by Gjelten, Tom
In 1965 Bacardi advertising executives negotiated a joint marketing agreement with Coca-Cola, premised on the promotion of Bacardi-and-Coke cocktails. For Coca-Cola, whose advertising had always emphasized wholesome themes, it was a bold move. One of the first products was an advertisement in Life magazine in May 1966 that purported to explain the origin of the rum-and-Coke craze. The ad featured a notarized affidavit signed by Fausto Rodríguez, the Bacardi ad executive who had long claimed to have been present the first time Bacardi rum was drunk with Coca-Cola. In his affidavit, Rodríguez swore that he was employed as a messenger by the U.S. Army Signal Corps.
I became friendly with a Mr. __, who worked in the office of the Chief Signal Officer. One afternoon, in August 1900, I went with him to the __Bar, and he drank Bacardi rum and Coca-Cola. I just drank Coca-Cola, being only 14 years old. On that occasion, there was a group of soldiers at the bar, and one of them asked Mr. _ what he was drinking. He told them it was Bacardi and Coca-Cola and suggested they try it, which they did.
The soldiers liked it. They ordered another round and toasted Mr. __ as the inventor of a great drink.
The drink has remained popular to the present time.
It was, of course, the famous “Cuba libre,” but in the Life ad it became a “Rum & Coke.” The words “Cuba” and “Havana” were nowhere to be seen in the “affidavit.” Cuba in 1965 was associated with revolution and counterrevolution, Fidel Castro and Communism, a failed U.S. invasion, and a nuclear missile crisis. Controversy and strong partisan feelings do not go well with advertising campaigns, and in public presentations there was no sign that Bacardi was still connected to its island home.
The unfortunate truth was that “Cuba” no longer meant what it once had. There was no single Cuban nation, no simple notion of a Cuban patriotism. Cuba was torn in two. One part was still on the island and living with Fidel Castro if not genuinely supporting him, the other part outside. Bacardi, as a family and a company, had ended up on the side in exile. Under the circumstances, a different kind of Cuban patriotism emerged: angrier, less liberal, more negative. Fidel Castro had so usurped the rhetoric of social justice and national sovereignty, even claiming Cuba’s independence heroes in the name of his revolution, that he left little room for idealism. Now there was just one issue: Cubans stood either with Fidel Castro or against him.
Chapter 18
Counterrevolution
When Pepín Bosch and his wife, Enriqueta, arrived in Miami in July 1960, they found the city’s restless exile community already abuzz with anti-Castro intrigues. Ex-batistiano army officers were alternately plotting and quarreling with supporters of ex-president Carlos Prío, while disaffected fidelistas huddled with CIA agents to discuss weapons shipments and invasion scenarios. The U.S. government was hoping that Cubans themselves would rise up and overthrow the Castro regime, and toward that end the CIA had assembled the Frente Revolucionario Democrático (FRD), the Democratic Revolutionary Front, an unwieldy group that was supposed to bring the disparate and squabbling exile factions together in support of an exile invasion force.
Back in Cuba, Daniel Bacardi and others were still clinging to their faith in Fidel Castro, but from the moment he left the island, Pepín Bosch was ready to support the CIA-led conspiracies. U.S. government agents immediately solicited his help. In September 1960, Bosch visited Richard Cushing, a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico. Cushing wanted a situation report from Cuba, where he had served for five years during the Batista era, and he sought Bosch’s advice on how the Castro regime could be undermined and who could lead a resistance movement. Bosch had strong opinions and was not shy about sharing them. According to an embassy cable on the Cushing meeting, Bosch had “little good to say” about the directors of the Frente Revolucionario Democrático in Miami, though he praised Eduardo Martín Elena, an ex-Cuban army colonel who had been chosen by the FRD directorate to supervise the military training of the exile force that was to go back to Cuba. As commander of the Cuban army garrison in Matanzas in 1952, Martín Elena had taken a courageous stand against the Batista coup and thereby earned Bosch’s admiration. “Bosch is so impressed with [Martín] Elena as a leader,” Cushing reported, “that, although almost sixty and slightly crippled, Bosch would willingly be part of any invasion force that Elena might muster.”
Bosch was actually sixty-two. He had his hands full with Bacardi affairs, and his boast that he was ready to volunteer for a Cuba invasion force should have been ignored. Over the next several years, however, Bosch would indeed devote much of his own time and money to the cause of fighting Fidel Castro. In addition to sponsoring propaganda campaigns aimed at turning U.S. public opinion against Castro, Bosch financed commando actions and sabotage operations inside Cuba. His politics had changed dramatically. In Cuba, Bosch’s activism had been forward-looking and idealistic, but in exile he was more rancorous, his sense of civic duty now channeled into an angry determination to bring Castro down, by any means necessary.
Outside Miami, many Americans were still fascinated by Fidel Castro and his revolution. An aura of romance and adventure had always surrounded Cuba in the U.S. imagination, and the charismatic bearded president provided colorful material as he rode around the Cuban countryside in an open jeep, orated passionately for hours before adoring crowds, and smoked cigars and discussed imperialism late into the night with visiting celebrities and world leaders. Foreign journalists were charmed by what CBS News correspondent Robert Taber, writing in 1961, called the “human quality” of the Cuban revolution, evident at the fidelista rallies:One sees a ferocious-looking rebelde with a magpie’s nest of a beard, carrying a submachine gun and armed with a tremendous revolver as well. From the pocket of his shirt protrudes a huge harmonica. His companion, equally hairy and ferocious, is eating an ice-cream on a stick, and grinning cheerfully, while Fidel, with the same good humor, lectures an old man in the crowd who complains that he has not yet been given a cow.
The American sociologist C. Wright Mills toured Cuba in the summer of 1960 and returned to write an adulatory book about the revolution titled Listen, Yankee. Written in a popular, accessible style, with Mills taking on the voice of the Cubans with whom he had traveled, the book sold four hundred thousand copies within the first few months of its publication.
To Fidel Castro’s U.S. supporters, the anger and noise coming from the exile community in south Florida mainly reflected the bitterness of people who had lost their privileged class position in Cuba and refused to support the social and economic transformation there. Herbert Matthews, the New York Times correspondent who had interviewed Castro in the Sierra Maestra four years earlier, was still defending him in February 1961, even after Pepín Bosch and other old Cuban friends had turned against the revolution. In an interview on WBAI radio, a public radio station in New York City, Matthews praised Castro’s government for its social and economic reforms, scoffed at the charges that he was a Communist, and chided the U.S. government and the exile community for their hostility to the revolutionary regime. A few weeks later, Corliss Lamont, a wealthy New York socialist whose father was J. P. Morgan’s business partner, wrote a letter to the New York Times criticizing those who labeled the Cuban government “Communist” solely on the basis of its deep reforms in agriculture and industry and its commercial agreements with the Soviet Union and Communist China.
Pepín Bosch was dismayed by the continuing enthusiasm for Fidel Castro among leading U.S. journalists and intellectuals. Just two years earlier, he had promoted Herbert Matthews as someone who could explain “the Cuban side” of the Castro story, but that was before Fidel turned sharply to the left. After hearing of his comments on WBAI, Bosch wrote Matthews a personal letter, imploring him to reconsider his rosy assessments of Castro’s revolution. “To Fidel, you are the equivalent of an army division,” Bosch said, “so winning you away will be quite a victory.”
During the anti-Batista struggle, Bosch had been a key source and pro-Castro spokesman for many U.
S. journalists, including Robert Taber of CBS, Jay Mallin of Time, Jules Dubois of the Chicago Tribune, and Ruby Hart Phillips and Homer Bigart of the New York Times, as well as Herbert Matthews. In exile, it occurred to Bosch that he could use his contacts and influence in the U.S. media to get across his new message—that Fidel Castro had betrayed those who believed in the promise of his revolution and that he was installing a Communist dictatorship in Cuba. About a week after writing to Matthews, Bosch submitted a lengthy letter to the New York Times, saying he wanted “to clarify some misconceptions” about “the so-called Cuban Revolution.” Rather than have his commentary edited to fit in the “letters” column on the editorial page, Bosch took out a paid advertisement in the name of Bacardi and ran his entire letter in the allotted space under the Bacardi corporate logo. Addressing the Times editor, he complained about pro-Castro comments made by “your” Herbert Matthews and also about the Lamont letter:It is my opinion that neither Mr. Matthews nor Mr. Lamont knows what is really going on in Cuba—or does not wish to know. For Mr. Castro, in the name of Communism, has led my people into poverty, disease, slavery, and the loss of that gaiety and happiness that have always marked the character of the Cuban people. Castro could very easily have given his country freedom and justice, and the opportunity for the pursuit of happiness. He could have offered his people a better education in a free society; and he could even have doubled the national income in a few short years. Instead of this, he has destroyed our national wealth and practically everything of material and spiritual value in my country.
By the time Bosch published his open letter, the peasants’ rebellion in the Escambray Mountains and the underground resistance movements in Havana had all been crushed. The CIA-organized exile army was left as the only hope for overthrowing the Castro regime. Bosch was kept apprised of the invasion planning by Polo Miranda, the former Hatuey brewery manager in Manacas. Miranda had turned against Castro while still in Cuba, going from cooperating with the M-26-7 guerrillas to buying and smuggling arms for the anti-Castro rebels in the Escambray mountains. A report filed by CIA agent Bernard Barker in June 1960 had judged him a “superior” candidate for CIA assignments. Though he fled Cuba before taking any CIA work, Miranda went on to take part in various Agency-supported capers, and in Miami his Bacardi job was mainly to serve as Bosch’s intermediary with the exile groups working against Castro.
The organization of the exile army was problematic, largely due to CIA heavy-handedness. Some popular exile leaders were barred from the effort because they were seen as leaning too far to the left. Pepín Bosch’s favorite commander, Colonel Eduardo Martín Elena, quit after the American agents in charge of organizing the army barred him from contact with the Cuban troops he was supposed to be leading. By early 1961, however, exiles who wanted to fight Fidel Castro effectively had no alternative but to sign up for the CIA force preparing to invade Cuba. Among the volunteers were three young men from the Bacardi clan. Two were great-grandsons of Emilio Bacardi Moreau: José Bacardi, the son of Emilio Bacardi Rosell, and Roberto del Rosal, whose grandmother was Marina Bacardi Cape. The third was Polo Miranda’s nephew, a former law student named Jorge Mas Canosa, a brash young man who would later become the dominating political figure in the Cuban exile community.
The three men, about twenty-one years old when they joined the exile invasion force, had known each other back in Santiago and managed to get assigned together. They were part of a group that was to land in Oriente province with the aim of creating a diversion from the main force due to come ashore at the Bay of Pigs. After arriving at their destination, the Bacardi boys spent two nights huddled with their comrades in a boat off the Cuban coast, waiting for the signal to move ashore. The order to disembark came on the second night, and the young men nervously prepared to move, heavy packs on their backs and rifles in hand. The operation was aborted at the last minute, however, when the commander got word that government soldiers had spotted the boat and were prepared to massacre the group as soon as it touched shore. The Bacardi cousins and their friend Jorge never managed to set foot on Cuban soil.
With the attempt to foment an anti-Castro uprising, Cuban history was repeating itself. In the first place, those Cubans who took up arms to oppose the Castro regime were carrying on a long-standing insurrectionist tradition on the island. In the nineteenth century, Cuban rebels fought three wars against their Spanish rulers, and there were at least five more armed uprisings in the first half of the twentieth century. A readiness to resort to violence in pursuit of political aims was part of the national culture in Cuba. Second, the anti-Castro movement was characterized by petty internal rivalries, in a pattern reminiscent of the way Cuba’s political parties had fragmented in previous decades and made dictatorships possible. Finally, the opposition was tainted by its close association with the U.S. government, another long-standing issue in Cuba’s uneven political development. Nationalists on the island had long railed against the “Platt mentality” of those Cubans who looked to the United States for political guidance, in a manner reminiscent of those Cuban legislators who supported the 1901 amendment that gave the United States a formal right to intervene in Cuban affairs.
Infighting among the exile leaders and their dependence on U.S. assistance played straight into Fidel Castro’s hands, allowing him to portray those who opposed him as ineffectual lackeys of U.S. imperialism. Castro, in fact, almost seemed to welcome efforts to overthrow his government. “A revolution that was not attacked,” he wrote in a 1961 essay, “would in the first place not be a true revolution.” It was only when Castro saw a genuine counterrevolution emerging, led by those he considered his enemies, that he could be sure he was transforming Cuba in the way he wanted. Any political outcome not opposed by Cuban capitalists, by the island’s upper class, and by the U.S. government would not have satisfied him. “A revolution that does not have an enemy in front of it,” he wrote, “runs the risk of lulling itself to sleep.”16
For their part, Pepín Bosch and other exiles working against the Castro regime did not necessarily object to the “counterrevolutionary” label. To the extent anti-Americanism and state socialism defined the Cuban revolution, they were indeed determined to counter it. In dedicating themselves to that goal, they acted in pursuit of their own interests and principles as Cubans and not on the orders of the U.S. government. The big question was whether they were capable of challenging Castro without U.S. assistance. Most concluded they could not.
President John F. Kennedy inherited the “Castro problem” from the Eisenhower administration, but he was no less determined to overthrow the Marxist regime than his predecessor had been and perhaps more so. It was an assignment he gave mostly to his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April 1961, the attorney general directed the CIA to design a new anti-Castro plan. The result was “Operation Mongoose,” a covert action program largely focused on sabotage operations with the goal of disrupting the Cuban economy and thereby weakening the Castro regime. The program was to be implemented in tandem with an embargo on all trade with Cuba, initiated in February 1962.
Over the next nine months, more than fifty million dollars were spent on some of the most outrageous and bizarre initiatives in the history of U.S. foreign policy. The planned actions under Operation Mongoose ranged from attempts to induce Cuban crop failures to the staging of “provocations” that could then be used as pretexts for U.S. military action. In the “psychological” operations category, Mongoose planners contemplated a massive airdrop of toilet paper, then in short supply in Cuba, with the idea that the Cuban people would cheer the United States for coming to their rescue. CIA officials also made contacts with organized crime figures to arrange Castro’s assassination. One CIA agent went so far as to deliver poison pills to a Mafia figure in Miami, who in turn was supposed to pass them to a contact in Cuba. Few of the schemes got past the planning stage, and Operation Mongoose was significant mostly for providing Fidel Castro with facts
and anecdotes to back up his repeated claims that the United States was out to get him and that the deep economic problems in Cuba were the consequence of U.S. sabotage efforts.
Years later, Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger dismissed the idea of Operation Mongoose as “silly and stupid,” but it was called off only when the “Castro problem” was superseded by something far more dangerous: the threat of nuclear war. In October 1962, after U.S. spy planes discovered nuclear missile sites in Cuba, the United States and the Soviet Union stood at the brink for nearly two weeks, with Fidel Castro urging Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev not to back down.17 In the letter that resolved the missile crisis, President Kennedy assured Khrushchev that in exchange for the removal of the missiles, the United States would not invade the island. Such assurance did not theoretically prohibit covert sabotage operations, but having narrowly avoided a confrontation with the Soviet Union, the Kennedy administration thought it wise to put an end to all CIA-sponsored activities inside Cuba, at least temporarily. If operatives were caught in Cuba, the Soviets might have been able to justify their missile deployment as a reasonable measure to protect their Cuban ally against U.S. subversion and attack.
