by Tad Szulc
On July 6, Eisenhower made the next move in the economic war with Castro when he announced that the United States would not allow the importation of the balance of the Cuban sugar under the 1960 quota, roughly one quarter of the annual total of some three million tons. Eisenhower also made it clear that the United States would not buy any Cuban sugar until further notice. The White House acted immediately after Congress authorized the administration to allocate and reallocate the sugar quotas of foreign producers, a law that Fidel Castro described as the "Dagger Law," the dagger in the back of the revolution. Bonsal, who had opposed ending the quota, rejects the suggestion that Eisenhower acted in reprisal for the oil refineries' seizures: "The suspension of the sugar quota was a major element in the program for the overthrow of Castro." As for Castro, he had warned in a television speech two weeks earlier, when the "Dagger Law" was about to be passed, that "if we lose our entire sugar quota, they could lose all their investments in Cuba"—plus the huge annual trade surplus. The loss of the quota, Castro said in a five-hour speech, which was a treatise on the history of sugar and Cuban-American trade relations over a century, "would cost Americans in Cuba down to the nails in their shoes. "
However, Castro waited a full month before striking back. Always concerned with strategy and tactics, he first sought to extract maximum political advantage from the sugar affair by portraying Cuba as the victim of "economic aggression" by the United States in violation of the charter of the Organization of American States (for which he otherwise had no use), and then to obtain overwhelming Soviet public support for the Cuban cause.
Fidel had always understood the immense importance of Third World solidarity with his revolution, and as early as mid-1959, he had dispatched Che Guevara to Africa and Asia to look for friends. Early in May 1960, President Achmed Sukarno of Indonesia, a virtual ally of the Soviet Union, became the first foreign chief of state to visit Cuba; the Marxist prime minister of British Guyana, Cheddi Jagan, came twice that year. At the end of August, the Cuban delegation walked out of an inter-American foreign ministers' conference in San José, Costa Rica, where a resolution criticizing Cuban meddling in Latin America was approved; on September 2, Castro convened one million Cubans in Havana to hear his denunciation of the San José conclave and to "approve" the First Declaration of Havana, condemning man's exploitation by man in the impoverished world. He was already reaching out for Third World leadership, knowing that his natural allies were there, but in those days Washington was not taking the Third World very seriously; postwar decolonization was still very much under way.
Nikita Khrushchev came through with flying colors. As soon as Eisenhower chopped off the sugar quota, Moscow announced it would buy (though at world prices) the 700,000 tons that would have gone to the United States, in addition to the 770,000 tons the Soviets had already purchased in 1960. This meant that over one fourth of that year's sugar harvest was going to Russia. Though Castro and Guevara still could not make up their minds whether Cuba should remain a major sugar producer or concentrate (as Che urged) on industrialization, the Soviets were becoming, in effect, the guarantors of the island's economic viability. Khrushchev clearly had already taken the strategic decision to form an alliance with Cuba, but it is difficult to understand the intellectual processes in the Eisenhower administration that helped to smooth the way for this new friendship. Khrushchev's most extraordinary commitment to Cuba came on July 9 when he declared in a speech that "the Soviet Union is raising its voice and extending a helpful hand to the people of Cuba. . . . In a figurative sense, if it became necessary, the Soviet military can support the Cuban people with rocket weapons. . ."
This comment may have been meant symbolically—Khrushchev did use the word "figurative"—but Castro chose to manipulate it for his own purposes, in the same way in which the origins of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis are still being obfuscated by him. In a display of high drama, Castro spoke on television from his sick bed the next day (his illness was never explained) to thank the Soviets for their expressions of support, but he repeatedly stated that the Khrushchev offer was "absolutely spontaneous"—although he also threw out heavy hints that Moscow had offered "real" rockets. Typically, Fidel appeared to be trying to avoid the impression in Washington that he had requested Soviet "rockets," while at the same time magnifying the scope of the Soviet commitment to suit himself. Khrushchev, who was beginning to learn that life with Fidel was not always easy, must have objected to Castro's public interpretation of his words because the entire reference to "rockets" has disappeared from modern Cuban official texts. But in July 1960 it was crucial for Castro to be able to print prominently in his newspapers the Soviet promises of "rockets," even though a joint communiqué issued in Moscow when Raúl Castro met with Khrushchev early in August mentioned no rockets of any kind.
In any case, Fidel was in fine form on July 26 when he returned to the Sierra Maestra to celebrate the seventh anniversary of Moncada and to proclaim that "we shall continue to make our fatherland an example that will make the Andes mountain range into the Sierra Maestra of all America." He was ready now to punish the United States for taking away his sugar quota. The Cuban cabinet passed a Law of Nationalization right after Eisenhower had acted on the sugar question and on August 5 Castro was ready to implement it. He called it the "Machete Law" in retaliation for the U. S. "Dagger Law." Much land, chiefly from the United Fruit Company, had already been seized, but now Fidel moved on the bulk of American investment on the island. Conchita Fernández, his secretary at INRA, recalls that late in the evening he called her into his fourth-floor office and told her: "Call Che and call that Mexican named Fofo, because I'm going to nationalize now all these foreign companies: Shell, Standard Oil, Esso . . . right now, at midnight." Castro instructed her to summon Carlos Franqui, then editor of Revolución, so that the announcement of the nationalizations could be published the following morning. Conchita Fernández says that Castro had remained at his INRA office three days and nights preparing the nationalizations with Che Guevara, and then he suddenly announced that he was ready to sign the documents. He told Conchita: "Right now, we'll give the back of the hand to these imperialist companies." Then, he went to a Latin American youth meeting at the Havana stadium to announce what he had done. In all, Cuba nationalized thirty-six American-owned sugar mills, two oil refineries, and two utility companies (two nickel mines, one belonging to the U. S. government, were taken in October). It was the end of an era—and the start of a new one for Cuba, at home and internationally.
In the context of a nearly total break with the United States and an emerging strong Soviet alliance, Fidel Castro flew to New York in September to address the United Nations, and, as much as anything else, to meet Nikita Khrushchev on American turf. It was the kind of irony in which Fidel delights. He felt very strong and self-assured, having successfully weathered his great confrontation with the United States and consolidated his domination at home. Finance Minister Rufo López-Fresquet, the last moderate in the cabinet, had resigned in March, and Castro no longer needed to rule with a "hidden government." He and his companions were fully and openly in charge of all that mattered in Cuba, and what remained of relatively independent life—such as culture—would soon be regimented as well. The Cuban Workers' Confederation (CTC) had tried to keep Communist leadership at bay, but Castro put an end to that in November 1959 when he forced the CTC convention to drop an elected non-Communist slate; the force of his personality always won the day when all else failed. The CTC's secretary general, David Salvador, a top 26th of July Movement leader, was dismissed and joined the anti-Castro underground before being arrested.
Propaganda and the control of public opinion are fundamental Castro concerns, and special attention was given them as soon as sufficient revolutionary consolidation was attained. Superficial observation of Castro's seemingly wildly uncoordinated activities and his chaotic life-style had suggested that he was running Cuba from whim to whim. In retrospect, however, it is evident that Fid
el knew exactly what he was doing—and how and when. Every step logically followed the previous one; the timing was impeccable because Castro sensed what the nation was prepared to accept, his sermonlike speeches fit perfectly into the concept of revolutionary indoctrination, and his improvisations were in reality carefully thought-out chessboard moves. When outsiders commented on Castro's "rantings," they failed to perceive that he was engaged in a campaign to educate the masses in his beliefs and political and economic analyses.
It was logical, then, to subordinate the media to the revolution. During the first year, he was basically served by Revolutión, the organ of the 26th of July Movement, and the Communist party's newspaper, Hoy, resumed publication shortly after the victory; Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, Fidel's principal Communist ally, was the editor. From the outset, Castro acted as Revolutión's supereditor, visiting its offices, conferring almost daily with Carlos Franqui, who was the editor and chief propagandist, and seeing to it that the revolutionary line was phrased precisely the way he wanted it to be every time. The two principal TV channels, CMQ and Mundo, were put instantly under official control, though for a time their private ownership was left untouched. Radio stations were joined in a network called FIEL, always available to broadcast Fidel's words.
Early in 1960 it was time to curtail the independent press. Castro invented the notion of the coletilla, a postscript appended at the end of every article, news dispatch, editorial or photograph that happened to disagree with the official line on anything. Castro-controlled journalists' and printers' unions were charged with drafting and publishing these coletillas, or, told simply to refuse to run what they disliked. It was a lethally subtle form of censorship-cum-intimidation, all in the name of the revolution, and by mid-1960 the so-called "bourgeois press" went out of business because editors could not control the content of their publications, and the rapidly shrinking private sector of the economy could no longer provide the required advertising. Castro's view was that only the revolution brought real freedom of the press to Cuba to replace the right-wing biases of the bourgeoisie. His propagandists went the absurd extra mile to ban Santa Claus as a Christmas symbol. A revolutionary figure named "Don Feliciano" took its place, and a popular American tune reemerged equipped with new lyrics: "Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Always with Fidel!" It did not catch on (nor did that other revolutionary jingle, "Ping-Pang-Poong! Viva Mao Tse Tung!").
Astonishingly, it was the "old" Communist party that went on giving Castro trouble, notwithstanding Nikita Khrushchev's fervent July support of the Cuban revolution. Castro and his group and the old-line Communist leaders had begun meeting secretly eighteen months earlier to plan an ultimate merger, but the party still resisted the "exceptionality" of the Fidelista triumph outside Marxist dogma. Only Castro himself was trusted by the PSP old guard, to the extent they trusted anyone, and Pedro Miret recalls that on many occasions when Raúl Castro made a proposal, Blás Roca, the PSP secretary general, would ask, "but have you cleared it with Fidel?" At the PSP's Eighth Congress in August 1960, Blás Roca seemed out of synch with reality when he described the revolutionary regime as a power that "represents and executes the policy of the coalition of the proletariat, the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, and the advanced sectors of the national bourgeoisie." Aníbal Escalante, another top PSP leader, opposed the confiscation of all private property because of the "national bourgeoisie's strong fear of the revolutionary changes," adding that "we maintain the strategy of the alliance of classes with which the revolution originated." This was historical nonsense, but as subsequent events would show, the "old" Communists appeared to be holding out for key posts in the regime, a step Castro was not about to take.
Only Carlos Rafael Rodríguez was Castro's unconditional ally (he seemed to be better attuned to Moscow's thinking than his colleagues), and he was largely responsible for the October 1960 merger between the party's Socialist Youth and the 26th of July Movement's youth division. Recalling those days, Pedro Miret says that the first step for the Fidelistas was to "dilute" the Movement without most Cubans realizing it, because "we had to create our own little group." Castro was setting the stage for the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations, the ORI mechanism he regarded as a preparation for his own Communist party, but through most of 1960, the "old" Communists were dragging their feet, often insisting that they represented the views of the Kremlin. Finally, Aleksandr Alexeiev, back in Cuba ostensibly as the permanent TASS correspondent (while Kudryatsev acted as ambassador), delivered a private message from Khrushchev to Castro to the effect that the Soviet government considered "there is no intermediary party," between them, and that Fidel was the "authentic leader" of the revolution. Anticipating meeting Castro in New York, Khrushchev was careful not to make him feel like the head of an Eastern European satellite country.
Unlike Cuba's old-line Communists, Khrushchev also evidently had the sense to accept Castro for what he was at that stage in history, although he learned later that Fidel could not easily be maneuvered into going along with the Kremlin dogma. In attempts to reconstruct Castro's ideological evolutions—and to dispel the persistent impression in successive American governments that he always was a Soviet tool—it is useful to consider his comments on Marxist interpretations in conversations with the French writer Régis Debray in the mid-1960s. Castro said: "I am accused of heresy. It is said that I am a heretic within the camp of Marxism-Leninism. Hmmm! It is amusing that so-called Marxist organizations, which fight like cats and dogs in their dispute over possession of revolutionary truth, accuse us of wanting to apply the Cuban formula mechanically. They reproach us with a lack of understanding of the Party's role; they reproach us as heretics within the camp of Marxism-Leninism." Debray explains that the great difference between Castro and the dogmatics accusing him of heresy was his belief that Marxist-Leninist parties are not necessarily the only or the best "vanguard" leadership in launching revolutions. The Sandinista victory in Nicaragua in 1979 would prove Castro right, but in the meantime he had to keep protecting his heresies.
Fidel Castro arrived in New York on September 18, the day after signing decrees nationalizing three American bank branch offices in Cuba. Four days before he reached the city, a CIA-organized plot to assassinate him was formally set in motion at a meeting at a New York hotel with a key Mafia figure whom the Agency wanted to handle the assignment. The decision to murder Castro was an outgrowth of the "Program" against him approved by Eisenhower in March. The assassination was to coincide with intensive guerrilla warfare to be triggered on the island; the first guerrilla operations had, in fact, already begun in the Escambray Mountains.
An internal CIA memorandum states, "In August, 1960, [Deputy Director] Mr. Richard M. Bissell approached Colonel Sheffield Edwards to determine if the Office of Security had assets that may assist in a sensitive mission requiring gangster-type action. The mission target was the liquidation of Fidel Castro." Bissell, who was also in charge of preparing the Bay of Pigs invasion, briefed CIA Director Allen Dulles, who "gave his approval." What remains unknown is whether Dulles acted on his own authority in ordering the assassination of a foreign head of government or whether he obtained President Eisenhower's explicit assent. In the 1960s, however, the White House practiced the concept of "plausible denial" in risky and potentially embarrassing operations to protect the prestige of the president, and usually the CIA director and the national security adviser took it upon themselves to keep Eisenhower in the dark about specific enterprises so that he could claim ignorance without actually lying if the Agency were caught red-handed. Authority for such operations was derived from overall policy directives by the president—such as the March decision to oust Castro. "Plausible denial" was invoked for Eisenhower in May when the U-2 spy plane (another Bissell undertaking) was shot down over the Soviet Union, and chances are that the same principle was applied to the Castro assassination plot.
Castro says that he had assumed all along that he was on an American hit list, but he had also conc
luded that he would be safer in the United States than at home; he did not think the CIA would risk the awesome political fallout of murdering him in Manhattan. According to the CIA memo, a former agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert A. Maheu, was asked if he could develop "an entree into the gangster element" as the first step toward organizing the murder. Maheu therefore met at the Plaza Hotel in New York on September 14 with Johnny Roselli, described as "a high-ranking member of the 'syndicate.' " An offer of $150,000 to kill Castro was conveyed on behalf of "businessmen" who had suffered financially in Cuba because of the revolution, Roselli put Maheu in touch with Mafia chiefs Salvatore "Momo" Giancana and Santos Trafficante in Miami. On the gangsters' suggestion, the CIA's Technical Services Division developed and produced pills with "elements of rapid solubility, high lethal content and little or no traceability." The CIA says that "several attempts without success" were made to have Castro take the pill in some fashion, and "the project was cancelled shortly after the Bay of Pigs episode." Subsequent testimony at Senate hearings into anti-Cuban intelligence operations disclosed that the murders of Raúl Castro and Che Guevara were also contemplated because, in the opinion of the chief of the CIA's Western Hemisphere Division, unless the three top leaders "could be eliminated in one package—which is highly unlikely—this operation can be a long, drawn-out affair and the present government will only be overthrown by the use of force. "
