Castro: A Failure of Rapprochement

Castro: A Failure of Rapprochement Shima M. Yuko April 2005

Castro: Profiles in Power by Sebastian Balfour, is written chronologically from Fidel Castro s biographical background to the major events of the early 1990s. The author writes the book very lucidly without much of his personal bias, depicting the recent history of Cuba, Castro s rise to power, and the prolonged struggles between Castro and the United States. Although the author provided a lot of accurate information throughout the book based on his research, he failed to provide some important detailed information, which could more color to the book. Therefore, I challenged some of the author s viewpoints on some social and political aspects. My arguments focus on the education system in Cuba, secret rapprochement efforts by some United States presidents, the issue of the trade embargo, and terrorism issues. As the author says, Castro s greatest preoccupation was to provide the human and social resources that he saw as vital to economic take-off, in particular education. 1 Indeed, after the Cuban revolution, Castro increased his country s literacy rate to 96 percent from 76 percent, but the education progress has not been very helpful in promoting economic advances. In reality, students in Cuba suffer from a lack of needed learning materials; they had to share old textbooks with multiple students, and there was a lack of education technology for learning. Due to the trade embargo by the United States and the economic turmoil after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba s purchasing power for goods and materials dramatically decreased since the early 1990s. The supplies of pencils, paper, and books have been reduced by 50 percent compared to what it acquired in 1989. 2 Free education in Cuba is probably the reason for its high literacy rate, and it sounds generous and liberal, but there is a price to be paid. For example, intellectual and academic activities are controlled, and freedom of expression is limited, emphasizing anti-capitalist ideas and communist theory in the academic curriculum. The curriculum includes learning the value of labor, with students attending boarding schools where they work in agricultural fields at least one month each year. Pope John Paul II criticized the boarding school system when he visited Cuba in January 1998, because middle-school students were away from parental supervision. 3 All education and training is tied to a responsibility to the state and the government s perceived national interests. 4 For students, the government uses higher education as a tool of moral obligation to produce conformity and acceptance of actions taken by the state. 5 It seems that education is important in Cuba, but only if it serves the interests of the government.

The relationship between Cuba and the United States became estranged after Castro overthrew President Batista 6 in 1959. Batista had a long business relationship with the United States, especially with the organized crime leaders of the Mafia. The United States began to break off all diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1960 while Castro declared that his country had become a socialist nation. One of the most decisive early events that completely divided the United States and Cuba is the unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion. Balfour says the long-expected invasion force of Cuban exiles set sail from Nicaragua under US navy escort. The new American President, John F. Kennedy, had approved the invasion plan drawn up by the outgoing administration but had vetoed the use of any US forces in the combat. 7 There is some disagreement about whether Kennedy actually approved the invasion. Some people contend that Kennedy did not even know of the plan, and some people argue that Kennedy was really upset about the plan and strongly opposed it for moral and humanitarian reasons. It seems clear, however, that Kennedy did know about the plan, and agreed to it only if United States forces were not directly involved. 8 The truth is that the invasion was proposed by Vice President Nixon and planned by President Eisenhower s administration a long time before Kennedy became President. When Nixon met Castro in April 1959, he thought that Castro acted as a communist. However, Kennedy and his advisors continued to oppose any plans to attack Cuba, believing that Castro s forces were too strong and all the planned covert actions against Cuba would not result in the overthrow of Castro. 9 However, since Kennedy s commitment was to contain communism, he reluctantly took over the invasion plan from Eisenhower, who had actually wanted to take action against Castro before Kennedy s inauguration. 10 The years from 1961 to 1963 were a critical and perilous period for John F. Kennedy. He became president in January 1961, the Bay of Pigs invasion was carried out in April 1961, the Cuban missile crises happened in October 1962, and he was assassinated in November 1963. During his presidency, Kennedy only reluctantly supported the Bay of Pigs invasion. After that failure, and after the missile crises ended, he seriously considered the Cuban problem and told both CIA and Pentagon officials that the solution to the Cuba problem was the U.S. government s top priority. 11 Kennedy was interested in more flexible positions, including negotiations with Castro.

During the Clinton administration, many formerly secret government documents were released to the public, including some very interesting documents about Castro wanting better relations with the United States and the Kennedy administration s response. This interest in rapprochment can be seen in a series of documents exchanged between McGeorge Bundy, the National Security Advisor, Gordon Chase, Latin American Specialist on the National Security Council, Richard Helms, Deputy Director (Plans) at the Central Intelligence Agency, and William Attwood and Adlai E. Stevenson, U.S. Ambassadors to the United Nations. 12 Castro had expressed his interest in improving U.S.-Cuban relations to Lisa Howard, a reporter for ABC News. 13 Howard became the middleman between Castro and the Kennedy administration, and she brought the message from Castro that he was interested in a rapprochment with the United States. This information was reported to John McCone, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency by Richard Helms, 14 who thought Castro s motivation, was probably because he is aware that Cuba is in a state of economic chaos. 15 Although a meeting between Kennedy and Castro never came to reality, there were indirect contacts between them, using Lisa Howard and Jean Daniel, a French journalist. In a speech on November 19, 1963, just four days before he was assassinated, Kennedy gave a coded message to Castro: Cuba had become a weapon in an effort dictated by external powers to subvert the other American republics. This and this alone divide us. As long as this is true, nothing is possible. Without it, everything is possible. 16 Castro s praised Kennedy to Daniel, because he was the leader who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists, even in the Americas. 17 When Kennedy was assassinated, Castro told Daniel, this is an end to your mission of peace; everything is changed. 18 However, even after Kennedy s death, Howard never gave up setting up these secret rapprochment efforts, even though the CIA Director disagreed with her involvement. She carried a personal message from Castro to President Johnson on February 12, 1964. Castro told Johnson, I seriously hope that Cuba and the United States can eventually sit down in an atmosphere of good will and of mutual respect and negotiate our differences. I believe that there are no areas of contention between us that cannot be discussed and settled within a climate of mutual understanding. 19 After this message, there is no official record that President Johnson sent any message to Castro. Johnson may have been worried about possible criticism from Nixon that he was soft on communism if he was discovered negotiating with Castro. 20

Castro relied heavily on the Soviets until the breakdown of the Soviet Union, but he still wanted better relations with the United States. Balfour mentions Castro had continued to seek a rapprochment with Washington that would not cripple his efforts to build alliances in the Third World. In the first two years of the Carter administration the Cuban leaders had made strenuous attempts to improve relations with the United States 21 Cuba did sign an anti-hijacking agreement with the Ford administration in 1973, 22 but it was under the Carter administration that the President directed that relations with Cuba become normalized. In a Presidential Directive, Jimmy Carter said, I have concluded that we should attempt to achieve normalization of our relations with Cuba. To this end, we should begin direct and confidential talks in a measured and careful fashion with representatives of the Government of Cuba. Our objective is to set in motion a process which will lead to the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba and which will advance the interests of the United States 23 Despite such efforts by both Cuba and the United States, diplomatic relations have been broken for more than four decades, and the countries have accumulated much hostility toward each other. The economic relationship between Cuba and the United States is much more complicated than it seems to some people. The U.S. economic embargo against Cuba began in 1960 under the Eisenhower administration; the Kennedy and Carter administrations sought to ease the embargo, but the Clinton administration reinforced it with the Helms-Burton law that prohibits U.S. subsidiaries from trading with Cuba. 24 The Cuban Democracy Act, otherwise known as the Torricelli Amendment of November 1992, banned all U.S. subsidiaries based in third countries from trading with Cuba. Balfour states that the amendment had been promoted by a democrat and supported by Clinton himself. 25 However, President Clinton said that the United States actually had been moving forward to end the embargo against Cuba until 1996 when the Cuban Air Force shot down two private planes belonging to an exile group, killing four Americans. 26 Clinton did sign another bill into law in 2000. The main purpose of that bill was to ease restrictions on food and medicines, but the bill also restricted Americans from traveling to Cuba. 27 Other countries have not supported the embargo against Cuba for many years. In a vote of the United Nations General Assembly, which was held on October 28, 2004, the Assembly overwhelmingly, approved, for the 13th consecutive year (it was only twice when Balfour wrote his book 28 ), a resolution that the United States should end its commercial, economic, and

financial embargo against Cuba. The vote was 179 in favor of the resolution, and four against (the United States, Israel, Palau, and the Marshall Islands), with the Federated States of Micronesia abstaining. 29 U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Oliver Garza pointed out to the General Assembly that the United States was still the largest provider of humanitarian assistance to Cuba, licensing more than $1.1 billion in sales and donations since 1992, and agricultural goods worth more than $5 billion since 2001, plus $1 billion a year for remittances. 30 Since Cuba has not changed in over forty years, maybe it is time to get rid of the embargo completely, and see if things change then. Finally, the subject of terrorism and United States policy needs to be examined. Cuban- Americans, mostly in the Miami, Florida area, have been putting out anti-castro propaganda from the beginning of the Cuban revolution. 31 Tensions between the Bush administration and Castro had been raised even more due to a mass-murder terrorist suspect named Luis Posada Carriles, who sneaked into the United States for protection. Posada was described by the Washington Post as a CIA-trained Cuban exile implicated in a series of terrorist incidents. 32 He was believed to have participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion, and was a suspect in a series of terrorist bombings, including the bombing of a Cuban civilian airplane in flight and several tourist hotels. He was also suspected of attempting to assassinate Castro in Panama. He was expecting to apply for asylum and sought permanent residency in the United States. 33 Another Washington Post writer, Eugene Robinson, tells us that Posada s record, which also includes escaping from prison, should mean that he would be immediately found and locked up like any other terrorist suspect. But no, that is what would happen to him if he were named Mohammed, but not if his alleged terrorist career was aimed at toppling or killing Fidel Castro 34 Posada poses a problem for the United States, and especially for President Bush. Bush had wasted no opportunity to turn up the pressure on Castro, tightening travel restrictions and choking the flow of money from relatives in the United States 35 but he might not be able to protect an anti-castro terrorist. As Robinson wrote, Come on now, Bambi, 36 you don t really believe the Bush administration is cynical enough to let an accused serial bomber like you settle in the United States, compromising the fight against terrorism, in exchange for a few votes and campaign contributions from Miami, do you? 37 This speculation naturally occurred because President Bush received 56 percent of the Hispanic votes in Florida compared to John Kerry s 44 percent in 2004, and he received 49 percent compared to Al Gore s 48 percent in 2000. 38

From the historical context, I conclude that if the Bay of Pigs invasion in April, 1961, was not carried out, and if Kennedy had a chance to talk to Castro while he was alive, or if he was not assassinated, the U.S. might have been successful in preventing more than thirty years of Soviet influence in Cuba. History could have been very different, and there might have been a peaceful coexistence between the two countries. As Castro once suggested, this hostility between Cuba and the United States is both unnatural and unnecessary and it can be eliminated. 39 Although Balfour says that the United States held the key to Cuba s development; it could provide the goods, the credits, the technology, and the tourist trade that Cuba so badly needed 40 diplomatic relations with the U.S. have still not resumed even today. Some scholars claim that the majority of people in Cuba are still as poor and unhappy as those who are in the undeveloped countries today. 41 In many ways, people in Cuba are given less freedom than there was before the revolution. 42 The United States missed a golden opportunity to have a better relationship with Cuba by providing the assistance it needed between the 1960s and the 1970s before Castro became completely inclined toward Soviet power. Shima M. Yuko. All Rights Reserved

Notes (Castro s Relation with the United States) 1 Sebastian Balfour, Castro, 2nd ed., Profiles in Power Series (Harlow, England: Pearson Education, 1995). 80. 2 Cuba versus Blockade, Education. Cuban People s Web Site. Undated, available from http://www.cubavsbloqueo.cu/default.aspx?tabid=281; Internet; accessed April 16, 2005. 3 GlobalSecurity.org, Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, Intellectual and Academic Freedom in Cuba. September 23, 2001, available from http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/cuba/4890.htm; Internet; accessed April 16, 2005. 4 Ibid., 5 Ibid., 6 Fulgencio Batista Zaldívar was a president and dictator who twice ruled Cuba (1933-44, 1952-1959). 7 Balfour, 70. 8 Jerry A. Sierra, Invasion at Bay of Pigs. Undated. Available from http://www.historyofcuba.com/history/baypigs/pigs.htm; Internet; accessed April 16, 2005. 9 Ibid., 10 Ibid., 11 David Corn and Gus Russo. The Old Man and the CIA: A Kennedy Plot to Kill Castro? The Nation, March 26, 2001. Available from http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010326&s=corn; Internet; accessed April 16, 2005. 12 The collection of documents can be found in the National Security Archives at George Washington University, available on the Internet at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsaebb/nsaebb103/. 13 Lisa Howard, a former actress, was known for substantial coverage of the Cuban revolution. She had met Castro more often than any other journalist, and she was also the first journalist to secure an interview with Nikita Khrushchev in 1960. 14 Richard Helms would later become a Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. 15 Richard Helms, Interview of U.S. Newswoman with Fidel Castro Indicating Possible Interest in Rapprochment with the United States. Memorandum to the Director of Central Intelligence. May 1, 1963, National Security Archives, George Washington University. Available from http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsaebb/ NSAEBB103/640912.pdf; Internet; accessed April 16, 2005. 16 Sparticus Educational. Lisa Howard Biography, undated. Available from http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ JFKhowardL2.htm; Internet; accessed April 16, 2005. 17 Ibid., 18 Ibid., 19 Fidel Castro. Verbal Message given to Miss Lisa Howard of ABC News on February 12, 1964 in Havana, Cuba. February 12, 1964. Memorandum from Prime Minister Fidel Castro to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Available from http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsaebb/nsaebb103/640212.pdf; Internet; accessed April 16, 2005. 20 Ibid., See also Gordon Chase, Cuba Item of Presidential Interest. Memorandum for Mr. Bundy, November 25, 1963. Available from http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsaebb/nsaebb103/631125.pdf; Internet; accessed April 16, 2005. 21 Balfour, 135. 22 Ibid.,, 128. 23 Jimmy Carter. Presidential Directive/NSC-6, Subject: Cuba. March 15, 1977. Presidential Directive. Available from http: Available from http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20020515/cartercuba.pdf; Internet; accessed April 16, 2005. 24 Associated Press. Cuban Americans, U.S. Still Prefer a Hard Line on Castro. NewsMax.com Wires. April 11, 2005. Available from http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/4/10/204822.shtml; Internet; accessed April 16, 2005. 25 Balfour, 171. 26 David Morris, Heidi Przybyla and Emily Schwartz. Clinton Says Cuba Must Do More Before Sanctions End. Bloomberg.com. June 29, 2000. Available from http://www.cubanet.org/cnews/y00/jun00/29e19.htm; Internet; accessed April 17, 2005.

27 People s Daily, Clinton Signs Cuba Trade Bill into Law, October 29, 2000. Available from http://english.people.com.cn/english/200010/29/eng20001029_53855.html; Internet; accessed April 17, 2005. 28 Balfour, 171. 29 UN News Service. General Assembly Calls for End to US Embargo Against Cuba. October 29, 2004. Available from http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?newsid=12377&cr=cuba&cr1; Internet; accessed April 17, 2005. 30 China Daily. UN Votes Overwhelmingly Against U.S. Embargo on Cuba. October 29, 2004. Available from http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-10/29/content_386819.htm; Internet; accessed April 17, 2005. 31 Balfour, 179. 32 Michael A. Fletcher. U.S. Asylum Sought by Cuban Tied to Terror Cases. Washington Post, April 15, 2005. Available from www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ac2/wp-dyn/a47870-2005apr12?language=printer; Internet; accessed April 17, 2005. 33 Ibid., 34 Eugene Robinson. A Terror Suspect With Connections. Washington Post, April 15, 2005. Page A25. Available from www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/a55031-2005apr14.html; Internet; accessed April 17, 2005. 35 Ibid., 36 Posada uses the unlikely nickname of Bambi. 37 Robinson, A Terror Suspect With Connections. 38 Associated Press. Cuban Americans. 39 Fidel Castro. Verbal Message. 40 Balfour, 127. 41 Paul B. Goodwin. Latin America: Global Studies, 11th ed. (Dubuque: McGraw Hill, 2004), 137. 42 Ibid.,, 138.