflect the fact that the Castros were serious allies. The Castro brothers’ main fear was that the US would repeat what it had done in Guatemala, and they had grounds to worry. Within the Republican Party, Nixon’s hopes of succeeding Eisenhower were under threat from Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, whose main plank was visceral anti-Communism, and the Republicans in turn faced the challenge of the Democrat John F. Kennedy, who made much of the Iron Curtain having moved within ninety miles of the US mainland. During the 1960 presidential campaign, after Nixon had prevailed on Eisenhower to send a symbolic reinforcement of 1,400 Marines to Guantanamo, Kennedy rightly dismissed the PR exercise as ‘too little, too late’.36 He did not yet know how far planning had advanced into what was to become the most ludicrously sordid episode in US history, a tar-baby he was to embrace with enthusiasm.

  Kennedy had the morals of an alley-cat, but Eisenhower was an upright, devout and honourable man. How could he have sanctioned a government conspiracy with mobsters to murder a fellow head of state? The answer lies in the fact that few who had endured the Second World War doubted that it could have been prevented by the timely assassination of Hitler. There was also a precedent for US government involvement with the Mob in the deal made with Luciano, which saw him released from prison in return for Mafia assistance during the invasion of Sicily directed by Ike in 1943.

  The Mafia were recruited to kill the Castro brothers and Guevara as a possible alternative to the CIA’s planned invasion by a force of exiles, in that the US might intervene directly to ‘restore order’ after the leaders were dead. Robert Maheu, a former FBI agent, arranged meetings between Colonel Sheffield Edwards (representing the CIA’s special plans chief Richard Bissell) and Italian-born Johnny Rosselli, whose real name was Filippo Sacco. As the Mob’s man in Los Angeles Rosselli had pressured Hollywood film producer Harry Cohn to cast Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity, although not by placing the head of a racehorse in his bed as portrayed in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. Later he became the Mob’s chief representative in Las Vegas. Rosselli linked the CIA with Chicago boss Sam Giancana and Florida boss Santo Trafficante, both of whom nurtured a murderous personal grudge against Castro for the money they had lost in Cuba.

  Bissell explicitly informed Allen Dulles that ‘contact has been made with the Mafia’, including a payment of $200,000 diverted from the budget for the invasion to cover the cost of assassinations, although Giancana declined his fee on grounds of patriotic duty. It would be otiose to list, once again, the many failed attempts to murder Castro. Most of them suffered from the basic sin of over-elaboration, what the Americans call ‘trying to be cute’, leading Fidel to dub the CIA the ‘Central Agency of Yankee Cretins’.37 A barman was bribed to put a capsule containing botulism bacteria into Castro’s milkshake, but stored the capsules in a freezer and could not free them when the time came. Juan Orta, a private secretary in the Prime Minister’s office who missed the kickbacks he had once received from the Mob, was also given poison pills by Maheu and Rosselli. As Larry Devlin realized in the Congo, there was no substitute for a proficient sniper.38

  Of the US and Cuba, Khrushchev once asked ‘Why should an elephant be afraid of a mouse?’ Kennedy was to ask him the same question with regard to Hungary and Poland, implicitly revealing that he believed the US also controlled a bloc, though he would have denied it. Like Khrushchev, Kennedy was above all concerned that a successful revolution against US authority would have a domino effect – and it did. The Cuban example inspired would-be imitators throughout Latin America, in many cases supported by Cuban agents and arms, and further encouraged by Khrushchev’s decision to support national liberation movements throughout the Third World. It was rubber-stamped by the Presidium in August 1961, at the height of the crisis provoked by the Soviet ultimatum demanding the withdrawal of Western armed forces from West Berlin, which ended with the construction of the Berlin Wall, a humiliating admission that the people could be kept in the people’s republics only by force.

  KGB chief Aleksandr Schelepin drew up a plan to back Latin American revolutionary movements which ‘would favour dispersion of attention and forces by the United States and its satellites, and would tie them down during the settlement of a German peace treaty and West Berlin’. The main tools were to be the Cubans and the newly formed Sandinista movement in Nicaragua, which received a modest KGB subvention from the start.39 With good cause, the US government feared that Cuba had become a Communist spearhead pointed at the totality of US interests in Latin America.40 Castro confirmed that it was so in the autumn of 1960, when he merged the PSP and the 26 July Movement into a single Cuban Communist Party and pronounced himself a Marxist-Leninist, which was news to brother Raúl and to his Soviet advisers.41

  All Mouth and No Trousers

  Astute though he undoubtedly was, Fidel could not have prayed for a more obliging enemy than the new American President, who remains the benchmark aspired to by all who seek to use style to obscure their lack of substance. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born outside Boston in 1917 into one of America’s richest families, his father Joe having made a fortune in movies, property and stocks and distributing imported spirits. These were real clan Irish, with the father believing that ‘family’ – in the Mafia sense – trumped all other considerations. In a society still prejudiced against Catholics and the Irish, Joe acquired social respectability sufficient for FDR to appoint him to such posts as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and as one of the most anti-British ambassadors every posted to London. His vicarious political ambitions were initially invested in his namesake elder son, leaving second son John free to pursue a carefree young life.

  John or ‘Jack’ Kennedy had a gilded youth, fitfully laid low by colitis and Addison’s disease, which plagued him throughout his life. The family home was a large house at Riverdale in suburban Manhattan. Long summers were spent sailing off Cape Cod, where the family congregated in their own compound at Hyannis Port. There was another place at Palm Springs. The Depression made little impact on the Kennedys; Jack’s sole recollection was that his father hired more gardeners.42 Jack’s interests at Harvard were on the social and sporting side, although this period also saw the beginnings of the sex addiction that he indulged for the rest of his life. His combination of money and good
looks made him what the British called a ‘deb’s delight’.

  While shadowing his ambassador father to London in the 1930s, Jack was seduced by the lifestyle of the British aristocracy, with whose philistinism he strongly identified. Though he later assumed the airs of a highly cultivated man, and knew how to flatter vain artists and intellectuals, there is scant evidence that he had any serious cultural interests. Camelot, it should be recalled, was just a kitschy musical. Home-movie footage from Hyannis Port shows Kennedy ‘goofing off’ with a tight coterie of friends, aggressively playing touch football and above all sailing, which he found relaxing.

  His father ensured that much of Jack’s medical history was suppressed when he joined the navy in October 1941. He eventually commanded a fast Patrol Torpedo boat (PT-109) in the Pacific. After a botched attack on a Japanese convoy, PT-109 was sliced in half by an enemy destroyer that was not even aware that the boat was there. Kennedy redressed his sloppy seamanship by a genuinely heroic effort to rescue his surviving crew members, which lost nothing in the telling back home.

  Aged twenty-eight when the war ended, Kennedy was ‘drafted’ by his overbearing father into politics to replace his elder brother, killed piloting a bomber packed with explosives that detonated prematurely.43 Joe quite simply bought Jack’s election to Congress in November 1946 for Massachusetts’s 11th District, and his money thereafter was the magic dust that transformed a junior congressman with a very modest track record into a rising national figure. Jack struck crucial progressive poses, supporting Third World nationalists and US trade unions, but also pandered to his blue-collar base by adopting a hardline anti-Communist stance. His younger brother Bobby even worked for the notorious red-baiter Senator Joseph McCarthy. In 1951 the brothers became more closely acquainted when they went on a seven-week tour of Israel, Iran, Pakistan, India, Singapore, French Indochina, Korea and Japan. Jack returned convinced that the US should align itself with emerging nations, while helping them combat ‘poverty and want’ and ‘sickness and disease’. Joe’s money was again lavishly dispensed to get Jack elected to the US Senate in 1952, spending $500,000 to secure the support of the Boston Post, which he calculated was worth 40,000 votes.44