Red Heat

Conspiracy, Murder and the Cold War in the Caribbean

Alex von Tunzelmann

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781847394590
• eBook ISBN: 9781471114779
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

America's secret war in the Caribbean during the Cold War is revealed as never before in this riveting story of the machinations and blunders of superpowers, and the daring of the mavericks who took them on. During the presidencies of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, the Caribbean was in crisis, while the United States and the USSR acted out the world's rising tensions in its island nations. Meanwhile the leaders of these nations - the charismatic Fidel Castro, and his mysterious brother Raúl; the ideologue Che Guevara; the capricious psychopath Rafael Trujillo; and François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, a buttoned-down doctor with interests in Vodou, embezzlement and torture - had ambitions of their own. Alex von Tunzelmann's brilliant narrative follows these five rivals and accomplices from the beginning of the Cold War to its end. The superpowers thought they could use these Caribbean leaders as puppets, but what neither bargained on was that their puppets would come to life. The United States, in its all-consuming fight against communism, stumbled into one disaster after another. First, with the Bay of Pigs, and then with the Cuban Missile Crisis, it helped bring the world as close to catastrophic nuclear war as it has ever been. Red Heatis an authoritative and eye-opening account of a wildly dramatic and dangerous era of international politics that has unmistakable resonance today.

PART I

IN SEARCH OF MONSTERS TO DESTROY

CHAPTER 1

THE ENTRAILS

On the north coast of Cuba’s Isle of Pines stands the Presidio Modelo, a panopticon prison. There are four large, drum-shaped cell blocks and a round refectory, all painted the colour of butter, on a wide, desolate, grassy plain that leads down to the Caribbean Sea. The cells are open to the elements. Winds whip across the flat scrub, as do hurricanes, in season. When the sun blazes down, a thick, exhausting heat simmers back off the rocky ground. Blizzards of flies and mosquitoes swarm around, and biting ants teem over every surface. Behind the drums is a low-rise isolation block, where special prisoners were kept. It was here, in 1953, that a young lawyer called Fidel Castro began to read the history of revolutions.

Fidel had been sent to this island prison after his failed attack on a barracks of the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Twenty-seven years old, beardless, and a passionate nationalist, he was facing the prospect of a stay in the Presidio Modelo which, if he took no amnesty, would last well into his forties. He had no intention of taking an amnesty, for that meant negotiating with Batista. But staying true to his principles pained him. ‘In many of the terrible moments that I have had to suffer during the past year,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘I have thought how much better it would be to be dead.’¹

Life was hard for the prisoners in the panopticons. Had Fidel, over six feet tall and broad as an ox, been forced to cramp himself with another man into one of the tiny cells, he would barely have had room to stand up or lie down. But Fidel was not kept in the panopticons. He was kept alternately in the relative comfort of the infirmary or in the isolation block, along with his brother Raúl and a small band of comrades. The reason for his comfort was his family connections. His brother-in-law was one of Batista’s ministers. The reason for his isolation was that he could not keep his mouth shut. When Batista had visited, Fidel had organized his fellow prisoners into an impromptu choir, singing out a rebel anthem at the fuming dictator until he went away.

Fidel’s cell, with limewashed walls, a high ceiling and granite floor, was relatively cool and hospitable. He was permitted to read, cook, and even smoke the occasional cigar from the fancy Havana firm of H. Upmann – then also the favourite brand of John F. Kennedy, a young senator from Massachusetts. His mood swung between despair and ebullience, the latter when he contemplated revolution.

Fidel read stacks of French, Russian and English literature, and the works of Freud. ‘But my attention is really focused on something else,’ he wrote. ‘I have rolled my sleeves up and begun studying world history and political theory.’² Among a broad selection of works that he acquired was Marx’s Das Kapital. He claimed at the time that it made him laugh, and later admitted he had never managed to get through the whole thing. With history, he fared better. He considered Julius Caesar ‘a true revolutionary’, became obsessed with Napoleon, and admired Franklin D. Roosevelt. But his hero remained the nineteenth-century Cuban poet and patriot, José Martí. Fidel also read of the first flowering of glory in the islands, post-Columbus: what he described as the ‘very moving’ story of the Haitian revolution.³

• • •

The history of Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic is a repeating cycle: plunder, oppression, a flash of hope, and a slide into disappointment. The first iteration was its conquest by the Spanish, who arrived in the wake of Christopher Columbus’s voyages. They sought gold, found little, and drained it fast, but in seeking it brought war, disease and slavery to the native Taino and Ciboney people. The islands’ chieftains led heroic revolts against the European conquest. Yet within a remarkably short space of time – little more than half a century – the Hispaniolan Taino, and most of the Cuban Taino and Ciboney, would be dead. Their civilizations were wiped off the earth.

Sugar would make the Caribbean’s fortunes, and its arrival began the second iteration of the cycle. But the farming and refining of sugar cane is punishing work, made tortuous by the heat. No free man would willingly do it. And so, having worked one race to death, the Europeans imported a new race so that they could work that one to death, too. The first African slaves arrived in the Caribbean just ten years after Columbus. Those who made it off the boats alive were put to work for twelve hours a day, six days a week. On the seventh day, they were forced to grow their own food, or otherwise starve. Conditions were squalid, disease was rife, and beatings and abuses were universal.

The West Africans enslaved in Hispaniola and Cuba died just as quickly as had the Taino and Ciboney. But these deaths troubled the Europeans little. Dead African slaves could be replaced with live African slaves. It cost money, of course, but not a great deal; and the supply seemed to be inexhaustible. Though the first few white voices of protest began to be raised in the second half of the sixteenth century, they were widely viewed as a lunatic minority.⁴ Slavery was endorsed by the Church on biblical authority, by governments on economic and social authority, and by the market itself.

Cuba and the eastern two-thirds of Hispaniola, now known as Santo Domingo, grew rich off the whip-scarred backs of slaves. But the French, who had taken control of the western third of Hispaniola and called it Saint-Domingue, perfected the slave economy. Saint-Domingue was acclaimed as the Pearl of the Antilles. Its plantations accounted for two-fifths of French foreign trade. It became the world’s premier producer of sugar, its profits per acre double those of most Caribbean lands, and its slave population twice that of its nearest rival, Jamaica’s.⁵

In Saint-Domingue alone, slavery is estimated to have killed 1 million people.⁶ More yet lived lives of misery. Though this may not have concerned the plantation owners morally, it did concern them practically. There was a great number of mistreated human beings in Saint-Domingue, and they were very angry.

A revolution broke out in North America. A regiment of black slaves and freedmen from Saint-Domingue was sent to fight in the ensuing war of independence, and saw action against the British at Saratoga and Savannah. When its men returned, they brought with them the idea that a people need not put up with being dominated. And so, on the night of 14 August 1791, a ceremony was held during a thunderstorm in the northern woods of Bois Caïman. A priestess, Roumaine, cut the throat of a black pig and drained its blood, mixing it with gunpowder. Those present drank the potion. An offering was made of the pig’s entrails, to affirm a pact between those present and the loas, or spirits, of their Vodou religion. A priest, Boukman, declared that all whites must die. ‘We must not leave any refuge,’ he declared, ‘or any hope of salvation.’⁷

Eight days later, drumming was heard all over the north of Saint-Domingue. It heralded fire attacks on plantations of cane, cotton and coffee. By September, over 1000 plantations had been burned, and tens of thousands killed. The United States wanted the French out of the Caribbean, and sent arms and supplies to the black army. This move was strategic, not idealistic. Like the French, white Americans did not see black Haitians as human beings of equal worth to themselves. As President John Adams noted of the Haitians in 1799, ‘Independence is the worst and most dangerous condition they can be in for the United States.’⁸

‘There was Napoleon acting like Caesar, as if France were Rome,’ wrote Fidel Castro, a century and a half later, ‘when a new Spartacus appeared, Toussaint L’Ouverture.’⁹ Born into slavery, Toussaint had ascended to the prestigious position of livestock steward. He had learned to read and, like Fidel, had looked to Caesar’s commentaries for his political and military education.¹⁰ When he joined the revolution he was already forty-five years old. His physical stamina – on an ordinary day, he rode 125 miles on horseback – and exceptional abilities as a strategist and a leader ensured a swift rise. By 1800, Toussaint had wrested control of Saint-Domingue. He declared independence and the end of slavery, and annexed the Spanish side of Hispaniola, Santo Domingo.

In February 1802, Napoleon sent his brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc, to retake Hispaniola. Leclerc publicly promised that French rule would in future be free, equal and fraternal for all. At this, many of Toussaint’s best generals defected to the French. Toussaint was defeated by May, trapped in June, and put on a ship to France.

There was no trial. There was only imprisonment high in the Alps – a climate to which Toussaint did not adjust – and a meagre prison diet. The greatest slave leader in history was found dead the following spring, his small, cold body huddled sadly by the fireplace in his cell.

In July came Napoleon’s treachery. Slavery, which had been outlawed in 1794, was restored across the French Empire. At once, every black and many mulatto soldiers and officers who had fought for the French turned against them. If slavery were to be reimposed, Leclerc told Napoleon, ‘I shall have to wage a war of extermination.’¹¹ Instead, an epidemic of yellow fever killed most of the French troops, including Leclerc himself. The tattered remains of the French army were defeated finally by the black general Jean-Jacques Dessalines on 18 November 1803.

On the first day of 1804, Dessalines declared independence, and renamed the country Haiti, after its Taino name, Ayiti, land of mountains. ‘I have given the French cannibals blood for blood,’ he said. ‘I have avenged America.’¹²

‘What a small place in history is given to the rebelling African slaves who established a free republic by routing Napoleon’s best generals!’ Fidel Castro wrote, back in his cell on the Isle of Pines. ‘I am always thinking about these things because I would honestly love to revolutionize this country from one end to the other! I am sure this would bring happiness to the Cuban people. I would not be stopped by the hatred and ill will of a few thousand people, including some of my relatives, half the people I know, two-thirds of my fellow professionals, and four-fifths of my ex-schoolmates.’¹³

• • •

The revolution in Haiti created shockwaves across the world’s slaveholding nations. At the beginning of 1806, the United States Congress banned trade with Haiti.¹⁴ With the battle continuing on Dominican soil between the Haitians and the various colonial interests on the Spanish side of the island, the sugar industry collapsed on both sides of Hispaniola. But European powers and the United States still required sweetness. Gigantic cane plantations sprung up all over Cuba, with a corresponding increase in slave numbers.

In white-ruled Cuba, the United States saw opportunity. Thomas Jefferson was one of many early American statesmen who expressed interest in adding the island to the Union. This did not imply that all its people would be treated as equal American citizens. Jefferson thought that non-European peoples had much further to go before they would be ‘capable’ of enjoying liberty. No hope at all was held out for African slaves or Native Americans, and only little for Latin Americans, who were ‘immersed in the darkest ignorance, and brutalised by bigotry & superstition’. Still, Jefferson hoped that ‘Light will at length beam in on their minds and the standing example we shall hold up, serving as an excitement as well as a model for their direction may in the long run qualify them for self-government.’¹⁵

As Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams agreed that the role of the United States was to serve as an example of freedom, not a crusader. In a famous address to the House of Representatives on Independence Day, 1821, he declared proudly that the United States ‘goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.’¹⁶ Two years later, he notified the Spanish government of Washington’s formal interest in acquiring Cuba.

American politicians still considered themselves opposed to empires, which they associated with their own oppression by the British. Paradoxically, though, they sought to expand the territory of the United States, and to establish political primacy across the Americas. At the end of that year, President James Monroe announced to Congress that, while the United States would not interfere in existing European colonies, it would henceforth view any effort on the part of European powers to extend their domains in the western hemisphere, including ‘any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny’, to be ‘the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States’.¹⁷ This Monroe Doctrine would become a central plank of American foreign policy, well into the Cold War and beyond.

• • •

The Haitian revolution had created its flash of hope, and Caribbean history was due a slide into disappointment. The villains were the French. In 1825, the restored King Charles X sent warships to encircle Haiti’s coastline. France considered that the land – and the slaves – had been French property. Emancipation had stolen that property. Now it demanded reparations: 150 million francs, in gold.

There could have been no more flagrant breach of the Monroe Doctrine. Haiti had declared and maintained its independence, existing free from European rule for a generation. The demand was an interposition by France, with the intent to oppress Haiti and control its destiny. Yet it was not considered an unfriendly act against the United States, as undoubtedly it would have been in any of the white-ruled republics. The Monroe Doctrine did not apply to states whose independence the United States had not acknowledged, and the United States had refused to afford the black republic the dignity of recognition. And so the American government placidly looked on while French warships, acting for the French crown, extended their colonial power in the western hemisphere.

The ransom demanded from Haiti was ten times its annual national revenue. But, with the guns of the French Caribbean fleet pointed at Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s president was forced to agree that the former slaves should compensate their masters. To make the first payment – 30 million francs – Haiti was obliged to take on loans covering the full sum from Parisian banks. Interest of 20 per cent on this loan – 6 million francs – was demanded in advance. To pay that, the treasury was emptied.

For the first liberated Latin American nation, formal independence on 11 July 1825 did not signify the beginning of freedom, but the end of hope. The chains were not cast off; they were soldered back on. Even after it was reduced to 60 million francs in 1838, the debt was an impossible sum. During the nineteenth century, slavery would be outlawed all over Europe and in the United States. Compensation was paid to slave-owners – but by the governments that outlawed slavery, not by the slaves themselves. Yet the French government continued to insist that its own ex-slaves in Haiti pay for their liberty. The slavery reparations would not be paid off until 1947.¹⁸

• • •

In 1848, 1854 and 1859, explicit offers to purchase Cuba were conveyed from Washington to Madrid. On several more occasions, implicit offers were made, requesting the island as surety on loans made to Spain. Meanwhile, in Hispaniola, the complicated tensions between French-speakers and Spanish-speakers, rich and poor, former freeman and former slave, had only intensified. Strict race lines had crept back into society, and were defined by the precise proportions of black and white in seven generations of a person’s ancestry. Foreigners could rarely detect the all-important differences between a noir, a sacatra, a griffe, a marabou, a mulâtre, a quarteron, a métis, a mamelouc, a quarteronné and a sang-mêlé. Partly, this was because they were not always detectable by sight: as the black leader Jean-Jacques Acaau observed, ‘Nèg riche se mulat,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Contents
• Map
• The Secret War
• PART I: IN SEARCH OF MONSTERS TO DESTROY
• PART II: CUBA LIBRE
• PART III: COCKFIGHT
• PART IV: FALLOUT
• List of Illustrations
• Note on Names
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the Author
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright