Cuba in the Cross-Hairs: A Near Half-Century of Terror
Noam Chomsky
Excerpted from Hegemony or Survival, Metropolitan Books, 2003
The Batista dictatorship was overthrown in January 1959 by Castro's guerrilla forces. In March, the National Security Council (NSC) considered means to institute regime change. In May, the CIA began to arm guerrillas inside Cuba. "During the Winter of 1959-1960, there was a significant increase in CIA-supervised bombing and incendiary raids piloted by exiled Cubans" based in the US. We need not tarry on what the US or its clients would do under such circumstances. Cuba, however, did not respond with violent actions within the United States for revenge or deterrence. Rather, it followed the procedure required by international law. In July 1960, Cuba called on the UN for help, providing the Security Council with records of some twenty bombings, including names of pilots, plane registration numbers, unexploded bombs, and other specific details, alleging considerable damage and casualties and calling for resolution of the conflict through diplomatic channels. US Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge responded by giving his "assurance [that] the United States has no aggressive purpose against Cuba." Four months before, in March 1960, his government had made a formal decision in secret to overthrow the Castro government, and preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion were well advanced.
Washington was concerned that Cubans might try to defend themselves. CIA chief Allen Dulles therefore urged Britain not to provide arms to Cuba. His "main reason," the British ambassador reported to London, "was that this might lead the Cubans to ask for Soviet or Soviet bloc arms," a move that "would have a tremendous effect," Dulles pointed out, allowing Washington to portray Cuba as a security threat to the hemisphere, following the script that had worked so well in Guatemala. Dulles was referring to Washington's successful demolition of Guatemala's first democratic experiment, a ten-year interlude of hope and progress, greatly feared in Washington because of the enormous popular support reported by US intelligence and the "demonstration effect" of social and economic measures to benefit the large majority. The Soviet threat was routinely invoked, abetted by Guatemala's appeal to the Soviet bloc for arms after the US had threatened attack and cut off other sources of supply. The result was a half-century of horror, even worse than the US-backed tyranny that came before.
For Cuba, the schemes devised by the doves were similar to those of CIA director Dulles. Warning President Kennedy about the "inevitable political and diplomatic fall-out" from the planned invasion of Cuba by a proxy army, Arthur Schlesinger suggested efforts to trap Castro in some action that could be used as a pretext for invasion: "One can conceive a black operation in, say, Haiti which might in time lure Castro into sending a few boatloads of men on to a Haitian beach in what could be portrayed as an effort to overthrow the Haitian regime, . . . then the moral issue would be clouded, and the anti-US campaign would be hobbled from the start." Reference is to the regime of the murderous dictator "Papa Doc" Duvalier, which was backed by the US (with some reservations), so that an effort to help Haitians overthrow it would be a crime.
Eisenhower's March 1960 plan called for the overthrow of Castro in favor of a regime "more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the U.S.," including support for "military operation on the island" and "development of an adequate paramilitary force outside of Cuba." Intelligence reported that popular support for Castro was high, but the US would determine the "true interests of the Cuban people." The regime change was to be carried out "in such a manner as to avoid any appearance of U.S. intervention," because of the anticipated reaction in Latin America and the problems of doctrinal management at home.
Operation Mongoose
The Bay of Pigs invasion came a year later, in April 1961, after Kennedy had taken office. It was authorized in an atmosphere of "hysteria" over Cuba in the White House, Robert McNamara later testified before the Senate's Church Committee. At the first cabinet meeting after the failed invasion, the atmosphere was "almost savage," Chester Bowles noted privately: "there was an almost frantic reaction for an action program." At an NSC meeting two days later, Bowles found the atmosphere "almost as emotional" and was struck by "the great lack of moral integrity" that prevailed. The mood was reflected in Kennedy's public pronouncements: "The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong . . . can possibly survive," he told the country, sounding a theme that would be used to good effect by the Reaganites during their own terrorist wars. Kennedy was aware that allies "think that we're slightly demented" on the subject of Cuba, a perception that persists to the present.
Kennedy implemented a crushing embargo that could scarcely be endured by a small country that had become a "virtual colony" of the US in the sixty years following its "liberation" from Spain. He also ordered an intensification of the terrorist campaign: "He asked his brother, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy, to lead the top-level interagency group that oversaw Operation Mongoose, a program of paramilitary operations, economic warfare, and sabotage he launched in late 1961 to visit the 'terrors of the earth' on Fidel Castro and, more prosaically, to topple him."
The terrorist campaign was "no laughing matter," Jorge Dominguez writes in a review of recently declassified materials on operations under Kennedy, materials that are "heavily sanitized" and "only the tip of the iceberg," Piero Gleijeses adds.
Operation Mongoose was "the centerpiece of American policy toward Cuba from late 1961 until the onset of the 1962 missile crisis," Mark White reports, the program on which the Kennedy brothers "came to pin their hopes." Robert Kennedy informed the CIA that the Cuban problem carries "the top priority in the United States Government -- all else is secondary -- no time, no effort, or manpower is to be spared" in the effort to overthrow the Castro regime. The chief of Mongoose operations, Edward Lansdale, provided a timetable leading to "open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime" in October 1962. The "final definition" of the program recognized that "final success will require decisive U.S. military intervention," after terrorism and subversion had laid the basis. The implication is that US military intervention would take place in October 1962 -- when the missile crisis erupted.
In February 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved a plan more extreme than Schlesinger's: to use "covert means . . . to lure or provoke Castro, or an uncontrollable subordinate, into an overt hostile reaction against the United States; a reaction which would in turn create the justification for the US to not only retaliate but destroy Castro with speed, force and determination." In March, at the request of the DOD Cuba Project, the Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted a memorandum to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara outlining "pretexts which they would consider would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba." The plan would be undertaken if "a credible internal revolt is impossible of attainment during the next 9-10 months," but before Cuba could establish relations with Russia that might "directly involve the Soviet Union."
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http://www.chomsky.info/books/hegemony02.htm
