Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence

by Philip Brenner

  Imagine Castro’s surprise to hear on October 28—by way of a radio broadcast, without the courtesy of a prior telephone call from Khrushchev or the Soviet ambassador—that the Soviets had agreed to remove the missiles. He did not find the Soviet explanation for the oversight credible—that Khrushchev did not consult him because there was a lack of time given the urgency of the situation. In fact, Khrushchev made the decision to remove the missiles three days earlier, which gave him sufficient time to inform Castro about the change in the Soviets’ position and to consult with the Cubans about strategy.

  The Soviet fear of nuclear war was real, but lack of time was not the reason for failing to consult with the Cubans. The Soviet leaders thought that if they involved Castro in negotiations, a peaceful resolution of the crisis would have been more difficult. They believed the Cuban leader was not ready to compromise. In his memoirs, Khrushchev scornfully remarked, “In those days, you know, Fidel was very fiery . . . he hadn’t even thought about the obvious consequences of his proposal, which placed the world on the brink of destruction.”32

  On October 28, Cuba notified Acting Secretary-General U Thant that Cuba wanted five demands satisfied before it would permit international verification that the ballistic missiles had been removed. They were: (1) Cease the US economic embargo and US pressure on other countries to cut commercial links to Cuba; (2) end US subversive activities against Cuba; (3) stop US supported “piratical attacks” from bases in the United States and Puerto Rico; (4) discontinue US violations of Cuban airspace; and (5) US withdrawal from Guantánamo Naval Base.33

  Soviet leaders judged that if they included any of Cuba’s demands, their negotiations with the United States would have been even more complicated. Yet if the Soviet leaders had been less dismissive of their Cuban allies, they might have found Kennedy willing to accept at least one of Cuba’s requirements, that the United States meet with Cuba face-to-face to discuss Cuba’s complaints about US aggression.34 A Soviet demand for direct negotiations between Cuba and the United States also would have acknowledged that Cuba’s conflict with the United States was the source of the crisis, and that Cuba had the sovereign right to negotiate its own fate.

  Yet the leader of a superpower has difficulty in thinking this way. Khrushchev and Kennedy were able to empathize with each other more easily than either could with Castro. In accepting Kennedy’s stipulation that international inspectors confirm the missiles’ removal, Khrushchev cavalierly ignored Cuban sovereignty. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had asked Cuba for permission to make inspections on Cuban territory, and Fidel refused to allow inspectors to enter the country.

  Meanwhile, the United States continued surveillance flights in Cuban airspace. Indeed, the crisis did not actually end on October 28, because the United States maintained its strategic forces at Defense Condition 2 (DEFCON-2), the highest state of alert short of nuclear war. Its full might remained at a hair trigger, where the slightest error might have set off Armageddon.

  The November Crisis

  Such were the circumstances when Soviet deputy premier Mikoyan arrived in Cuba on November 2. Khrushchev had sent him halfway around the world to gain Cuban acquiescence in some form of international inspection, because that issue had become an obstacle to concluding the crisis. Mikoyan also hoped to assuage the anger of Cuba’s leaders.35

  But Castro was unyielding. He told Mikoyan on November 4, “We cannot take that step. If we agree to an inspection, then it is as if we permit the United States of America to determine what we can or cannot do in foreign policy. That hurts our sovereignty.”36

  Adding injury to insult, Khrushchev had volunteered to remove all Soviet troops from the island. Recalling this decision in 1968, Castro noted scornfully that Kennedy’s demands “did not include those divisions, which were not offensive or strategic weapons.” This decision, Castro said, “was a freely granted concession to top off the concession of the withdrawal of the strategic missiles.”37 Moreover, Khrushchev acquiesced to Kennedy’s demands to take back both obsolete IL-28 bombers and Komar patrol boats, which had been delivered to Cuba to ward off attacks from Operation Mongoose operatives.

  The Soviet retreat on the IL-28s and Komars, despite a firm promise to Cuba that they would not be removed, was the final confirmation of Soviet treachery from Castro’s viewpoint. Five years later he explained that Cuba found itself in “the special circumstance of . . . an aggressive and emboldened enemy, an ally on the retreat and . . . our resolve to prevent relations with that ally from deteriorating to the point of rupture.”38 Thus for Cuba, the crisis was never fully resolved. “An international conflict was avoided,” Castro observed in 1992, “but peace had not been achieved. For our country, there was no peace.”39

  Mikoyan could not understand this point of view. Like other Soviet officials, he was unable to comprehend the anger that Cuba’s leaders expressed about the outcome of the confrontation. He said to Fidel and Raúl Castro, Che Guevara, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, and Osvaldo Dortícos in November 1962, “Let our enemies die. We must live and live. . . . Sometimes, in order to take two steps forward,” Mikoyan advised, “it is necessary to take a step back.”40 But this was not a choice the Cubans felt they had. The Soviet Union was a large country. It could absorb defeats. For Cuba, a small country, a defeat by the other superpower essentially would mean annihilation.

  The crisis formally ended on January 7, 1963, with two letters to UN Acting Secretary-General U Thant. One was a joint letter from the United States and the Soviet Union. The other was from Cuba alone.41 The occasion was reminiscent of the treaty signing in 1898 that ended Spain’s colonial domination of Cuba. Cuba had been excluded, and only the United States and Spain ratified the treaty.

  Cuba’s Lessons

  Cuba’s dilemma was daunting at the end of the missile crisis. As the location of the nuclear confrontation that US leaders understood came harrowingly close to a devastating war, Cuba had become a mortal enemy of the United States in the very heart of the traditional US sphere of domination. The Cubans surmised that any appearance of weakness would stimulate a US impulse to rid itself of this threat in the Caribbean. While Cuba had strengthened its military after the Bay of Pigs invasion, it still lacked a meaningful air force, navy, and anti-aircraft weaponry, and it had even lost the obsolete IL-28 bombers. Meanwhile, the Soviets demonstrated to the Cuban leaders that they cared more about maintaining a positive relationship with their superpower adversary than they did about their small socialist ally. “We realized,” Castro told the Cuban Communist Party Central Committee in 1968, “how alone we would be in the event of a war.”42

  Cuban leaders viewed the US no-invasion guarantee and Soviet promises of protection as hollow. Both countries had ignored Cuba’s interests during the crisis and its immediate aftermath. Terrorist attacks resumed even while US forces were at DEFCON-2 in November 1962.43 Castro’s suspicion that the Soviets were treating Cuba as a bargaining chip were confirmed in 1963 during a trip to the Soviet Union, when he learned inadvertently that Kennedy had agreed secretly to remove US missiles in Turkey in exchange for Soviet ones in Cuba.44

  Trusting neither superpower, Cuba attempted to codify the Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement in a UN Security Council protocol that also would have addressed Cuba’s desire to end the US economic embargo and engage the United States in negotiations over the Guantánamo Naval Base.45 But the United States refused to consider negotiating the proposed protocol and the Soviets did not insist on it.

  Cuban fear of the United States and distrust of the Soviet Union provided the motivation for a new international approach around which the revolutionary government organized its foreign policy for the remainder of the 1960s. This is the topic we take up in the next chapter.

  Notes

  1. Edmundo Desnoes, Inconsolable Memories (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 171–72.

  2. Ernesto Che Guevara, “Letter t
o Fidel,” 1965; read by Fidel Castro Ruz in a speech delivered to the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party on October 3, 1965, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1965/esp/f031065e.html. [Translation by the authors.]

  3. James G. Blight and Philip Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba’s Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 256n81.

  4. Castro and Ramonet, Fidel Castro, 271. Also see Tomás Diez Acosta, October 1962: The ‘Missile’ Crisis as Seen from Cuba (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2002); James G. Blight, Bruce J. Allyn, and David Welch, Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002, enlarged paperback edition); Ramón Sánchez-Parodi, Cuba-USA: Diez tiempos de una relación (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2012), 152–55.

  5. This summary of the US understanding of the crisis is repeated in the revised edition: Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, second edition (New York: Longman, 1999), 77.

  6. FRUS, 1961–1963, volume X, Document 383, August 22, 1962, and FRUS, 1961–1963, volume X, Document 386, August 23, 1962.

  7. United States, Atlantic Command. 1963. CINCLANT Historical Account of Cuban Crisis. Serial: 000119/J09H, April 29; National Security Archive, Accession No. CC03087, 39–40.

  8. William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: Norton, 2003), 493–500; Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 224–28.

  9. Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 216–17; Sheldon M. Stern, Averting ‘The Final Failure’: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003).

  10. Bruce J. Allyn, James G. Blight, and David A. Welch, eds., Back to the Brink: Proceedings of the Moscow Conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis, January 27–28, 1989, CSIA Occasional Paper No. 9 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992), 36.

  11. Nikita Khrushchev, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, ed. Sergei Khrushchev, trans. George Shriver (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 321.

  12. Anatoli I. Gribkov and William Y. Smith, Operation ANADYR: US and Soviet Generals Recount the Cuban Missile Crisis (Chicago: edition q, 1994), 13; Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: Norton, 1997), 170–71.

  13. Gribkov and Smith, Operation ANADYR, 10–11.

  14. Sergo Mikoyan and Svetlana Savranskaya, The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis: Castro, Mikoyan, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Missiles of November (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012), 186–89; James G. Blight, The Shattered Crystal Ball: Fear and Learning in the Cuban Missile Crisis (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990), chapters 7 and 8.

  15. Dino A. Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Random House, 1991), 461.

  16. Gribkov and Smith, Operation ANADYR, 66–67.

  17. Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight, 248–49.

  18. “Dobrynin’s Cable to the Soviet Foreign Ministry, 27 October 1962,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 5 (Spring 1995): 79–80.

  19. Khrushchev, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, 348.

  20. Blight et al., Cuba on the Brink, 510–11, 514.

  21. Blight et al., Cuba on the Brink, 196.

  22. National Archives and Records Administration, JFK Assassination System, Record Series: JFK; Record Number: 104-10213-10101; Agency File Number: 80TO1357A; released June 23, 1998.

  23. FRUS, 1961–1963, volume X, Document 257, August 22, 1961.

  24. FRUS, 1961–1963, volume X, Document 258, August 22, 1961.

  25. FRUS, 1961–1963, volume X, Document 304, February 20, 1962.

  26. Blight et al., Cuba on the Brink, 206.

  27. “Manifesto for the Liberation of the Americas: ‘The Second Declaration of Havana,’” in Fidel Castro Reader, ed. David Deutschmann and Deborah Shnookal (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2007).

  28. Khrushchev, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, 331; Blight et al., Cuba on the Brink, 83–84, 349–351.

  29. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech to the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party,” January 25–26, 1968, in Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba’s Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis, James G. Blight and Philip Brenner (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 41–42.

  30. Blight et al., Cuba on the Brink, 211.

  31. Castro, “Speech to the Central Committee,” 55.

  32. Khrushchev, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, 348.

  33. “Fija Fidel Las Cinco Garantias Contra La Agresion a Cuba,” Revolucion, October 29, 1962.

  34. Castro and Ramonet, Fidel Castro, 278.

  35. Mikoyan and Savranskaya, The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis, 195–207.

  36. “Mikoyan’s Mission to Havana: Cuban-Soviet Negotiations, November 1962,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin, no. 5 (Spring 1995): 95.

  37. Castro, “Speech to the Central Committee,” 57–58.

  38. Castro, “Speech to the Central Committee,” 61.

  39. Blight et al., Cuba on the Brink, 297.

  40. “Mikoyan’s Mission to Havana,” 108, 159.

  41. Carlos Lechuga, In the Eye of the Storm: Castro, Khrushchev, Kennedy and the Missile Crisis, trans. Mary Todd (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1995), 176–81.

  42. Castro, “Speech to the Central Committee,” 60.

  43. Desmond Fitzgerald, “Memorandum for the Record,” FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. XI, Document no. 348, June 19, 1963, 837–38.

  44. Blight et al., Cuba on the Brink, 224–25.

  45. Lechuga, In the Eye of the Storm, 139–44.

  Chapter 13

  Foreign Policy in the 1960s

  Exporting Revolution, Chinese Flirtations, Soviet Tensions

  First of all I raised the question of policy with regard to Latin America. Fidel said: you don’t accept our policy toward the countries of Latin America. I responded: yes, we don’t accept. And the controversy began. I said to Fidel: conducting revolution in the countries of Latin America through expediting there a few people is adventurous. Fidel responded: “So was the Cuban revolution too?” He added that Che Guevara is fighting in Bolivia and has successes. Most of the communist parties in Latin America are not parties—said Fidel—but Marxist clubs. He was particularly angry at Venezuela. He called them traitors, saying that communist parties have become bureaucratized, lost their revolutionary character and interest in leading their nations to a revolution. We believe, he said, in a military coup and in the formation of popular-revolutionary parties, which in Bolivia are created by Che Guevara. I responded: I have not heard that he had been invited by the Bolivians. Fidel said he had been invited. I expressed my opinion on the communist parties in those countries. Fidel disagreed with me. But all the time (we chatted the whole night) he was repeatedly raising this subject. Then he took up our letter and said: you have said here that if we continue taking such position and conduct such activity in other countries, there will be conflicts and you will not take responsibility on yourselves. Thus, you learned that we were under threat and you sent out to us such letter to wash your hands of this matter. He was saying all of this in a quite abrasive tone.

  —Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin, “Report on Trip to Cuba,” July 19671

  Outreach to the United States Fails

  Only a few weeks after the missile crisis, Cuba resumed negotiations with the United States over the release of the 1,113 surviving Bay of Pigs invaders, and quickly lowered its demands. Cuba accepted $53 million worth of food, medicine, and medical equipment in exchange for the prisoners’ release. On December 29, 1962, President Kennedy promised a joyful cro
wd of 40,000 at Miami’s Orange Bowl that he would return Brigade 2506’s flag to these fighters “in a free Havana.”

  In 1963, US intelligence analysts noted that Castro had toned down his anti-American rhetoric after the missile crisis, and had indicated “through various channels, public as well as private, that he is interested in an accommodation with the United States.”2 In fact, the Cuban leader used a January 1963 trip by James Donovan, a New York attorney who had negotiated the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners, to float a proposal for Cuba and the United States to normalize relations.3

  As Donovan prepared to return to Cuba in March, the CIA and State Department recommended three nonnegotiable guidelines for the lawyer to convey to the Cuban prime minister: (1) that “Castro . . . must get the Russians out of Cuba lock, stock and barrel”; (2) that he “must agree to stop all Communist subversion efforts directed at Latin America”; (3) that he should “throw the Communists out of his government.”4 But Kennedy wanted to be more conciliatory. He overruled the recommendation, saying that Donovan’s instructions should not include “the breaking of Sino/Soviet ties.” McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, wrote that the president declared, “We should start thinking along more flexible lines.”5

  The January proposal was the first of several possible openings between the two countries that year. Others involved Lisa Howard of ABC News, the first woman to anchor a major network news program, Ambassador William Attwood, a former editor of Look magazine, and Jean Daniel, a French journalist. Daniel was meeting with Castro on November 22, 1963, when the two men learned of Kennedy’s assassination, which essentially shut off US receptivity to normalization feelers.6