Reagan: The Life (54 page)

Clark yielded the floor to William Casey, who detailed the activities of the Cubans in the region. Cuba was projecting its influence around the region in part as a way of employing the young men who formed a demographic bulge in the country’s population and couldn’t find work in Cuba’s floundering economy, Casey said. The Cuban troops were well armed and provisioned. “The Soviets gave Cuba some 66,000 tons of military equipment last year—more than $1 billion in arms including SA-6s, MIG-23s, T-62 tanks, MI-24 helicopters, etc. Cuba has a modern army with substantial reserves plus 200 MIG aircraft. It receives $8 million a day in aid in the form of cheap oil and a subsidized price for Cuba’s exports: nickel and sugar.” Castro had developed a strategy for destabilizing conservative and moderate governments in the region. “Cuba and Castro bring together the various guerrilla factions within the target countries and
after they are unified Havana supplies them with arms, training, etc. in order to make the guerrillas more effective.”

The
Sandinista government of Nicaragua was copying the Cuban model of subversion, Casey said. “Nicaragua continues to build up its military capabilities. MIGs are expected soon. Nicaragua’s build-up in military strength will intimidate its neighbors and tip the balance in
El Salvador in favor of the guerrillas against the government forces because, quite frankly, people join what appears to be the winning side.”

Casey concluded that the United States found itself at an increasing disadvantage to Moscow and its Caribbean-basin allies. “The Soviets are in a no-lose situation,” the CIA chief said. “If we don’t act, we lose credibility and the Soviets gain an increasing number of allies within our own hemisphere. If we react strongly, the Soviets will be able to say the United States is no better than the Soviets are in Poland.”

Thomas Enders, the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, reported that an interagency group had been working on the Caribbean basin. It had produced a detailed plan for countering Cuban and Soviet influence. Enders summarized the plan as consisting of three prongs. “First of all, we have to win on the ground in El Salvador and deal with the source of the arms problem in Nicaragua and Cuba,” Enders said. “Secondly, we need to obtain the support of the American people as well as the United States Congress. And thirdly, we need to mobilize support in the region—that is, the hemisphere.”

Mobilizing support, particularly among the American people, was Reagan’s specialty. Bill Clark had called this meeting to obtain a decision on a presidential speech on the Caribbean. Robert—“Bud”—McFarlane, Clark’s deputy, made the pitch to Reagan. “While we can propose solutions, we cannot carry out the solutions to these problems without the support of the American people,” he said. “The American public must understand the nature of the threat because for most Americans this hemisphere has always seemed to be a quiet, even a docile area, and extremely non-threatening.” The president’s communications skills were crucial in changing this impression—though not changing the impression too much. “It is essential that we do not come on as alarmists,” McFarlane said. “This morning, Mr. President, we have been alarmists.” But the president would know how to explain the threat more calmly. “This is a process that is going to take time. We must elevate the public awareness of what is going on, and that means three things: why the area is important, how it is threatened, and what we can do in economic, political and mili
tary terms. And military would be the last of the terms, but all of these must be understood by the American people.”

J
IM
B
AKER DIDN
’
T
want Reagan to give anything like the speech Clark and McFarlane sought. Baker doubted that conditions were as dire as Casey portrayed them, and he feared that a Caribbean adventure would derail the administration’s domestic agenda. Moreover, he didn’t want Reagan getting out front on any half-baked initiative. “The speech alone won’t solve the problem, won’t give us the consensus, and may risk a revival of our Vietnam problem,” Baker told the NSC. “The president should and can address the economic situation at an appropriate time, but a speech that deals with the security problem will add to our serious domestic political problem. We must go to the Congress first. We cannot put the president out in front until we have an answer and until we have a strategy under way.”

Ed Meese sided with Baker. The Caribbean Basin Initiative, as Clark was calling the recommended program, made sense as an economic assistance package, Meese allowed. “The CBI is one of the best initiatives that we have in this administration. Let’s press on this.” But to entangle it with military and security issues was unwise. “Let’s not mix in
El Salvador with the CBI because that will kill it. If we try to do both economic and security at the same time, we will lose both.”

Don Regan joined the skeptics. “First we must ask ourselves, who is this speech for?” he said. “Is it for Havana and Moscow, or is it for Duluth? With our internal economic problems, it would be very difficult to get people’s attention on a region outside the United States. Furthermore, by raising the question of security you are upping the ante by dwelling on the threat.”

William Casey fought back. “Unless you alert the country, you won’t get the support from the Congress or the country on the Caribbean Basin Initiative,” the CIA chief said. “You must go and outline the whole problem as it is.”

“How?” Baker demanded.

“We must spell out the CBI,” Casey said. “The CBI itself cannot be justified without a sense of threat.”

“We must do what we need to do,” Baker granted. But the president didn’t have to be the one to do it. “Don’t put the president up front until public opinion and the Congress begin to understand the problem better than they do now.”

R
EAGAN LISTENED DURING
the first ninety minutes of the meeting, content to let Clark, McFarlane, and Casey battle Baker, Meese, and Regan. On another subject his silence might have signaled lack of interest. But Central America stirred his anticommunist passions, and he followed the arguments closely. He now engaged. He said he appreciated the need to organize and focus America’s efforts in the Caribbean basin. “If the president fails to mobilize those efforts, how much further behind will we be?” he mused aloud. Yet he didn’t want to frighten anyone. His critics were already calling him a warmonger. “Many people believe we will be in a war soon.” He preferred not to add to this impression. “If I do make a speech, how do I avoid an I-told-you-so reaction among the public?” But he couldn’t remain silent. “If we look further down the road, I would not want history to record that there was a time when we could have headed off this hemisphere becoming an extension of the
Warsaw Pact. Lenin may then turn out to have been right when he said that someday the Western Hemisphere would be ripe fruit after Europe.”

Reagan agreed that the American people needed to be reminded that the Caribbean was America’s southern border. “What a bastion of strength it would be if North and South America had bonds like those between the U.S. and
Canada. No Kremlin would want to take on that.” He reflected again on the difficulty of dealing forthrightly with the danger without provoking the antiwar left. “How do we frame a speech that keeps the protesters out of the snow?” He elaborated on Baker’s Vietnam analogy. “We never explained Vietnam, did we? Eisenhower told Kennedy that more troops would be needed. We tried to fight a war pretending there was none.”

As to the Caribbean speech, it required further thinking. “We need concepts of what the speech would say. Shouldn’t we say that there is too much misinformation, that we did not discover
El Salvador in this administration, that we are trying to address the economic problems of El Salvador, that we want to be a friend, that the CBI is our way of helping countries to achieve self-sustaining growth, that we will continue our close friendship with Canada and
Mexico, that in the end we are all Americans? Can we do a speech without making it sound like war? We are seeking to offer the advantages of our economic system to others. We have had good neighbor policies before. None of them succeeded. We forget our size and our strength. We tried to impose our way. We should
go to the Caribbean and say we are all neighbors. Let’s hear your ideas and together bring about the things you are interested in.”

Stepping back, the president commented on what the American people thought of him. “The problem is how I am perceived. I was a hawk in Vietnam because I believe if you ask people to die you should give them a chance to win. The best way to prevent war is to get to the problem early. Can I do something without adding to the perception of me as a hawk?”

Reagan closed the meeting by returning to the subject of
Cuba, albeit obliquely. “Let’s talk about others, not Cuba,” he said of the speech he might give. “Let’s isolate them. It’s the only state that is not American. Let’s give Cuba a chance to rejoin the Western Hemisphere.” He said this topic wasn’t for the speech in question but for a broader venue, with a larger aim. “North and South America together equals China, a pretty big colossus if we were all buddies.”

R
EAGAN ESCHEWED ALARMISM
, but he was plenty concerned. “
Central America is really the world’s next hotspot,” he wrote in his diary. “Nicaragua is an armed camp supplied by Cuba and threatening a communist takeover of all of Central America.” A short while later he reiterated: “
There is no question but that all of Central America is targeted for a communist takeover.”

To prevent the takeover, Reagan launched a campaign of covert operations. The Caribbean Basin Initiative was the public face of the administration’s policy; its funding required congressional approval, which would take time. To prevent the communists from capturing Central America before Congress acted, Reagan turned to his shadow warriors. “
We have decided on a plan of covert actions, etc., to block the Cuban aid to Nicaragua and El Salvador,” he wrote in his diary in November 1981. The covert measures included arming anti-Sandinista Nicaraguans known as contras; the contras were supposed to keep the Sandinistas occupied at home and thereby hinder their aiding leftist rebels in El Salvador. Progress came slowly. “
We have problems with El Salvador,” Reagan wrote in February 1982. “The rebels seem to be winning.” This was bad news for the region. “Guatemala could go any day,” he said. “And of course Nicaragua is another Cuba.”

The president took a briefing by the CIA on El Salvador. “
The guerrillas have a really sophisticated set-up,” he noted afterward. “I’d never suspected their organization and communications. They have divided the country into sections with a separate command group for each section and a network of permanent camps, well fortified.” He added, “Now we must find a way to counter it.” American critics of the administration’s policy
weren’t helping. “
Ed Asner and some performers show up in Washington with $25,000 they’ve raised for the guerrillas.”

R
EAGAN UNDERSTOOD THAT
in foreign policy “covert” and “secret” aren’t synonyms. He knew that the targets of America’s shadow campaign would learn about it; in fact he intended that they learn about it. The purpose of the campaign was to get the Sandinistas and other regional leftists to change their ways. The covert campaign—which was covert only as to details and in being unacknowledged—would cease when they had done so.

Fidel Castro was the ultimate target of Reagan’s campaign, and to assess how it was working upon the Cuban leader, the president dispatched
Vernon Walters, a veteran American troubleshooter, to Havana.
Walters had orders to discuss three topics: Cuban arms aid to the government of Nicaragua, Cuban support for antigovernment guerrillas in El Salvador, and the possible repatriation of Cuban criminals and mental patients included in the mass exodus of Cuban refugees from Mariel harbor in 1980. The subtext of the message Walters was to convey was that the American government was newly serious about cleaning up the Caribbean.

Reagan didn’t expect miracles. He appreciated that Castro hadn’t remained in power in Cuba for two decades accidentally. But the president judged a shot across the Cuban bow long overdue. And he could hope for movement on the Mariel problem. “
Maybe we’ll be sending Castro back his jailbirds and maniacs,” he wrote in his diary.

In the event, nothing of substance came of the Walters mission. Cuba continued to support its allies in Central America, and the Mariel refugees remained in the United States. But Reagan thought the effort wasn’t wasted. “
They are uptight thinking we may be planning an invasion,” he wrote of Castro and his comrades. “We aren’t but we’ll let them sweat.”

In late February 1982, Reagan decided the time was ripe for the speech the NSC had argued about. He ventured the few blocks from the White House to the headquarters of the Organization of American States and addressed a gathering of the group’s permanent council, along with other persons interested in Latin America. The first part of his speech was as innocuous as Jim Baker wanted it to be. “
In the commitment to freedom and independence, the peoples of this hemisphere are one,” Reagan said. “In this profound sense we are all Americans.” He proposed economic reforms to encourage prosperity among the countries of the
Caribbean basin, starting with the elimination of tariffs on imports to the United States from the countries of the region. To this he would add tax incentives for American firms to invest in the Caribbean basin and $350 million of new economic aid. “It is an integrated program that helps our neighbors help themselves, a program that will create conditions under which creativity and private enterprise and self-help can flourish,” Reagan said.

The second part of the speech invoked the sterner themes Bill Clark and Bill Casey wanted. “A new kind of colonialism stalks the world today and threatens our independence,” Reagan asserted. “It is brutal and totalitarian. It is not of our hemisphere, but it threatens our hemisphere and has established footholds on American soil for the expansion of its colonialist ambitions.” The Caribbean was at a crossroads. One route led toward a bright future of democracy, already embraced by two-thirds of the region’s countries. The other went a very different way. “The dark future is foreshadowed by the poverty and repression of Castro’s Cuba, the tightening grip of the totalitarian left in
Grenada and
Nicaragua, and the expansion of Soviet-backed, Cuban-managed support for violent revolution in Central America.”