by Gus Russo
To emphasize their tenure in America as temporary, Cubans fleeing to the safety of the U.S. called themselves “exiles,” rather than refugees.
In the early months of the revolution, Castro hoped for American support for his endeavor. “I am going to the United States to gather men and money,” Castro had told his people. “I’ll come back to see you and we shall plan what we have to do for our military training.”14 But the nationalization of American-owned property, combined with Fidel’s firing squad purges, had so outraged U.S. citizens and officials that, in April 1959, when Fidel flew to Washington to seek aid for his fledgling regime, President Eisenhower refused to see him. Not only did the United States refuse any assistance to Cuba, but Eisenhower virtually planted the kiss of death on the revolution by banning all Cuban sugar imports to the America Castro was surely disappointed. The United States had been silent during the excesses of the Batista regime. But now, it seemed, Eisenhower was doing his best to drive Cuba into the Soviet sphere.
What followed was an all too-familiar stroke of opportunism by the Soviets. In October 1959, the Soviets sent an envoy to Cuba—Alexander Alexyev. When word of the U.S. sugar ban reached Soviet Premier Khrushchev, he immediately dispatched a cable to Alexyev to forward to Castro. “When I handed this to Fidel, it said that ‘we, the Soviet Union, were ready to buy all the sugar, those 700,000 tons rejected by the Americans. And not only that year’s assignment, but also all the next year’s.’ That was really an event! I was at the rally. There were one million people there. I could see for myself the joy of the Cuban people. They were throwing their berets in the air. They were dancing.”15
In the U.S., debate raged as to whether Castro’s dealings with the Soviet Union represented merely financial opportunism or a political alliance. Castro himself supported the view that his alignment was transient and pragmatic. As if to drive home the point of his non-allied independence, he said, “I hate Soviet imperialism as much as Yankee imperialism! I’m not breaking my neck fighting one dictatorship to fall into the hands of another.”16 However, as historian Bernard Weisberger has written:
For Washington’s security planners, the controversy was wastefully abstract. The brutal fact to deal with was that before 1959, Cuba had been within the American sphere of interest. . . and now it was literally an enemy island in the very waters that lapped at the U.S. Gulf. An unthinkable Soviet foothold, ten minutes from Miami by jet plane.17
In Castro, the U.S. seemed to have quite a potential adversary. Maurice Halperin wrote of the country’s charismatic head, “Like all political leaders. . . he has been a disciple of Machiavelli, capable of inconsistency, opportunism, and deceit but not for their own sake, and always weighing anticipated profits against costs in any political operation.” More forebodingly, Halperin quoted Castro as often saying, “We [Cuban revolutionaries] are not afraid of danger. As a matter of fact, we thrive on it. And besides, everyone has to die sooner or later.”18
The Eisenhower-Nixon Covert Model
In the American public, a vast tide of fear and hatred towards Cuba was rising up. Yet, Dwight D. Eisenhower did not immediately react militarily towards Cuba’s new government. As a Cold War president, he had developed innovative strategies towards burgeoning Communist governments, and his administration would rely on these strategies to take care of Castro.
Having seen the horrors unleashed by world war, Eisenhower believed that another such confrontation, now likely nuclear, had to be avoided by any means necessary. That meant stamping out Communist regimes early, before they could gain global allies.
“Ike” further worried about the built-in dangers of the expanding military-industrial complex, which he believed might trigger a world war if given the slightest provocation. Thus, he turned to the Central Intelligence Agency as his personal counter-insurgency weapon, giving that agency a charge unintended by its founder (President Harry S Truman). The pie was sweetened by the fact that CIA covert operations were much cheaper than anything the U.S. military could undertake. What transpired under Ike’s direction led Blanche Cook, author of The Declassified Eisenhower, to label him “America’s most covert President.” Implicit in Eisenhower’s demand for counter-insurgency was the need for detailed planning: any undertaking was to commence not one moment before every possible contingency had been addressed. In addition, Ike demanded total deniability for the President, and he got what he wanted: after counter-insurgent escapades, the CIA burned the entire paper trail of its communications with the President.
In 1953, the first year of his presidency, Eisenhower, already caught up in Communist “domino theory” fears, instructed CIA director Allen Dulles to implement Operation Ajax: the overthrow of Iran’s leader, Mohammed Mossadegh. The fervent nationalist Mossadegh had had the audacity to nationalize U.S. oil businesses and legalize the Communist party’s right to participate in elections. In response, the CIA adopted a British coup plan in the making for over a decade. When the CIA’s Kim Roosevelt successfully deposed Mossadegh, Eisenhower was so ecstatic that he secreted him into the White House and bestowed on him the National Security Medal.
The following year, when Guatemala’s Jacabo Arbenz nationalized the U.S. multinational United Fruit Company, Ike had Dulles initiate an operation coded PBSUCCESS. On this occasion, Ike told Dulles, “I want you all to be damn good and sure you succeed. When you commit the flag, you commit to win.”19 The coup planning, known only to Ike and the Dulles brothers (Allen of the CIA, and John Foster, Secretary of State), proceeded for over a year before Eisenhower gave the go-ahead. When this coup also proved successful, the White House-CIA covert partnership became entrenched.
After the Guatemalan coup, Ike commissioned an internal report on covert activity. In March 1954, his National Security Council passed Resolution 5412/2, which was intended to give definition and direction to the CIA’s covert action capability. The directive resulted in the formation of the “5412 Committee” (later renamed “the 40 Committee,” then the “303 Committee,” and finally, “The Special Group”). This committee set the standard for the U.S. policy planners:
Create and exploit troublesome problems for International Communisim. . . and facilitate covert and guerrilla operations. . . U.S. Government responsibility for [covert operations] must not be evident. . . and if uncovered the United States can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them. Specifically, such operations shall include sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition, subversion against hostile states. . .
The following September, Ike endorsed “The Doolittle Report,” which intoned: “There are no rules in such a game—norms of human conduct do not apply. We must try to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever and more effective methods.”20
It was against this backdrop that Vice-President Richard Nixon, a legendary anti-Communist, convinced President Eisenhower that something had to be done about Cuba. Nixon thus became one of the first in the Eisenhower administration to urge Castro’s overthrow. This came as no surprise, given Nixon’s role as White House Chair of the “5412 Committee.” It was Nixon’s gung-ho spirit that initiated not only the idea of invading Cuba, but, quite possibly, the use of political assassination as well.
After meeting Fidel Castro in Washington in the spring of 1960, Nixon became, in his own words, “the strongest and most persistent advocate for setting up and supporting” covert action to end Fidel Castro’s regime.21 Nixon’s resolve was reinforced by the opinions of his close friend, William Pawley. Pawley, a World War II hero, became a highly successful capitalist in the Havana of the Batista regime. Ousted after the revolution, Pawley developed a pathological hatred of Castro, and went on to work with both Nixon and the CIA to help launch sabotage raids against the island.
Nixon, as he would later write in 1962, concluded that the U.S. should move “vigorously to eradicate this cancer on our hemisphere and to prevent further Soviet penetration.”22 According to CIA Cuba Project officer (and later Watergate burglar) E. Howard Hunt
, Nixon at this time was the “[Cuba] project’s action officer within the White House.” The U. S. Ambassador to Cuba Philip Bonsai called Nixon “the father of the operation.”23 “Nixon was a hard-liner,” says Eisenhower’s National Security Advisor, Colonel Philip Corso. “He wanted to get rid of him [Castro]. He wanted him hit hard. . . when he was Vice-President. He was a rough customer.”24
As his first step, Nixon drafted a secret four-page memo to Eisenhower, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and Secretary of State Christian Herter (who succeeded John Foster Dulles following his death). “Castro is either incredibly naive about Communism, or is under Communist discipline,” Nixon wrote. All those who received the memo, as well as Nixon himself, were well aware that Castro was not naive. Eisenhower agreed with Nixon’s conclusions, and made him the point man for the new operation, thereby initiating a policy that led to many years of invasion and assassination plots against the Castro regime.
Nixon’s next step was to appoint General Robert E. Cushman, Jr. as his executive assistant for national security affairs. Cushman’s purpose was to coordinate communication between Nixon and the CIA’s team: Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell (Director of Covert Operations), and Jake Esterline (who was soon given the role of planning a Cuban invasion).
Cushman has gone on record as saying that Nixon was the one in the White House applying the pressure, via him, to the CIA.25 The President, a sober military realist, had misgivings about predictions of success from over-enthusiastic bureaucrats. He had been there before, and demanded slow and deliberate planning before he would give the go-ahead. Ike told his Defense Liaison Andrew Goodpaster that the invasion planning was merely a “Contingency plan,” and he put little faith in it. Goodpaster warned that the momentum in the Cuban exile community might become unstoppable, to which Ike replied, “That won’t happen as long as I’m here.” Goodpaster then told Ike that he wouldn’t be in office when the plan came to fruition in early 1961. Ike then said (prophetically), “Well, that’s going to be a problem for my successor.”26
Nixon, however, proceeded full-speed ahead. Years later, mired in the war in Southeast Asia, Nixon wrote of Eisenhower’s painstakingly-slow planning pace, “The liberals are waiting to see Nixon let Cambodia go down the drain the way Eisenhower let Cuba go down the drain.”27
From 1959 on, Cuba’s Fidel Castro became the chief focus of assassination plots hatched by the United States government. Another target of these attempts was Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. In Congressional hearings two decades later, CIA officials, driven by their relished role of secret-keepers, refused to name the originator of the plots, but insisted that the assassination plans were originally approved by someone at a high political level in the Eisenhower administration. That person appears not to have been President Eisenhower. Richard Nixon may have been the original instigator of these plots.
Recent interviews strongly suggest that Nixon, along with his Military Aide, General Robert Cushman, secretly undertook an anti-Castro operation that operated outside of Presidential and Security Council controls. He enlisted trusted power brokers in Washington and exiles in Miami to hatch not only of a Cuban peso counterfeiting scheme, but also to assemble an assassination squad. The goal was to invade Cuba while Castro was being executed—all prior to the November 1960 election—thus aiding Nixon’s presidential bid.
Although Nixon pressed for action before the all-important November presidential election, it was not to happen then. The exile forces proved too difficult to coalesce in such a brief time. The plan would reach fruition sometime in the spring of 1961, and become known as the Bay of Pigs operation.
Cuba and Politics
President Kennedy’s inauguration in January 1961 came on the heels of a campaign pitting one Cold War sabre-rattler against the other. Though he proved the louder and the more adept, Kennedy’s personal history with Cuba gave little indication of the strategy that Kennedy, the campaigner, would later adopt.
Kennedy first visited the Havana casinos in December 1957 during a period of marital troubles. According to the widow of mobster/casino owner Meyer Lansky, young senator Kennedy asked Lansky if he could set him up with women. Kennedy traveled to the island with his friend, Senator George Smathers, Democrat of Florida, who has said, “Kennedy liked Cuba. He liked the style. He liked the people. . . Once they started looking after you, which they naturally would a senator, why it was just elegant.” It proved so enjoyable that the two pals returned to Cuba again in 1958. Regarding politics, Smathers recalls, “I don’t think I ever heard Kennedy express any feeling about Batista or Castro either way.”28
By the time of his presidential campaign in 1960, John Kennedy knew innately that the political necessities of demonization and hyperbole could create international monsters where none existed. But before succumbing to the rhetoric of the campaign trail, Kennedy authored “The Strategy of Peace,” in which he wrote sympathetically of Castro’s mission. In that piece, Kennedy compared Castro to the “George Washington of South America,” Simon Bolivar, whose leadership freed much of South America from Spanish colonialism.29 As he later remarked to a friend, “I don’t know why we didn’t embrace Castro when he was in this country in 1959, pleading for help. . . Instead of that, we made an enemy of him, and then we get upset because the Russians are giving them money, doing for them what we wouldn’t do.”30 Shortly before his death in 1963, in an interview with Jean Daniel of the Paris Express, President Kennedy elaborated:
I believe there is no country in the world, including the African regions, including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation, and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part because of my country’s policies during the Batista regime. I believe that we created, built, and manufactured the Cuban movement, without realizing it.31
However, in the 1960 presidential campaign, both major party candidates, Nixon and Kennedy, recognized the votes to be gained by being tough on Castro.32 This shared anti-Castroism would prove to be Kennedy’s fatal mistake. In his zeal to win the presidency, John Kennedy chose to vilify Castro. He saw it as a convenient way to polarize the electorate. Kennedy’s soon-to-be Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, was startled by the intensity of Kennedy’s new anti-Castro feelings and thought that Kennedy “had it in for Castro.” Historian Bernard Weisberger concluded, “Future positions were frozen. Kennedy became rooted in absolute hostility to Castro.”33
In late October 1960, with the election near and its outcome very much in doubt, Kennedy told advisor and speechwriter Richard Goodwin to prepare a “real blast” for Nixon.34 From written questions the public submitted to the candidate at his major evening stops, Goodwin had noticed that Americans feared Cuba and Castro more than the USSR and its leader, Nikita Khrushchev. In fact, Castro had come to personify the conflict between communism and Americanism. He was public enemy number one. The idea of a communist outpost 90 miles from Florida disturbed Kennedy’s listeners more than any other foreign policy issue.35 “It was almost as if the communists had taken over southern Florida,” Goodwin remembered later.36
Tapping into this large reservoir of fear and anger seemed a good way to juice up the campaign, and it was consistent with his past conduct. During his terms in the House and Senate, Kennedy had been a stalwart Cold Warrior. Nothing in his background gave Kennedy’s speechwriters pause before attacking Nixon for “losing” Cuba, much as the Republicans had attacked the Democrats on the equally ridiculous charge of “losing” China to communism in the late 1940s.
Thus did Cuba become a “major” campaign issue in 1960, as Goodwin, who was partly responsible for making it so, would put it:37
In dozens of speeches we assailed Nixon and the Republicans for losing Cuba to our communist adversaries. (“Ike didn’t lose it,” Kennedy scribbled in the margin of one of his speeches, “he gave it away.”) We censured the feeble Republican response to this new danger; proposed further sanctions, a step-up of propaganda, action to “quarant
ine” the Cuban revolution, increased support for those Cubans, in exile and elsewhere, who opposed the Castro regime.38
Goodwin composed the “real blast for Nixon” one evening late in October. It attacked the Republicans for weakly opposing the perceived menace of communist Cuba. But this one went further than its predecessors by decrying the Eisenhower administration’s feeble support of anti-Castro forces, both in exile in the U.S. and underground in Cuba, offering “eventual hope of overthrowing Castro.” Those “fighters for freedom” deserved greater support, Goodwin wrote.
The speech, which was released to the press before the candidate approved it, provoked criticism for its “rash” call for government aid in overthrowing Castro: a clear violation of international law in general and the Inter-American treaty in particular. Nixon professed outrage at Kennedy’s recklessness in advocating American-sponsored revolution or invasion. Either, he said, would greatly harm American interests by demonstrating Washington’s willingness to baldly breach its international responsibilities and commitments. Unknown to the public, this was a striking display of Nixon’s deviousness. The vice-president had been largely responsible for the training of a force of Cuban exile guerrillas—training that President Eisenhower approved in March 1960.
Kennedy’s campaign strategy, according to Nixon, was no less devious than his own. He believed that Kennedy had been briefed by CIA chief Allen Dulles about plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion (Dulles later denied the charge). Therefore, according to Nixon, Kennedy was aware that the Eisenhower administration was going after Fidel, and knew that Nixon was incapable of responding to Kennedy’s charges because of the project’s secrecy. Nixon would later write in his memoirs:
