Conflicting Missions

Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976

Piero Gleijeses

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780807861622
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique latine et des Caraïbes

This is a compelling and dramatic account of Cuban policy in Africa from 1959 to 1976 and of its escalating clash with U.S. policy toward the continent. Piero Gleijeses's fast-paced narrative takes the reader from Cuba's first steps to assist Algerian rebels fighting France in 1961, to the secret war between Havana and Washington in Zaire in 1964-65--where 100 Cubans led by Che Guevara clashed with 1, 000 mercenaries controlled by the CIA--and, finally, to the dramatic dispatch of 30, 000 Cubans to Angola in 1975-76, which stopped the South African advance on Luanda and doomed Henry Kissinger's major covert operation there. Based on unprecedented archival research and firsthand interviews in virtually all of the countries involved--Gleijeses was even able to gain extensive access to closed Cuban archives--this comprehensive and balanced work sheds new light on U.S. foreign policy and CIA covert operations. It revolutionizes our view of Cuba's international role, challenges conventional U.S. beliefs about the influence of the Soviet Union in directing Cuba's actions in Africa, and provides, for the first time ever, a look from the inside at Cuba's foreign policy during the Cold War. Washington Post Book World "Gleijeses's research... bluntly contradicts the Congressional testimony of the era and the memoirs of Henry A. Kissinger.... After reviewing Dr. Gleijeses's work, several former senior United States diplomats who were involved in making policy toward Angola broadly endorsed its conclusions.-- New York Times "With the publication of Conflicting Missions, Piero Gleijeses establishes his reputation as the most impressive historian of the Cold War in the Third World. Drawing on previously unavailable Cuban and African as well as American sources, he tells a story that's full of fresh and surprising information. And best of all, he does this with a remarkable sensitivity to the perspectives of the protagonists. This book will become an instant classic.--John Lewis Gaddis, author of We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History Based on unprecedented research in Cuban, American, and European archives, this is the compelling story of Cuban policy in Africa from 1959 to 1976 and of its escalating clash with U.S. policy toward the continent. Piero Gleijeses sheds new light on U.S. foreign policy and CIA covert operations, revolutionizes our view of Cuba's international role, and provides the first look from the inside at Cuba's foreign policy during the Cold War.
-->

Chapter One
Castro’s Cuba, 1959-1964

The United States did not hesitate to recognize the government established by Fidel Castro. On January 7, 1959, just six days after Fulgencio Batista had fled Cuba, the Eisenhower administration extended the hand of friendship to the victorious guerrillas. To signal its goodwill, the State Department replaced the ambassador to Cuba, Earl Smith, a wealthy political appointee who had been close to Batista, with Philip Bonsal, a career diplomat known to work well with left-of-center governments. Within a year, however, Eisenhower had decided that Castro had to go.

It was not Castro’s record on human rights and political democracy that bothered Eisenhower. As historian Stephen Rabe has noted, “During much of the decade [1950s], U.S. officials were busy hugging and bestowing medals on sordid, often ruthless [Latin American] tyrants.” U.S. presidents—even Woodrow Wilson, his rhetoric notwithstanding—had consistently maintained good relations with the worst dictators of the hemisphere, so long as they accepted U.S. hegemony.¹

Castro, however, was not willing to bow to the United States. “He is clearly a strong personality and a born leader of great personal courage and conviction,” U.S. officials noted in April 1959. “He is inspired by a messianic sense of mission to aid his people,” a National Intelligence Estimate reported two months later. Even though he did not have a clear blueprint of the Cuba he wanted to create, Castro dreamed of a sweeping revolution that would uproot his country’s oppressive socioeconomic structure. He dreamed of a Cuba that would be free of the United States.²

THE BURDEN OF THE PAST

It was President Thomas Jefferson who first cast his gaze toward Cuba, strategically situated and rich in sugar and slaves. In 1809 he counseled his successor, James Madison, to propose a deal to Napoleon, who had occupied Spain: the United States would give France a free hand in Spanish America, if France would give Cuba to the United States. “That would be a price,” he wrote, “and I would immediately erect a column on the southernmost limit of Cuba, and inscribe on it a ne plus ultra as to us in that direction.”³

England, however, had made it clear that it would not tolerate Cuba’s annexation to the United States, and the Royal Navy dominated the waves. The United States would have to wait until the fruit was ripe, but time was in America’s favor. In John Quincy Adams’s words, “there are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation; and if an apple severed by the tempest from its native tree cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection with Spain and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only towards the North American Union, which by the same law of nature cannot cast her off from its bosom.”⁴

Through the administrations of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Adams, U.S. officials opposed the liberation of Cuba because they feared it would create an opportunity for other powers, particularly England, or lead to a successful slave revolt on the island, or, at a minimum, establish a republic that abolished slavery and promoted equal rights for blacks and whites. The fruit would never have ripened, because such a Cuba would have bitterly resisted annexation to Jeffersonian America, where the blacks were slaves or outcasts.

Cuba became the “ever faithful island”—a rich Spanish colony dotted with great landed estates worked by a mass of black slaves. A ten-year war of independence, which erupted in 1868, failed to dislodge the Spanish. But in 1895 José Martí raised again the standard of revolt. He wanted independence and reform, and he was deeply suspicious of the United States. “What I have done, and shall continue to do,” he wrote in May 1895, “is to… block with our blood . . . the annexation of the peoples of our America to the turbulent and brutal North that despises them. . . . I lived in the monster [the United States], and know its entrails—and my sling is that of David.”⁵

In 1898, as the Cuban revolt entered its fourth year, the United States joined the war, ostensibly to free Cuba. After Spain surrendered, Washington forced the Platt amendment on the Cubans. The amendment granted the United States the right to intervene and to have naval bases on Cuban soil. (Even today, the Platt amendment lives, with the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo.) Cuba became, more than any other Latin American country, in Tad Szulc’s words, “an American fiefdom.”⁶ And when a group of men who were determined to bring about social reform and national independence finally seized power in Cuba in September 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt refused to recognize their new government and urged the Cuban army to seize power. And so it did, and the era of Batista began.

When Fidel Castro began fighting against Batista in 1956, the United States supplied arms to the dictator. Castro took note. In a letter of June 5, 1958, he wrote: “The Americans are going to pay dearly for what they’re doing. When this war is over, I’ll start a much longer and bigger war of my own: the war I’m going to fight against them. That will be my true destiny.”⁷

Many of the opponents of Batista’s regime wanted to accommodate the United States, either because they admired its culture or had a fatalistic respect for its power. Castro, on the other hand, represented the views of those anti-Batista youths who were repulsed by Washington’s domination and paternalism. This, however, baffled Eisenhower and most Americans, who believed that America had always been the Cubans’ truest friend, fighting Spain in 1898 to give them their independence. “Here is a country that you would believe, on the basis of our history, would be one of our real friends,” Eisenhower marveled. As American historian Nancy Mitchell has pointed out, “Our selective recall not only serves a purpose; it also has repercussions. It creates a chasm between us and the Cubans: we share a past, but we have no shared memories.”⁸

THE BREAK

In 1959 Castro might have been willing to accept a modus vivendi with Washington that promised Cuba complete independence in domestic politics, while setting some limits on its foreign policy. History, after all, taught that no government could survive in the region against the will of the United States, and Castro had no assurances whatsoever that the Soviet Union would befriend Cuba, a fragile outpost in the American backyard. On the other hand, it is likely that very influential members of Castro’s entourage—including his brother Raúl and Che Guevara—were not only deeply skeptical that such an accommodation would be possible but also ideologically inclined to move Cuba toward the socialist bloc. Furthermore, given the youthful pride of the Cuban leadership, even a hint of bullying from Washington was bound to radicalize rather than intimidate.

The Eisenhower administration wanted a modus vivendi with Castro, sincerely but on its own terms: Cuba must remain within the U.S. sphere of influence. The U.S. press and the Congress, Republicans and Democrats, agreed.

If Castro accepted these parameters, he could stay. Otherwise he would be overthrown. The Eisenhower administration began to plot his ouster six months after he had seized power. At an NSC meeting on January 14, 1960, Under Secretary Livingston Merchant noted that “our present objective was to adjust all our actions in such a way as to accelerate the development of an opposition in Cuba which would bring about . . . a new government favorable to U.S. interests.” He then asked the assistant secretary for inter-American affairs, Roy Rubottom, to summarize the evolution of U.S.-Cuban relations since January 1959:

The period from January to March might be characterized as the honeymoon period of the Castro government. In April a downward trend in U.S.-Cuban relations had been evident. . . . In June we had reached the decision that it was not possible to achieve our objectives with Castro in power and had agreed to undertake the program referred to by Mr. Merchant. In July and August we had been busy drawing up a program to replace Castro. However some U.S. companies reported to us during this time that they were making some progress in negotiations, a factor that caused us to slow the implementation of our program. The hope expressed by these companies did not materialize. October was a period of clarification. . . . On October 31, in agreement with CIA, the Department had recommended to the President approval of a program along the lines referred to by Mr. Merchant. The approved program authorized us to support elements in Cuba opposed to the Castro government while making Castro’s downfall seem to be the result of his own mistakes.⁹

It was probably as part of this program that Cuban exiles mounted seaborne raids against Cuba from U.S. territory and that unidentified planes attacked economic targets on the island, leading the U.S. embassy to warn Washington that the population was “becoming aroused” against the United States.¹⁰ And in January 1960, when Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles “presented an Agency proposal [to Eisenhower] for sabotage of sugar refineries of Cuba,” the president replied that “he didn’t object to such an undertaking and, indeed, thought something like this was timely. However, he felt that any program should be much more ambitious, and it was probably now the time to move against Castro in a positive and aggressive way which went beyond pure harassment. He asked Mr. Dulles to come back with an enlarged program.”¹¹ This enlarged program, which Dulles presented to the president in March 1960, led to Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs, in which some 1,300 CIA-trained Cuban exiles stormed a Cuban beach in April 1961, only to surrender three days later.¹²

MONGOOSE

Flush with his victory at the Bay of Pigs, Castro tendered an olive branch to the United States. On August 17, 1961, at an inter-American conference at Punta del Este, Che Guevara arranged a meeting with Kennedy’s close aide Richard Goodwin. “He [Che] seemed very ill at ease when we began to talk, but soon became relaxed and spoke freely,” Goodwin reported to Kennedy. “Although he left no doubt of his personal and intense devotion to Communism, his conversation was free of propaganda and bombast. He spoke calmly, in a straightforward manner, and with the appearance of detachment and objectivity. He left no doubt, at any time, that he felt completely free to speak for his government and rarely distinguished between his personal observations and the official position of the Cuban government. I had the definite impression that he had thought out his remarks very carefully—they were extremely well organized.”

The Cubans, Che told Goodwin, “didn’t want an understanding with the U.S., because they knew that was impossible. They would like a modus vivendi—at least an interim modus vivendi. . . . He said they could discuss no formula that would mean giving up the type of society to which they were dedicated.” But they were willing to accept limits on their foreign policy: “they could agree not to make any political alliance with the East—although this would not affect their natural sympathies.” And he indicated, “very obliquely and with evident reluctance because of the company in which we were talking [a Brazilian and an Argentine diplomat were acting as interpreters], that they could also discuss the activities of the Cuban revolution in other countries.” According to Goodwin, therefore, Guevara was hinting at a tropical Finlandization: complete freedom at home and some limits on foreign policy.¹³

When Che and Goodwin met, Cuba’s support for revolutionary movements in Latin America was just beginning to gather momentum. “At present time, there is no hard evidence of an actual supply of arms or armed men going from Cuba to other countries to assist indigenous revolutionary movements,” the CIA had noted three months earlier. “There has been some movement of individual armed agents into other countries and some Cuban effort to train the revolutionaries of other countries. The export of physical aid to revolutionary movements, while important, is much less significant than the threat posed by Castro’s example and general stimulus of these movements.”¹⁴

This threat haunted Kennedy. “Latin America is ripe for revolution in one form or another,” a National Intelligence Estimate noted in 1962. Looking back thirty years later, Kennedy’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, explained, “That was a real fear! People [in Washington] were really nervous that somewhere, somehow they [the Castroites] would pull it off again. The fear in Washington was really intense. There was the idea that the situation was potentially very explosive and could spread.”¹⁵

Castro was hurling a two-pronged assault against the United States. He was leading his island into the Soviet embrace, and he was fomenting revolution throughout the hemisphere. Kennedy was not interested in exploring a modus vivendi. He would defang the threat in Latin America by launching the Alliance for Progress—an unprecedented program of social reform and economic growth—...