Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence

by Philip Brenner

  Beneath this seemingly benign approach, though, lingered an attitude of superiority that we saw in chapters 4 and 5 when the United States occupied Cuba after the Cuban War of Independence. Historian Louis Pérez observes that US officials imagined Cubans as if they were young children: immature, ignorant, and untutored in the ways of civilized people. And as a parent, the United States had “the duty to protect and nurture Cuba,” which justified US domination of Cuba as a selfless fulfillment of parental duty.4

  Embedded in the parent-child metaphor, linguist George Lakoff explains, is the expectation that the parent has the responsibility to teach the child right from wrong. And so when children are disobedient, they must be punished in order to instill them with discipline.5 To spare the rod was to spoil the child. In turn, an offspring had the responsibility to be appropriately grateful and deferential to the parent.

  But to the victorious leaders of the 1959 Revolution, playing their “proper” role as children would have been snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. They refused to be either compliant or appreciative. In response, US officials, editorial writers, and cartoonists soon began to depict the new Cuban government, and Fidel Castro, as a screaming, ranting, temperamental child—the kind of nuisance President Theodore Roosevelt had castigated in 1906, when he called the country “that infernal little Cuban republic.”6

  From Irritant to Menace

  During the first months after the victory over Batista, the US concern over Cuba was not about the Soviet Union, with which Cuba had neither diplomatic nor trade relations. Officials worried about Fidel Castro’s charisma and his penchant to have Cuba chart an independent course. This concern was evident in a confidential memo Vice President Richard Nixon wrote after meeting with Fidel in April 1959. The Cuban leader, Nixon judged,

  has those indefinable qualities which make him a leader of men. Whatever we may think of him he is going to be a great factor in the development of Cuba and very possibly in Latin American affairs generally. He seems to be sincere. He is either incredibly naive about Communism or under Communist discipline—my guess is the former. . . . But because he has the power to lead to which I have referred we have no choice but at least to try to orient him in the right direction.7

  Nixon met Fidel while the new prime minister was in the United States on a public relations gambit to improve his image prior to rolling out the Agrarian Reform Law. Staying at a Harlem hotel, he toured the city, spoke to thirty thousand people in Central Park, visited Yankee Stadium, and appeared on Meet the Press. When Castro arrived in Washington, President Eisenhower pointedly departed for a golfing date in Georgia, leaving Nixon to meet with the bearded revolutionary. The two engaged in a wide-ranging conversation for several hours, with Fidel graciously speaking in broken English.

  The Cuban leader not only rejected US “orientation.” He did not request any US foreign assistance, which troubled US officials, because they hoped that US aid would be a mechanism for binding Cuba to the United States. In addition, there was inconclusive evidence that Cuba was sending missions to support insurgent activity against dictatorships in the Dominican Republic, Panama, and Nicaragua.8 These alleged expeditions implicitly challenged US dominance in the region and the US conception of itself as protector of the hemisphere, an idea nurtured since the Monroe Doctrine in 1823.

  By October 1959, the US image of Cuba as a wayward child seemed too benign. The revolutionary government had transformed Cuba into a juvenile delinquent, a menace more than an irritant. Incapable of being disciplined, and unwilling to acknowledge that it owed gratitude to the United States for the “blessings of liberty” bestowed on the island since 1898, Cuba had betrayed its parent’s heritage and upbringing. Wayne S. Smith was a junior foreign service officer in the embassy at the time, and later became chief US diplomat in Cuba from 1979 to 1982. He recalls that “by October 1959 most of us in Havana” had decided Castro was turning toward the Soviet Union.9 In an October 1959 policy paper later endorsed by the secretary of state, Assistant Secretary R. Roy Rubottom Jr. concluded:

  That the policies and programs of the Castro Government which are inconsistent with the minimal requirements of good Cuban-US relations and with US objectives for Cuba and Latin America will not be satisfactorily altered except as a result of Cuban opposition to Castro’s present course and/or a change in the Cuban regime.10

  Secretary of State Christian Herter summarized for President Eisenhower why Cuba’s resistance to US discipline posed a threat to the United States. In a November 1959 memo, he observed that Castro “has veered towards a ‘neutralist’ anti-American foreign policy for Cuba which, if emulated by other Latin American countries, would have serious adverse effects on Free World support of our leadership.”11 By the end of November 1959 even Ambassador Bonsal had become critical of Cuba’s “independent position in world affairs.”12 Before the new year began, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was developing plans to overthrow the Cuban government.13

  Enter the Soviet Union

  The Soviets knew little about Fidel Castro and the July 26th Movement, and at first they tended to operate from the assumption that Cuba was still within the US sphere of interest. They also were not eager to support rebels who neither would take orders from Moscow nor were likely to survive US antagonism. Moscow waited a year before proposing that a Soviet trade delegation go to Havana.

  The group that came in February 1960 was a prominent one, headed by First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan. Shortly afterward, the two countries reestablished diplomatic relations, which Batista had broken in 1952 after he seized power. Mikoyan concluded the trade mission by announcing $100 million of commercial credit for the Cuban government, including oil shipments, and pledging to buy five million tons of Cuban sugar annually for five years. It was a signal of a major change after decades of Cuban economic dependence on US trade, and it spurred President Eisenhower to approve plans for a covert operation on March 17, 1960, to overthrow the Cuban government—plans that became the Bay of Pigs invasion.14

  The operation was to be based on the CIA’s 1954 intervention in Guatemala, when the agency helped to overthrow the democratically elected government headed by Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. Its plan called for the creation of opposition and propaganda units among exiles in Miami, an acceleration of intelligence operations on the island, and support for counterrevolutionaries, along with the training of five hundred exiles who would invade the island. Their arrival was supposed to spark an island-wide revolt that would oust the revolutionary government. The CIA turned to the now friendly Guatemala dictatorship to provide facilities for preparing the invaders.

  Tensions Increase

  In June 1960, President Eisenhower ordered Esso and Texaco not to refine Soviet petroleum at the companies’ Cuban facilities. In a speech vehemently denouncing imperialism, Prime Minister Castro responded by announcing the nationalization of the refineries. One month later, the United States reduced Cuba’s sugar quota to zero, effectively imposing a ban on Cuban sugar. Given the centrality of sugar to the Cuban economy, the zero-quota decision is often cited as the start of the US economic embargo. But Eisenhower’s advisers viewed the action as nothing more than “a good solid slap,” that is, a restrained response to Cuba’s expropriation of the refineries, short of deadly options that the United States might have chosen.15

  The United States followed up in August by pressuring the Organization of American States (OAS) to condemn Cuba for permitting Soviet “extra-continental intervention” in the hemisphere that “endangers American solidarity and security.”16 Castro reacted to the OAS condemnation with the “First Declaration of Havana” on September 2, 1960. Throwing down a gauntlet to the United States, he proclaimed Cuba would be committed to ending what Herter had called US “leadership” and Castro characterized as “domination”: “[T]he People of Cuba strongly condemn US imperialism for its gross and criminal domination . . . of all the peoples of Latin
America . . . affirm their faith that Latin America, united and victorious will soon be free of the bonds that now make its economies rich spoils for US imperialism.”17

  From the US perspective, the speech was an aggressive assault. And then Cuba added fuel to the simmering fire. Late in 1960, it received a few shipments of antiquated arms from Soviet bloc countries, which confirmed US government fears that Cuba might become a beachhead for Soviet influence in the Western Hemisphere.18

  Charges that Castro had betrayed the Cuban revolution swirled around Washington, and the US press turned sharply against the revolutionaries. Accordingly, plans to overthrow the Cuban government took on the air of a noble enterprise. Dazzled by the mistaken assumption that Cubans yearned for the prerevolutionary relationship, US officials convinced themselves that the Cuban people would rise up spontaneously against the Cuban government and invite the United States to restore order in the country.19 On January 3, 1961, in the final days of his administration, President Eisenhower contributed to the seemingly unstoppable momentum for an invasion. Citing “harassments” by the Cuban government—Cuba had demanded two days earlier that the US embassy reduce its staff to eleven people—the US president broke diplomatic relations with Cuba.20

  The Plan Changes

  As Secret as Christmas Day

  Richard Bissell was an ambitious CIA deputy director for plans who had voted for John Fitzgerald Kennedy in the November 1960 election. An Ivy Leaguer, he felt a rapport with the president-elect and hoped that Kennedy would choose him to succeed Allen Dulles as CIA director. But when he briefed Kennedy about the covert operation ten days after the presidential election, Bissell neglected to inform the president-elect that the plan had changed. The CIA had decided that the initial plan—to slowly infiltrate five hundred paramilitaries into Cuba to reinforce counterrevolutionaries already in place—was no longer feasible.

  The new plan called for a force three times as large that would seize and hold a piece of territory, declaring itself to be the new legitimate government of Cuba. The invasion was expected to “precipitate a general uprising throughout Cuba and cause the revolt of large segments of the Cuban Army and Militia,” as Jack Hawkins, the US field commander for the Bay of Pigs operation, wrote in a January 1961 memo.21

  Bissell also neglected to inform Kennedy about two other essential elements of the operation: an ongoing CIA program to assassinate the Cuban leadership and his expectation that the president ultimately would need to use US military forces to support the invaders. US attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro have been acknowledged officially since the 1975 US Senate hearings chaired by Frank Church (D-ID). But only in the mid-1990s did it become certain that murdering the Cuban leadership was an essential component of the Bay of Pigs attack.

  As historian Michael Warner wrote in a now declassified study, Dulles and Bissell were unconcerned about the logistical shortcomings of the exiles’ attack because they believed “Castro would either be assassinated or President Kennedy would send in the Marines to rescue the Brigade.”22 Jacob Esterline, the operational director for the invasion in the CIA’s Directorate for Plans, quickly understood the implication of the assassination strategy when he saw documents about it for the first time at a 1996 conference. As tears welled in his eyes, he said, “I’ll tell you what really bothers me about this. This stupid cockamamie idea may well have compromised serious support and backing of the brigade operation that was the main event, or should have been. . . . Maybe [Bissell] didn’t even care much about whether my people made it or not.”23

  While the Soviet bloc had not yet provided Cuba with significant military equipment, Cuba compensated for its lack of military strength with a capable intelligence operation. It infiltrated several agents into the Guatemala training camps, which turned out to be relatively easy. When the CIA increased the number of the invaders from five hundred to fifteen hundred, it desperately sought recruits with advertisements in Miami. Journalist Peter Wyden quoted one disgruntled CIA official saying that the covert operation had become “as secret as Christmas Day.”24 Cuban leaders were aware, therefore, that the United States was preparing for an exile invasion. But they did not know precisely when and where the assault would occur.

  Cuban military planners evaluated several likely invasion sites. One obvious entry point was the US Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay. The United States could secretly bring exiles to the base and launch the attack from there. But the site was so obvious that the Cubans came to discount its importance. However, they did worry that an exile force might masquerade as regular Cuban soldiers, attack the US base, and thus create a pretext for a US invasion. The Guantánamo Bay naval station was in Oriente Province, which had historical significance as the location where earlier Cuban revolts had started. The second possibility was given so much credence that Raúl Castro took personal command of Cuban defense forces in Oriente.

  Meanwhile, Cuban militia members were deployed in small numbers along the northern and southern coasts as lookouts. Internal security was tightened—any report of suspicious activity led to arrests, which did result in abuses. In April 1961 alone, thousands were imprisoned.

  Kennedy Wants a “Quiet” Landing

  Prior to his inauguration, the newly elected president raised few objections about the planned invasion. But once in office, he began to worry that an incursion could worsen the already negative US image in Latin America. This concern led him to tell the CIA on March 11 to move the planned landing site from the city of Trinidad—on Cuba’s southern coast—to a place that would “provide for a ‘quiet’ landing,” according to the CIA’s inspector general’s postmortem report. It added that the president wanted to avoid “the appearance of a World War II type of amphibious assault” that would expose the hand of the United States.25

  The CIA came back four days later with a new location, the Bay of Pigs, which had an existing airfield capable of handling “tactical air operations” and where there could be “An Unspectacular Landing.”26 In fact, the location was less than ideal. Only three roads led to the beaches, easily enabling the Cuban military to establish roadblocks. Had the exiles landed at Trinidad, they would have been able to flee to the adjacent Escambray Mountains where counterrevolutionaries were based. The Bay of Pigs is seventy miles west of the Escambray. Survivors would have had to traverse the crocodile-infested Zapata swamp to reach the mountains.

  Despite its logistical shortcomings, subordinates sensed that President Kennedy was reluctant to cancel the operation. No one wanted to be marked as a naysayer early in an administration that was trying to create a can-do image. In part, the young president himself had undermined the possibility of calling off the invasion, by attacking Nixon during the election campaign for failing to come to the aid of counterrevolutionaries, whom he called “fighters for freedom.”27 Now that he was in a position to help them, critics were certain to harp on his apparent hypocrisy if he had not acted. And the window for action was closing quickly. On February 17, the CIA had concluded that the Castro regime is steadily consolidating its control over Cuba—there was no significant likelihood that the Castro regime will fall of its own weight.28

  Two Perspectives on the Defeat of Brigade 2506

  Each member of the invading party received a number, starting at 2,501. The numbering was intended to make the Cubans think the group was larger than the 1,500 actually involved. In the aftermath, the survivors named themselves Brigade 2506, after the number of the first invader who was killed.

  At 1:15 a.m. on April 17, 1961, the first landing party arrived at Playa Girón, the beach at the mouth of the eighteen-mile-long Bay of Pigs, on the southern coast of Cuba. Three days later, 114 members of Brigade 2506 lay dead, 1,189 had been captured, and the fighting was over. The narrative of the invasion has been told many times, most often from the US perspective, which contrasts with the Cuban view.

  US Perspective: “A Perfect Failure” or Betrayal
>
  There are two popular US perspectives. The most common focuses on the constellation of logistical errors that led to the outcome, which journalist Theodore Draper dubbed as “a perfect failure.”29 The other US narrative, often heard from Brigade 2506 survivors, emphasizes President Kennedy’s unwillingness to provide more military support, which they have characterized as a betrayal.30

  A map of the Bay of Pigs area (see map 11.1 on next page) indicates the swamps to the east and northeast of the landing site, which made escape to the Escambray Mountains nearly impossible. Cubans name the invasion after one of the beaches, Playa Girón, around which significant fighting occurred. There was also a landing at Playa Larga, at the northern end of the bay.

  Map 11.1. Bay of Pigs Area. Map by Peter WD.

  Two days before the invasion, the CIA attempted to destroy the small Cuban air force and make airfields inoperable. Eight crews made up of Alabama National Guard members and Cuban exiles flew B-26 bombers camouflaged to look as if they were Cuban military planes. In anticipation of the attack, Fidel had ordered mock planes made of balsa wood to be placed outside hangars and the actual planes to be hidden. The air raid left Cuba with almost its entire air force undamaged—two B-26 bombers, three British World War II Sea Fury fighter planes, and three T-33 jet trainers. All of the airstrips remained operable. The CIA then requested authorization for a second bombing run. Kennedy refused, still seeking to keep the US role hidden.