Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

From these despotic bases, the CIA-directed assault of Colonel Armas overthrew Arbenz Guzmán in 1954 and established in Guatemala a regime similar to that of the Somozas. All civil and political freedoms were overthrown, the land reforms were undone, and corruption reigned. When Armas was assassinated in 1957 and a moderate elected as his successor, the army annulled those elections and held new ones in which one of their own, General Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, was “elected.” He liquidated what remained of Guatemala’s Socialist experiments by granting these enterprises, at very reasonable prices, to his friends, while collecting his own pay of $1,094,000 a year. Discontent from his associates led to a conservative army revolt against Ydigoras in November 1960, but American pressure secured his position. The United States at the time could not afford a change of regime in Guatemala, since that country was already deeply involved, as the chief aggressive base for the Cuban exiles’ attack on Cuba, at the Bay of Pigs, in April 1962.

As we all know, the CIA success in attacking “Communist” Guatemala from dictatorial Nicaragua in 1954 was not repeated in its more elaborate attack on “Communist” Cuba from dictatorial Guatemala in 1962. In fact, the Bay of Pigs must stand as the most shameful event in United States history since the end of World War II. But before we tell that story we must examine its background in Cuba’s recent history, a story that well exemplifies the tragedy of Cuba.

The causes of the Cuban disaster are as complex as most historical events, but, if we oversimplify, we may organize them in terms of two intersecting factors: (1) the personality deficiencies of the Cubans themselves, such as their lack of rationality and self-discipline, their emotionalism and corruptibility, and (2) the ignorance and ineptitude of the American State Department, which seems incapable of dealing with Latin America in terms of the real problems of the area, but instead insists on treating it in terms of America’s vision of the world, which is to say in terms of American political preconceptions and economic interests.

Cuba is more Spanish than much of Latin America, and obtained its independence from Spain only in 1898, two generations later than the rest of Latin America. Then, for over thirty years, until the abrogation of the Piatt amendment in 1934, Cuba was under American occupation (1898-1902) or the threat of direct American intervention. During that period the island fell under American economic domination by American investments on the island and by becoming deeply involved in the American market, especially for its sugar crop. In the same period, a local oligarchy of Cubans was built up, including an exploitative landlord group that had not existed previously.

With the establishment of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1933 and the ending of the threat of American direct intervention, it became possible for the Cubans to overthrow the tyrannical and bloody rule of General Gerardo Machado which had lasted for eight years (1925—1933). The opportunity to begin a series of urgently needed and widely demanded social reforms under Machado’s successor, Ramon Grau San Martin, was lost when the United States refused to recognize or to assist the new regime. As a result, a ruthless Cuban army sergeant, Fulgencio Batista, was able to overthrow Grau San Martin and begin a ten-year rule of the island (1934-1944) through civilian puppets, chosen in fraudulent elections, and then directly as president himself. When Grau San Martin was elected president in 1944, he abandoned his earlier reformist ideas and became the first of a series of increasingly corrupt elected regimes over the next eight years. The fourth such election, scheduled for 1953, was prevented when Batista seized power once again, in March 1952.

The next seven years were filled by Batista’s efforts to hold his position by violence and corruption against the rising tide of discontent against his rule. One of the earliest episodes in that tide was an attempted revolt by a handful of youths, led by twenty-six-year-old Fidel Castro, in eastern Cuba on July 26, 1953.

The failure of the rising of July 26th gave Castro two years of imprisonment and more than a year of exile, but at the end of 1956 he landed with a handful of men on the coast of Cuba to begin guerrilla operations against the government. Batista’s regime was so corrupt and violent that many of the local powers of Cuba, including segments of the army and much of the middle-class, were either neutral or favorable to Castro’s operations. The necessary arms and financial support came from these groups, although the core of the movement was made up of peasants and workers led by young, middle-class university graduates.

This Castro uprising was not typical of the revolutionary coups that had been familiar in Cuba and throughout Latin America in an earlier day, because of Castro’s fanatical thirst for power, his ruthless willingness to destroy property or lives in order to weaken the Batista regime, and his double method of operation, from within Cuba rather than from abroad and from a rural base, the peasants, rather than the usual urban base, the army, used by most Latin American rebels.

By destroying sugar plantations and utilities, Castro’s rebels weakened the economic and communications basis of the Batista government. The steady attrition of the regime’s popular and military support made it possible for Castro’s forces to advance across Cuba, and, on New Year’s Day of 1959, he marched into Havana. Within two weeks, an additional and very ominous difference in this revolution appeared: the supporters of the Batista regime and dissident elements in Castro’s movement began to be executed by firing squads.

For a year Castro’s government carried on a reformist policy administered by his original supporters, the July 26th group of young, middle-class, university graduates. These reforms were aimed at satisfying the more obvious demands of the dispossessed groups who had provided the mass basis for Castro’s movement. Military barracks were converted into schools; the militia was permanently established to replace the regular army; rural health centers were set up; a full-scale attack was made on illiteracy; new schools were constructed; urban rents were cut by half; utility rates were slashed; taxes were imposed on the upper classes; the beaches, once reserved for the rich, were opened to all; and a drastic land reform was launched. These actions were not integrated into any viable economic program, but they did spread a sense of well-being in the countryside, although they curtailed the building boom in the cities (especially Havana), largely rooted in American investment, and they instigated a flight of the rich from the island to refuge in the United States.

Beneath this early and temporary bloom of well-being, many ominous signs appeared. Castro soon showed that he was a tactician of revolution, not a strategist of reconstruction. He not only proclaimed permanent revolution in Cuba, but at once sought to export it to the rest of Latin America. Arms and guerrilla fighters were sent, and lost, in unsuccessful efforts to invade Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Failure of these turned him to methods of more subtle penetration, largely worked by propaganda and the arming and training of small subversive underground groups, especially in areas where democratic or progressive regimes seemed to be developing (as in Venezuela under Betancourt or Colombia under Alberto Lleras Camargo). At the same time, an unsuccessful effort was made to persuade all Latin America to form an anti-Yankee front.

Although the United States, in October 1959, had promised to follow a policy of nonintervention toward Cuba, these changes within the island, and especially the long visit there of Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan in February 1960, forced a reconsideration of this policy. The Mikoyan agreement promised Cuba petroleum, arms, and other needs for its sugar, although the price equivalent allowed for the sugar was only 4 cents a pound at a time when the American price was 6 cents; by June 1963, when world sugar prices reached 13 cents, the USSR raised its price for Cuban sugar to 6 cents. This trade agreement was followed by establishment of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in May and with Red China later in the year. The Soviet embassy in Havana became a source of Communist subversion for all of Latin America almost at once, while in September Khrushchev and Castro jointly dominated the annual session of the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York.