Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence

by Philip Brenner

  Thus, one explanation for the Bay of Pigs failure was that the tiny and battered Cuban air force was able to sink the invaders’ resupply ship, dooming the operation, because Kennedy refused to order an air strike on the morning of the invasion. But the report by the CIA inspector general (IG) on the operation concluded that additional air strikes would have made little difference because of many other organizational problems.31 For example, a 160-man diversionary unit, which was supposed to land about thirty miles east of Guantánamo on April 15, decided to avoid capture and stayed safely on its boat. The Taylor Committee—created by President Kennedy and headed by General Maxwell D. Taylor—judged that “This failure may have had a considerable affect [sic] on the main landing as the diversion was intended to draw Castro’s forces to the east and confuse his command.”32

  The CIA training program had problems from the outset. Most of the project officers did not speak Spanish. They prepared the brigadistas mainly for an assault, not for guerrilla warfare, and for a daylight invasion, although the plan called for night landings. Food in the Guatemala camp was terrible and the living conditions were harsh. Morale was so low that some of early recruits abandoned the operation.

  This problem was not only a logistical issue. It reflected, as the IG starkly concluded, the “contempt” CIA officials felt toward the Cubans and the “high-handed attitude” with which they were treated.33 Such contempt was the ultimate betrayal of Brigade 2506. The CIA did not believe the Cuban exiles could run their own program. Project officers described the brigadistas as “yellow-bellied,” and the Cuban Revolutionary Council—the supposedly future political leaders of Cuba whom the CIA had hand-picked—as “idiots,” according to the IG.34

  Just before the invasion began, the Cuban Revolutionary Council members were locked in a “safe house” at Opa Locka airfield outside Miami, despite their protestations, while the CIA wrote and issued public statements in the name of the brigade’s political leaders. Kennedy ordered Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Adolf A. Berle, a longtime Latin American adviser to Democratic presidents, to rush to the base to calm down the Cubans. One of them reportedly was threatening to commit suicide.35

  Cuban Perspective: “First Defeat of Imperialism in the Americas”

  While the April 15 bombardment of airfields did little damage to Cuba’s so-called air force, it did kill a number of workers. The next day, thousands of Cubans attended a rally outside the Colón Cemetery in Havana, where Castro and other officials condemned the attacks and mourned the dead. In his speech, the Cuban leader for the first time described the “character” of the Cuban Revolution as socialist.

  Several lightly armed members of Cuba’s People’s Militia detected the landing of the first brigade on April 17 within fifteen minutes of its arrival and sent a radio warning. A similar signal came soon after from a militia unit at Playa Larga, the beach at the head of the bay, eighteen miles away. A Cuban army battalion stationed at a sugar mill about 45 miles from the Bay of Pigs mobilized before dawn and engaged the attackers, but lacking armored vehicles, it quickly retreated.

  Fidel Castro quickly took charge, shouting orders into telephones in a frenzy, mobilizing the air force and battalions throughout the country. José Ramón Fernández, a professional military officer who was director of Cuba’s military schools that were training new cadets for the armed forces, became commander of the main unit at the Bay of Pigs. At about 2:00 a.m. on April 17, Castro woke him with a call, ordering to him to go to the battle front. A few minutes later Castro called again, demanding to know what Fernández was doing. He was still getting dressed. Ten minutes passed and Castro called again: “Why are you still there?”36

  Cuban air force planes arrived at daybreak and began bombing. Fidel had ordered that their priority should be the supply ships. They hit two, destroying one and damaging another. By midday, the Cuban leader was there himself, fighting alongside the militia and regular soldiers. In figure 11.1, we see a photo of Castro on this historic day. When the 72-hour conflict ended, eighty-seven Cuban defenders had been killed, and more than two hundred were wounded.

  Fidel was triumphant. He declared the victory as “the First Defeat of Imperialism in the Americas.” News of the outcome resounded throughout the third world, inflating further the symbol of the Cuban David challenging the US Goliath. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev reevaluated his earlier judgment, decided that the Cuban revolution had a good chance to survive, and authorized increased shipments of military equipment and subsidized trade with Cuba.37 (However, by December 1961 the Soviets had not shipped any of the promised MIG-15 fighters, MI-4 helicopters, torpedo boats, advanced communication equipment, or military specialists.)

  Figure 11.1. Fidel Castro (in glasses) during the battle at the Bay of Pigs. Photo courtesy of Granma.

  The Fatal Flaw

  The story of the Bay of Pigs invasion commonly told in the United States tends to echo the official histories. By emphasizing logistical failures, it reproduces the lack of respect for Cubans that the CIA showed for the Cuban exiles. Indeed, the low regard most US officials showed for all of the Cubans involved was the fatal flaw of the mission.

  US planners seemed unable to appreciate the genuine, widespread support the Cuban Revolution had earned in first two years. Ordinary Cubans who lived in the Bay of Pigs vicinity fought tenaciously against the invaders because they had something to protect. Consider that “a contingent of volunteer teachers was assigned to work throughout the swamp” in January 1961, and for the first time “thousands of children who lived on the Zapata Peninsula began to go to elementary school.”38 Similarly, the area had been without a hospital until the government built one in 1959, and farmers there had felt isolated because there were no roads until 1960.

  The US-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion was bound to fail because US officials denied that Cubans could be agents of their own history. The flawed assumption that the invasion would spark a mass insurrection—not its logistics—was the Achilles’ heel of the project. It was fueled by a political misjudgment about what a large majority of Cubans wanted. They wanted neither the form of democracy the United States had supported in Cuba from 1940 to 1952—characterized by corruption and politicians who did the bidding of the US government and corporations—nor the brutal Batista dictatorship, which the United States tolerated and which gave a free reign to organized crime. Cubans wanted independence and sovereignty. The 1959 Cuban revolution was a nationalist uprising. Most Cubans believed that the many errors committed by the revolutionary government were made in good faith, for the benefit of ordinary Cubans. They also were beginning to believe that Cubans themselves could solve their problems.

  Notes

  1. Several excellent studies have been published about the planning for and execution of the US invasion at Playa Girón, as Cubans refer to the events, or the Bay of Pigs, as the invasion generally is called in the United States. These include James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh, eds., Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998); Howard Jones, The Bay of Pigs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Peter Kornbluh, ed., Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba (New York: New Press, 1998); Jim Rasenberger, The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America’s Doomed Invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs (New York: Scribner, 2011); Juan Carlos Rodríguez, The Bay of Pigs and the CIA, trans. Mary Todd (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1999). Unless otherwise noted, the narrative of this chapter is based on these secondary sources. A large number of primary documents are available from the National Security Archive, http://nsarchive.gwu.edu. In particular, see document sets “The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962,” “The Cuban Missile Crisis: 50th Anniversary Update,” and “The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited: An International Collection, From Bay of Pigs to Nuclear Brink.” Also see Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, volume X, Cuba, January 1961–September 1962, ed. Louis J. Smith (
Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1997), cited as FRUS, 1961–1963, volume X; Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, volume XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath, eds. Edward C. Keefer, Charles S. Sampson, and Louis J. Smith (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1996), cited as FRUS, 1961–1963, volume XI.

  2. Rodríguez, The Bay of Pigs and the CIA, 142, 176.

  3. Wayne S. Smith, The Closest of Enemies: A Personal and Diplomatic Account of US-Cuban Relations since 1957 (New York: Norton, 1987), 47. Also see Philip W. Bonsal, Cuba, Castro, and the United States (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), 25–28, 39–42.

  4. Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba in the American Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 113.

  5. George Lakoff, Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 57–58.

  6. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 25.

  7. Richard M. Nixon, “Rough draft of summary of conversation between the vice-president and Fidel Castro,” April 25, 1959, reprinted in Jeffrey J. Safford, “The Nixon-Castro Meeting of 19 April 1959,” Diplomatic History 4, no. 4 (Fall 1980): 431.

  8. FRUS, 1958–1960, volume VI, Document No. 325, June 25, 1959. Cuba has acknowledged its active support only for a raid against the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo.

  9. Smith, The Closest of Enemies, 52.

  10. FRUS, 1958–1960, volume VI, Document No. 376, October 23, 1959.

  11. FRUS, 1958–1960, volume VI, Document No. 387, November 5, 1959.

  12. Morley, Imperial State and Revolution, 85.

  13. Thomas G. Paterson, Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 242, 258.

  14. FRUS, 1958–1960, volume VI, Document No. 486, March 17, 1960.

  15. Morley, Imperial State and Revolution, 109.

  16. “Text of O.A.S. Declaration of San Jose,” New York Times, August 29, 1960, 3.

  17. “First Declaration of Havana,” September 2, 1960, in Cuban Revolution Reader: A Documentary History of 40 Key Moments of the Cuban Revolution, ed. Julio García Luis (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2001), 45–51.

  18. Sergio del Valle Jiménez, ed., Peligros y Principios: La Crisis de Octubre desde Cuba (Havana: Editora Verde Olivo, 1992), 48.

  19. US Central Intelligence Agency, “Inspector General’s Survey of the Cuban Operation,” October 1961, p. 48, available at the National Security Archive, Washington, DC, Accession No. CU00223; reprinted in Peter Kornbluh, ed., Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba (New York: New Press, 1998), 48.

  20. E. W. Kenworthy, “Regime Is Scored; People Suffer Under ‘Yoke of Dictator,’ President Says,” New York Times, January 4, 1961, 1.

  21. FRUS, 1961–1963, volume X, Document 9, January 4, 1961.

  22. Michael Warner, “Lessons Unlearned: The CIA’s Internal Probe of the Bay of Pigs Affair,” Studies in Intelligence, Winter 1998/99, https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/winter98_99/art08.html.

  23. Blight and Kornbluh, Politics of Illusion, 85.

  24. Peter Wyden, Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 119.

  25. US Central Intelligence Agency, “Taylor Commission Report on Cuban Operations,” Memorandum No. 1, June 13, 1961, 10; available at the National Security Archive, Washington, DC, Accession No. CU00181 [hereafter cited as Taylor Commission, Memorandum No. 1].

  26. FRUS, 1961–1963, volume X, Document 61, March 15, 1961.

  27. “Text of Statement by Kennedy on Dealing with Castro Regime,” New York Times, October 21, 1960, 18.

  28. FRUS, 1961–1963, volume X, Document 46, February 17, 1961.

  29. Theodore Draper, Castro’s Revolution: Myths and Realities (New York: Praeger, 1962), 59.

  30. Blight and Kornbluh, Politics of Illusion, prologue and chapter 1; Haynes Johnson with Manuel Artime, The Bay of Pigs: The Leaders’ Story of Brigade 2506 (New York: Norton, 1964).

  31. Kornbluh, Bay of Pigs Declassified, 41.

  32. Taylor Commission, Memorandum No. 1, 14–15.

  33. Kornbluh, Bay of Pigs Declassified, 73.

  34. Kornbluh, Bay of Pigs Declassified, 74.

  35. Rasenberger, The Brilliant Disaster, 286.

  36. Fidel Castro and José Ramón Fernández, Playa Girón (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2001), 107.

  37. Carlos Lechuga, In the Eye of the Storm: Castro, Khrushchev, Kennedy and the Missile Crisis, trans. Mary Todd (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1995), 18; Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: Norton, 1997), 139–40, 146.

  38. Rodríguez, The Bay of Pigs and the CIA, 118–121.

  Chapter 12

  The Missile Crisis

  We’re already a modern country, we have twentieth-century weapons, atomic bombs, we’re no longer an insignificant colony, we’ve already rushed into history, we have the same weapons that the Russians and the Americans rattle at each other. Our power of destruction makes us an equal for a moment to the two great world powers. Still, I’m sure they’ll never accept us on equal terms, they’ll take our weapons away, ignore us, crush this island.

  —Narrator of Inconsolable Memories1

  Writing to Fidel Castro in 1965, Che Guevara recalled the October 1962 missile crisis in the following way: “I have lived magnificent days and I felt at your side the pride of belonging to our people in the luminous and sad days of the Caribbean crisis.”2

  Luminous and sad? You would be hard pressed to find any American or Russian who recalled those days as luminous and sad. “Harrowing,” “exhausting,” “stressful,” “frightening,” and “horrifying.” These were the words used by those who experienced the crisis. Did Guevara and his Cuban comrades experience the same crisis as the Americans and Soviets?

  In fact, the significance of the 1962 trilateral confrontation over ballistic missiles in Cuba was different for Cubans than for others. The crisis had a lasting impact on Cuba’s foreign relations, though the Cuban perspective about the crisis is not widely known in the United States.

  While the 1962 missile crisis brought the world closer to a nuclear war than any other crisis, it also seemed to end well. The United States and the Soviet Union did not go to war; the Soviets removed the missiles; the United States promised not to invade Cuba. Only one US soldier died in combat, Major Rudolph Anderson, who was piloting the U-2 surveillance plane the Soviets downed with a surface-to-air missile (SAM) on October 27.

  Most Americans understand the Cuban Missile Crisis as teachers and commentators repeatedly have summarized it: The Soviet Union placed ballistic missiles in Cuba to threaten the United States. These missiles could hit major US cities and ports in less than ten minutes. The crisis lasted for thirteen days, from October 16, when President Kennedy learned about the missiles, until October 28, when Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles in exchange for a US promise not to invade Cuba. The outcome was a great success for the United States, and perhaps Kennedy’s “finest hour.” In early 2001, one of the authors took his fourteen-year-old daughter to see Thirteen Days, a film that tells the missile crisis story from the traditional US perspective. As they exited the theater, he asked her why the Soviets had placed the missiles in Cuba. On the basis of the film, she said, “Because they were bad people.”

  Map 12.1. Map used by CIA briefers for President John F. Kennedy on October 16, 1962, indicates the estimated range of the Soviet ballistic missiles. Central Intelligence Agency, “Probable Soviet MRBM Sites in Cuba,” October 16, 1962.

  A Cuban’s view of the crisis provides a stark contrast to an American one. Cubans even give it a different name, the “Octobe
r Crisis.” The name embodies several elements, according to Cuban political scientist Carlos Alzugaray Treto. Cubans, he explained, at first used “Caribbean Crisis”—the Soviet name for the confrontation—and “October Crisis” interchangeably. But over time, he said, they “began to settle for “crisis de octubre,” because “there were so many crises with the US that what defined each crisis was the month in which it happened and not the place.”3 A second explanation for the Cuban appellation is that Cubans have used it to indicate that their understanding of the crisis differs from the Soviet interpretation. The name thus highlights Cuba’s ongoing tension with the United States, which Cubans argued led to the crisis over the missiles, and Cuba’s claim of betrayal by the Soviet Union. From Cuba’s perspective, Soviet and US interests defined the terms by which they avoided a nuclear war. The two superpowers neither addressed nor resolved the underlying causes of the crisis, the US war against Cuba.4

  Three Perspectives

  “Eyeball to Eyeball”: The Traditional US Narrative

  Harvard political scientist Graham Allison articulated a view in 1971 that summarizes nearly all early analyses of the crisis: “For thirteen days in October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union stood ‘eyeball to eyeball,’ each with the power of mutual annihilation in hand. . . . During the crisis, the United States was firm but forbearing. The Soviet Union looked hard, blinked twice, and then withdrew.”5 From this perspective, the crisis involved only the two superpowers and lasted less than two weeks.

  In fact, prior to October 16, 1962, US officials had become concerned about the increasing Soviet military buildup in Cuba. The Central Intelligence Agency judged in late August that the Soviets were delivering large quantities of defensive equipment to Cuba, but not ballistic missiles. Still, the president directed the Defense Department to examine ways of removing the Soviet military presence in Cuba.6