The Batista dictatorship was overthrown in January 1959 by Castro’s guerrilla forces. In March, the National Security Council (NSC) considered means to institute regime change. In May, the CIA began to arm guerrillas inside Cuba. “During the Winter of 1959-1960, there was a significant increase in CIA-supervised bombing and incendiary raids piloted by exiled Cubans” based in the U.S. We need not tarry on what the U.S. or its clients would do under such circumstances. Cuba, however, did not respond with violent actions within the United States for revenge or deterrence. Rather, it followed the procedure required by international law. In July 1960, Cuba called on the UN for help, providing the Security Council with records of some twenty bombings, including names of pilots, plane registration numbers, unexploded bombs, and other specific details, alleging considerable damage and casualties and calling for resolution of the conflict through diplomatic channels. U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge responded by giving his “assurance [that] the United States has no aggressive purpose against Cuba.” Four months before, in March 1960, his government had made a formal decision in secret to overthrow the Castro government, and preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion were well advanced.
Washington was concerned that Cubans might try to defend themselves. CIA chief Allen Dulles therefore urged Britain not to provide arms to Cuba. His “main reason,” the British ambassador reported to London, “was that this might lead the Cubans to ask for Soviet or Soviet bloc arms,” a move that “would have a tremendous effect,” Dulles pointed out, allowing Washington to portray Cuba as a security threat to the hemisphere, following the script that had worked so well in Guatemala.
Dulles was referring to Washington’s successful demolition of Guatemala’s first democratic experiment, a ten-year interlude of hope and progress, greatly feared in Washington because of the enormous popular support reported by U.S. intelligence and the “demonstration effect” of social and economic measures to benefit the large majority. The Soviet threat was routinely invoked, abetted by Guatemala’s appeal to the Soviet bloc for arms after the U.S. had threatened attack and cut off other sources of supply. The result was a half-century of horror, even worse than the U.S.-backed tyranny that came before.
For Cuba, the schemes devised by the doves were similar to those of CIA director Dulles. Warning President Kennedy about the “inevitable political and diplomatic fall-out” from the planned invasion of Cuba by a proxy army, Arthur Schlesinger suggested efforts to trap Castro in some action that could be used as a pretext for invasion: “One can conceive a black operation in, say, Haiti which might in time lure Castro into sending a few boatloads of men on to a Haitian beach in what could be portrayed as an effort to overthrow the Haitian regime, then the moral issue would be clouded, and the anti-U.S. campaign would be hobbled from the start.” Reference is to the regime of the murderous dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier, which was backed by the U.S. (with some reservations), so that an effort to help Haitians overthrow it would be a crime.
Eisenhower’s March 1960 plan called for the overthrow of Castro in favor of a regime “more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the U.S.,” including support for “military operation on the island” and “development of an adequate paramilitary force outside of Cuba.” Intelligence reported that popular support for Castro was high, but the U.S. would determine the “true interests of the Cuban people.” The regime change was to be carried out “in such a manner as to avoid any appearance of U.S. intervention,” because of the anticipated reaction in Latin America and the problems of doctrinal management at home.
Операція Мангуст
The Bay of Pigs invasion came a year later, in April 1961, after Kennedy had taken office. It was authorized in an atmosphere of “hysteria” over Cuba in the White House, Robert McNamara later testified before the Senate’s Church Committee. At the first cabinet meeting after the failed invasion, the atmosphere was “almost savage,” Chester Bowles noted privately: “there was an almost frantic reaction for an action program.” At an NSC meeting two days later, Bowles found the atmosphere “almost as emotional” and was struck by “the great lack of moral integrity” that prevailed. The mood was reflected in Kennedy’s public pronouncements: “The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong can possibly survive,” he told the country, sounding a theme that would be used to good effect by the Reaganites during their own terrorist wars. Kennedy was aware that allies “think that we’re slightly demented” on the subject of Cuba, a perception that persists to the present.
Kennedy implemented a crushing embargo that could scarcely be endured by a small country that had become a “virtual colony” of the U.S. in the sixty years following its “liberation” from Spain. He also ordered an intensification of the terrorist campaign: “He asked his brother, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy, to lead the top-level interagency group that oversaw Operation Mongoose, a program of paramilitary operations, economic warfare, and sabotage he launched in late 1961 to visit the ‘terrors of the earth’ on Fidel Castro and, more prosaically, to topple him.”
Терористична кампанія не викликала сміху, – пише Хорхе Домінгес в огляді нещодавно розсекречених матеріалів про операції Кеннеді, матеріалів, які “суворо продезінфіковані” і “лише вершина айсберга”, додає П’єро Глейєсес.
Operation Mongoose was “the centerpiece of American policy toward Cuba from late 1961 until the onset of the 1962 missile crisis,” Mark White reports, the program on which the Kennedy brothers “came to pin their hopes.” Robert Kennedy informed the CIA that the Cuban problem carries “the top priority in the United States Government—all else is secondary—no time, no effort, or manpower is to be spared” in the effort to overthrow the Castro regime. The chief of Mongoose operations, Edward Lansdale, provided a timetable leading to “open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime” in October 1962. The “final definition” of the program recognized that “final success will require decisive U.S. military intervention,” after terrorism and subversion had laid the basis. The implication is that U.S. military intervention would take place in October 1962—when the missile crisis erupted.
In February 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved a plan more extreme than Schlesinger’s: to use “covert to lure or provoke Castro, or an uncontrollable subordinate, into an overt hostile reaction against the United States; a reaction which would in turn create the justification for the U.S. to not only retaliate but destroy Castro with speed, force, and determination.”
In March, at the request of the DOD Cuba Project, the Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted a memorandum to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara outlining “pretexts which they would consider would provide justification for U.S. military intervention in Cuba.” The plan would be undertaken if “a credible internal revolt is impossible of attainment during the next 9-10 months,” but before Cuba could establish relations with Russia that might “directly involve the Soviet Union.”
Розсудливе вдавання до терору повинно уникати ризику для злочинця.
The March plan was to construct “seemingly unrelated events to camouflage the ultimate objective and create the necessary impression of Cuban rashness and responsibility on a large scale, directed at other countries as well as the United States,” placing the U.S. “in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances [and developing] an international image of Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere.” Proposed measures included blowing up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay to create “a ‘Remember the Maine’ incident,” publishing casualty lists in U.S. newspapers to “cause a helpful wave of national indignation,” portraying Cuban investigations as “fairly compelling evidence that the ship was taken under attack,” developing a “Communist Cuban terror campaign [in Florida] and even in Washington,” using Soviet bloc incendiaries for cane-burning raids in neighboring countries, shooting down a drone aircraft with a pretense that it was a charter flight carrying college students on a holiday, and other similarly ingenious schemes—not implemented, but another sign of the “frantic” and “savage” atmosphere that prevailed.
23 серпня президент видав Меморандум про національну безпеку № 181, «директиву щодо організації внутрішнього повстання, за яким послідує військове втручання США», передбачаючи «значні військові плани США, маневри та переміщення сил і обладнання», які, безсумнівно, були відомі Кубі та Росії. Також у серпні терористичні атаки були активізовані, включно з нападами на швидкісних катерах на кубинський приморський готель, «де, як відомо, збиралися радянські військові техніки, убивши десятки росіян і кубинців»; напади на британські та кубинські вантажні судна; забруднення вантажів цукру; та інші жорстокості та саботаж, здебільшого здійснені кубинськими вигнанськими організаціями, яким дозволено вільно діяти у Флориді. Через кілька тижнів настав «найнебезпечніший момент в історії людства».
A bad press in some friendly countries
Терористичні операції тривали в найнапруженіші моменти ракетної кризи. Вони були офіційно скасовані 30 жовтня, через кілька днів після угоди Кеннеді та Хрущова, але, тим не менш, продовжилися. 8 листопада «кубинська таємна диверсійна група, направлена зі Сполучених Штатів, успішно підірвала кубинське промислове підприємство», убивши 400 робітників, за даними кубинського уряду. Раймонд Ґартхофф пише, що «Ради могли сприймати [напад] лише як спробу відступити від того, що для них залишалося ключовим питанням: американські запевнення не нападати на Кубу». Ці та інші дії ще раз показують, підсумовує він, «що ризик і небезпека для обох сторін могли бути надзвичайними, і катастрофа не була виключена».
After the crisis ended, Kennedy renewed the terrorist campaign. Ten days before his assassination he approved a CIA plan for “destruction operations” by U.S. proxy forces “against a large oil refinery and storage facilities, a large electric plant, sugar refineries, railroad bridges, harbor facilities, and underwater demolition of docks and ships.” A plot to kill Castro was initiated on the day of the Kennedy assassination. The campaign was called off in 1965, but “one of Nixon’s first acts in office in 1969 was to direct the CIA to intensify covert operations against Cuba.”
Of particular interest are the perceptions of the planners. In his review of recently released documents on Kennedy-era terror, Dominguez observes that “only once in these nearly thousand pages of documentation did a U.S. official raise something that resembled a faint moral objection to U.S.-government sponsored terrorism”: a member of the NSC staff suggested that it might lead to some Russian reaction, and raids that are “haphazard and kill innocents…might mean a bad press in some friendly countries.”
The same attitudes prevail throughout the internal discussions, as when Robert Kennedy warned that a full-scale invasion of Cuba would “kill an awful lot of people, and we’re going to take an awful lot of heat on it.”
Terrorist activities continued under Nixon, peaking in the mid-1970s, with attacks on fishing boats, embassies, and Cuban offices overseas, and the bombing of a Cubana airliner, killing all seventy-three passengers. These and subsequent terrorist operations were carried out from U.S. territory, though by then they were regarded as criminal acts by the FBI.
Так справа продовжувалася, а Кастро був засуджений редакторами за підтримку «озброєного табору, незважаючи на безпеку від нападу, обіцяну Вашингтоном у 1962 році». Обіцянка мала бути достатньою, незважаючи на те, що послідувало; не кажучи вже про обіцянки, які передували, на той час добре задокументовані разом з інформацією про те, наскільки їм можна довіряти: наприклад, «момент Лоджа» в липні 1960 року.
On the thirtieth anniversary of the missile crisis, Cuba protested a machine-gun attack against a Spanish-Cuban tourist hotel; responsibility was claimed by a group in Miami. Bombings in Cuba in 1997, which killed an Italian tourist, were traced back to Miami. The perpetrators were Salvadoran criminals operating under the direction of Luis Posada Carriles and financed in Miami. One of the most notorious international terrorists, Posada had escaped from a Venezuelan prison where he had been held for the Cubana airliner bombing, with the aid of Jorge Mas Canosa, a Miami businessman who was the head of the tax-exempt Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF). Posada went from Venezuela to El Salvador, where he was put to work at the Ilopango military air base to help organize U.S. terrorist attacks against Nicaragua under Oliver North’s direction.
Posada has described in detail his terrorist activities and the funding for them from exiles and CANF in Miami, but felt secure that he would not be investigated by the FBI. He was a Bay of Pigs veteran, and his subsequent operations in the 1960s were directed by the CIA. When he later joined Venezuelan intelligence with CIA help, he was able to arrange for Orlando Bosch, an associate from his CIA days who had been convicted in the U.S. for a bomb attack on a Cuba-bound freighter, to join him in Venezuela to organize further attacks against Cuba. An ex-CIA official familiar with the Cubana bombing identifies Posada and Bosch as the only suspects in the bombing, which Bosch defended as “a legitimate act of war.” Generally considered the “mastermind” of the airline bombing, Bosch was responsible for thirty other acts of terrorism, according to the FBI. He was granted a presidential pardon in 1989 by the incoming Bush I administration after intense lobbying by Jeb Bush and South Florida Cuban-American leaders, overruling the Justice Department, which had found the conclusion “inescapable that it would be prejudicial to the public interest for the United States to provide a safe haven for Bosch [because] the security of this nation is affected by its ability to urge credibly other nations to refuse aid and shelter to terrorists.”
Економічна війна
Cuban offers to cooperate in intelligence-sharing to prevent terrorist attacks have been rejected by Washington, though some did lead to U.S. actions. “Senior members of the FBI visited Cuba in 1998 to meet their Cuban counterparts, who gave [the FBI] dossiers about what they suggested was a Miami-based terrorist network: information which had been compiled in part by Cubans who had infiltrated exile groups.” Three months later the FBI arrested Cubans who had infiltrated the U.S.-based terrorist groups. Five were sentenced to long terms in prison.
The national security pretext lost whatever shreds of credibility it might have had after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, though it was not until 1998 that U.S. intelligence officially informed the country that Cuba no longer posed a threat to U.S. national security. The Clinton administration, however, insisted that the military threat posed by Cuba be reduced to “negligible,” but not completely removed. Even with this qualification, the intelligence assessment eliminated a danger that had been identified by the Mexican ambassador in 1961, when he rejected JFK’s attempt to organize collective action against Cuba on the grounds that “if we publicly declare that Cuba is a threat to our security, forty million Mexicans will die laughing.”
In fairness, however, it should be recognized that missiles in Cuba did pose a threat. In private discussions the Kennedy brothers expressed their fears that the presence of Russian missiles in Cuba might deter a U.S. invasion of Venezuela. So “the Bay of Pigs was really right,” JFK concluded.
The Bush I administration reacted to the elimination of the security pretext by making the embargo much harsher, under pressure from Clinton, who outflanked Bush from the right during the 1992 election campaign. Economic warfare was made still more stringent in 1996, causing a furor even among the closest U.S. allies. The embargo came under considerable domestic criticism as well, on the grounds that it harms U.S. exporters and investors—the embargo’s only victims, according to the standard picture in the U.S.; Cubans are unaffected. Investigations by U.S. specialists tell a different story. Thus, a detailed study by the American Association for World Health concluded that the embargo had severe health effects, and only Cuba’s remarkable health care system had prevented a “humanitarian catastrophe”; this has received virtually no mention in the U.S.
The embargo has effectively barred even food and medicine. In 1999 the Clinton administration eased such sanctions for all countries on the official list of “terrorist states,” apart from Cuba, singled out for unique punishment. Nevertheless, Cuba is not entirely alone in this regard. After a hurricane devastated West Indian islands in August 1980, President Carter refused to allow any aid unless Grenada was excluded, as punishment for some unspecified initiatives of the reformist Maurice Bishop government. When the stricken countries refused to agree to Grenada’s exclusion, having failed to perceive the threat to survival posed by the nutmeg capital of the world, Carter withheld all aid. Similarly, when Nicaragua was struck by a hurricane in October 1988, bringing starvation and causing severe ecological damage, the current incumbents in Washington recognized that their terrorist war could benefit from the disaster, and therefore refused aid, even to the Atlantic Coast area with close links to the U.S. and deep resentment against the Sandinistas.
They followed suit when a tidal wave wiped out Nicaraguan fishing villages, leaving hundreds dead and missing in September 1992. In this case, there was a show of aid, but hidden in the small print was the fact that apart from an impressive donation of $25,000, the aid was deducted from assistance already scheduled. Congress was assured, however, that the pittance of aid would not affect the administration’s suspension of over $100 million of aid because the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan government had failed to demonstrate a sufficient degree of subservience.
U.S. economic warfare against Cuba has been strongly condemned in virtually every relevant international forum, even declared illegal by the Judicial Commission of the normally compliant Organization of American States. The European Union called on the World Trade Organization to condemn the embargo. The response of the Clinton administration was that “Europe is challenging ‘three decades of American Cuba policy that goes back to the Kennedy Administration,’ and is aimed entirely at forcing a change of government in Havana.” The administration also declared that the WTO has no competence to rule on U.S. national security or to compel the U.S. to change its laws. Washington then withdrew from the proceedings, rendering the matter moot.
Successful Defiance
The reasons for the international terrorist attacks against Cuba and the illegal economic embargo are spelled out in the internal record. And no one should be surprised to discover that they fit a familiar pattern—that of Guatemala a few years earlier, for example.
From the timing alone, it is clear that concern over a Russian threat could not have been a major factor. The plans for forceful regime change were drawn up and implemented before there was any significant Russian connection, and punishment was intensified after the Russians disappeared from the scene. True, a Russian threat did develop, but that was more a consequence than a cause of U.S. terrorism and economic warfare.
У липні 1961 року ЦРУ попередило, що «широкий вплив «кастроїзму» не є функцією кубинської влади. . . . Тінь Кастро надто велика, тому що соціальні та економічні умови по всій Латинській Америці заохочують опозицію до правлячої влади та спонукають до агітації за радикальні зміни», для чого Куба Кастро послужила зразком. Раніше Артур Шлезінгер передав новому президенту Кеннеді свою доповідь Латиноамериканської місії, в якій попереджав про сприйнятливість латиноамериканців до «ідеї Кастро взяти справу у свої руки». У доповіді таки виявлено зв’язок з Кремлем: Радянський Союз «зависає, процвітаючи великими позиками на розвиток і представляючи себе як модель для досягнення модернізації за одне покоління». Небезпека «ідеї Кастро» є особливо серйозною, як пізніше уточнив Шлезінгер, коли «розподіл землі та інших форм національного багатства значною мірою сприяє заможним класам» і «бідним і знедоленим, стимульованим прикладом кубинської революції, тепер вимагають можливості для гідного життя». Кеннеді побоювався, що російська допомога може перетворити Кубу на «вітрину» для розвитку, даючи Радянам перевагу в Латинській Америці.
In early 1964, the State Department Policy Planning Council expanded on these concerns: “The primary danger we face in Castro…in the impact the very existence of his regime has upon the leftist movement in many Latin American countries…. The simple fact is that Castro represents a successful defiance of the U.S., a negation of our whole hemispheric policy of almost a century and a half.” To put it simply, Thomas Paterson writes, “Cuba, as symbol and reality, challenged U.S. hegemony in Latin America.” International terrorism and economic warfare to bring about regime change are justified not by what Cuba does, but by its “very existence,” its “successful defiance” of the proper master of the hemisphere. Defiance may justify even more violent actions, as in Serbia, as quietly conceded after the fact; or Iraq, as also recognized when pretexts had collapsed.
Обурення через непокору сягає далекого коріння в американську історію. Двісті років тому Томас Джефферсон гірко засуджував Францію за її «непокору» під час утримання Нового Орлеана, якого він прагнув. Джефферсон попереджав, що «характер Франції [знаходиться] в точці вічного тертя з нашим характером, який, хоч і любить мир і прагне багатства, є високодушним». «Непокора Франції [вимагає від нас] одружитися з британським флотом і нацією», — радив Джефферсон, змінюючи свої попередні погляди, які відображали вирішальний внесок Франції у звільнення колоній від британського панування. Завдяки визвольній боротьбі Гаїті, яка не проводилася без сторонньої допомоги та майже повсюдно протистояла, непокора Франції незабаром припинилася, але керівні принципи залишаються в силі, визначаючи друга і ворога.
Z
Noam Chomsky is a linguist, social critic, political activist, and author of numerous books