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

As part of the trade agreement with Russia, Castro obtained Soviet crude petroleum for Cuban sugar. When he insisted that American-owned refineries in Cuba process this oil, they refused and were at once seized by Castro. The United States struck back by reducing the Cuban sugar quota in the American market, which led, step by step, to Castro’s sweeping nationalization of foreign-owned factories on the island. The United States retaliated by establishing a series of embargoes on Cuban exports to the United States. These controversies led Castro into an economic trap similar to that into which Nasser had fallen with Egypt’s cotton. Each nationalist revolutionary leader committed his chief foreign-exchange-earning product (sugar or cotton) to the Soviet Union as payment for Communist (often Czech) arms. This tied these countries to the Soviet Union and deprived them of the chance to use their one source of foreign money for equipment so urgently needed for economic improvement. By December 1960, when American diplomatic relations with Cuba were broken off, the Cuban economic decline had begun, and soon reached a point where standards of living were at least a third below the Batista level, except for some previously submerged groups.

At the end of 1960, the Eisenhower Administration decided to use force to remove Castro. This decision was a major error and led to a totally shameful fiasco. The error apparently arose in the Central Intelligence Agency and was based on a complete misjudgment of the apparent ease with which that agency had overthrown the Arbenz regime in Guatemala in 1954 by organizing a raid of exiles, armed and financed by the CIA, into Guatemala from Nicaragua. The CIA analyzed this apparently successful coup quite incorrectly, since it assumed that Arbenz had been overthrown by the raiding exiles, when he had really been destroyed by his own army, which used the raid as an excuse and occasion to get rid of him. But on this mistaken basis, the CIA in 1960 decided to get rid of Castro by a similar raid of Cuban exiles from Guatemala.

This decision was worse than a crime; it was stupid. A unilateral, violent attack on a neighboring state with which we were not at war, in an area where we were committed to multilateral and peaceful procedures for settling disputes, was a repudiation of all our idealistic talk about the rights of small nations and our devotion to peaceful procedures that we had been pontificating around the world since 1914. It was a violation of our commitment to nonintervention in the Americas and specifically in Cuba. In sequence to our CIA intervention in Guatemala, it strengthened the Latin American picture of the United States as indifferent to Latin America’s growing demand for social reform and national independence and as hostile to these when they conflicted with its own drives for wealth and power. Moreover, the attack on Cuba was ill-advised at a time when Castro’s prestige at home was rapidly dwindling and when opposition was rising to his chaotic rule throughout the island. And, finally, the whole operation, patterned on Hitler’s operations to subvert Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938, was bungled as Hitler could never have bungled anything. The project was very much of a Dulles brothers’ job, and its execution was largely in the hands of the Central Intelligence Agency, which organized the expeditionary force from Cuban exiles, financed and armed them, and supervised their training in Guatemala and elsewhere.

The plan of the invasion of Cuba seems to have been drawn on typical Hitler lines: the expeditionary force was to establish a beachhead in Cuba, set up a government on the island, be recognized by the United States as the actual government of Cuba, and ask Washington for aid to restore order in the rest of the island which it did not yet control. The Joint Chiefs of Staff approved of the plan, and President Kennedy was persuaded to accept it, after his inauguration, because of the CIA’s argument that something must be done to remove Castro before his newly acquired Soviet armaments became operational. The President was assured that if matters were allowed to go on as they were, Castro would be strengthened in power (which was untrue) and that the invasion would be a success because the Cuban people, led by the anti-Castro underground, would rise against him as soon as they heard of the landing.

Whatever truth there was in this last contention, the CIA handling of the invasion made it impossible, because the CIA refused to use either the anti-Castro underground in Cuba or the Cuban refugees in the United States (except as volunteers to be targets in the invasion attempt), and kept all planning and control of the invasion in its own hands. The executive committee of Cuban refugees in the United States, mostly representatives of the older ruling groups in Cuba, were eager to restore the inequitable economic and social system that had existed before Castro. They were alienated from the most vigorous anti-Castro groups in the Cuban underground, who had no desire to turn back the clock to the Machado-Batista era but wanted to free the social and economic reform movement from Castro, the Communists, and the antidemocratic and totalitarian forces that had taken control of it. The CIA would not cooperate with the anti-Castro underground because it was opposed to their wish for social and economic reform, and it would not use the Miami refugee committee because it doubted either their discretion or fighting spirit. Accordingly, the CIA launched the invasion without notifying the Cuban underground and kept the refugee committee locked up without communication for the week of the attack. Then the attack itself was bungled, since it was aimed at an inappropriate spot, without eliminating Castro’s air power, and without provision for fighting it, and with the logistics for the whole tactical operation of the invasion at an unbelievable level of incompetence.

As a result of these errors, the 1,500 men landed at the Bay of Pigs in southern Cuba on April 17, 1961 were destroyed in seventy-two hours by Castro’s speedily mobilized and well-armed militia. At the same time, Castro’s police destroyed any possible simultaneous rising of the underground by arresting thousands of suspects. To do the wrong thing is bad, but to do it incompetently is unforgivable.

The blow to American prestige from the Bay of Pigs was almost irretrievable. On the other hand, it greatly strengthened Castro’s prestige, in Latin America more than in Cuba itself, and made it possible for him to bind the Kremlin to his cause so tightly that it could neither reduce its support nor control his policies. This in turn permitted him to survive a deepening wave of passive resistance and sabotage within Cuba itself, chiefly from the peasants. And, finally, as we shall see, this made it possible for him to recapture control of the Cuban revolutionary movement for himself and the Fidelistas from the Cuban Communists. This last point was in March, 1962, but the others began in 1961.

Until the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Soviet commitment to Castro had been considerable but not irretrievable. Soviet armaments began to arrive as early as July 1960, and in the first year exceeded 30,000 tons valued at 50 million dollars. As payment, the Communist bloc’s portion of Cuba’s export trade rose from 2 percent to 75 percent. Within a year of the failure at the Bay of Pigs, Sino-Soviet military support for Castro doubled. It also changed its quality to late model antiaircraft missiles, long-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, and even Soviet combat troops. By the time these changes became evident to Washington in October 1962, the Soviet military buildup in Cuba had cost over 700 million dollars.

Before this Soviet military buildup in Cuba reached its stage of most rapid acceleration in July-October 1962, a number of significant changes occurred in Cuba itself. Two of these were the growth of Cuban resistance to the Castro regime and Castro’s acceptance and sudden reversal of a Communist usurpation of his power within Cuba.