Who Rules the World? (29 page)

The terrorist commander Henry Kissinger, in contrast, was “apoplectic” over the insubordination of the “pipsqueak” Castro, whom he felt should be “smash[ed],” as William LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh reported in their book
Back Channel to Cuba
, relying on recently declassified documents.
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Turning to Nicaragua, we need not tarry on Ronald Reagan’s terrorist war, which continued well after the International Court of Justice ordered Washington to cease its “illegal use of force”—that is, international terrorism—and pay substantial reparations, and after a resolution of the UN Security Council that called on all states (meaning the United States) to observe international law—vetoed by Washington.
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It should be acknowledged, however, that Reagan’s terrorist war against Nicaragua—extended by George H. W. Bush, the “statesman” Bush—was not as destructive as the state terrorism he enthusiastically backed in El Salvador and Guatemala. Nicaragua had the advantage of having an army to confront the U.S.-run terrorist forces, while in the neighboring states the terrorists assaulting the population were the security forces armed and trained by Washington.

In Cuba, Washington’s terror operations were launched in full fury by President Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to punish Cubans for defeating the U.S.-run Bay of Pigs invasion. This terrorist war was no small affair. It involved four hundred Americans, two thousand Cubans, a private navy of fast boats, and a $50 million annual budget. It was run in part by a Miami CIA station functioning in violation of the Neutrality Act and, presumably, the law banning CIA operations in the United States. Operations included the bombing of hotels and industrial installations, the sinking of fishing boats, the poisoning of crops and livestock, the contamination of sugar exports, and so on. Some of these operations were not specifically authorized by the CIA but were carried out by the terrorist forces it funded and supported, a distinction without a difference in the case.

As has since been revealed, the terrorist war (Operation Mongoose) was a factor in Khrushchev’s sending of missiles to Cuba and the “missile crisis,” which came ominously close to a terminal nuclear war. U.S. “operations” in Cuba were no trivial matter.

Some attention has been paid to just one rather minor part of the terror war: the many attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, generally dismissed as childish CIA shenanigans. Apart from that, none of what happened has elicited much interest or commentary. The first serious English-language inquiry into the impact of the terror war on Cubans was published in 2010 by Canadian researcher Keith Bolender, in his
Voices From the Other Side
, a valuable study that has largely been ignored.
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The three examples highlighted in the
New York Times
report on U.S. terrorism are only the tip of the iceberg. Nevertheless, it is useful to have this prominent acknowledgment of Washington’s dedication to murderous and destructive terror operations and of the insignificance of all of this to the political class, which accepts it as normal and proper that the U.S. should be a terrorist superpower, immune to law and civilized norms.

Oddly, the world may not agree. Global polls show that the United States is regarded as the biggest threat to world peace by a very large margin.
9
Fortunately, Americans were spared this insignificant information.

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Obama’s Historic Move

The establishment of diplomatic ties between the United States and Cuba has been widely hailed as an event of historic importance. Correspondent Jon Lee Anderson, who has written perceptively about the region, sums up a general reaction among liberal intellectuals when he writes, in the
New Yorker
, that

Barack Obama has shown that he can act as a statesman of historic heft. And so, at this moment, has Raúl Castro. For Cubans, this moment will be emotionally cathartic as well as historically transformational. Their relationship with their wealthy, powerful northern American neighbor has remained frozen in the nineteen-sixties for fifty years. To a surreal degree, their destinies have been frozen as well. For Americans, this is important, too. Peace with Cuba takes us momentarily back to that golden time when the United States was a beloved nation throughout the world, when a young and handsome J.F.K. was in office—before Vietnam, before Allende, before Iraq and all the other miseries—and allows us to feel proud about ourselves for finally doing the right thing.
1

The past is not quite as idyllic as portrayed in the persistent Camelot image. JFK was not “before Vietnam”—or even before Allende and Iraq, but let us put that aside. In Vietnam, when JFK entered office, the brutality of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime that the United States had imposed had finally elicited domestic resistance that it could not control.

Kennedy therefore at once escalated the U.S. intervention to outright aggression, ordering the U.S. Air Force to bomb South Vietnam (under South Vietnamese markings, which deceived no one), authorizing napalm and chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock, and launching programs to drive peasants into virtual concentration camps to “protect them” from the guerrillas whom Washington knew they were mostly supporting.

By 1963, reports from the ground seemed to indicate that Kennedy’s war was succeeding, but a serious problem arose. In August, the administration learned that the Diem government was seeking negotiations with North Vietnam to end the conflict.

If JFK had had the slightest intention to withdraw, that would have been a perfect opportunity to do so gracefully, with no political cost. He could even have claimed, in the usual style, that it was American fortitude and its principled defense of freedom that had compelled the North Vietnamese to “surrender.” Instead, Washington backed a military coup to install in power hawkish generals more attuned to JFK’s actual commitments. President Diem and his brother were murdered in the process. With victory apparently within sight, Kennedy reluctantly accepted a proposal by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to begin withdrawing troops (National Security Action Memo 263), but only with a crucial proviso: after victory had been attained. Kennedy maintained that demand insistently until his assassination a few weeks later. Many illusions have been concocted about these events, but they collapse quickly under the weight of the rich documentary record.
2

The story elsewhere was also not quite as idyllic as in the Camelot legends. One of the most consequential of Kennedy’s decisions, in 1962, was to shift the mission of Latin American militaries from “hemispheric defense” to “internal security,” with horrendous consequences for the hemisphere. Those who do not prefer what international relations specialist Michael Glennon has called “intentional ignorance” can easily fill in the details.
3

In Cuba, Kennedy inherited Eisenhower’s policy of embargo and formal plans to overthrow the regime, and he quickly escalated them with the Bay of Pigs invasion. The failure of the invasion caused near hysteria in Washington. At the first cabinet meeting after the failed invasion, the atmosphere was “almost savage,” Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles noted privately. “There was an almost frantic reaction for an action program.”
4
Kennedy articulated the hysteria in his public pronouncements, though he was aware, as he said privately, that allies “think that we’re slightly demented” on the subject of Cuba.
5
Not without reason.

Kennedy’s actions were true to his words.

There is now much debate about whether Cuba should be removed from the list of states supporting terrorism. Such a question can only bring to mind the words of Tacitus that “crime once exposed had no refuge but in audacity.”
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Except that it is not exposed, thanks to the “treason of the intellectuals.”

On taking office after Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon Johnson relaxed the reign of terror, which nonetheless continued through the 1990s. But he was not about to allow Cuba to survive in peace. He explained to Senator William Fulbright that though “I’m not getting into any Bay of Pigs deal,” he wanted advice about “what we ought to do to pinch their nuts more than we’re doing.”
7
Latin America historian Lars Schoultz observes that “Nut-pinching has been US policy ever since.”
8

Some, to be sure, have felt that such delicate means are not enough—take for example Richard Nixon’s cabinet member Alexander Haig, who asked the president to “just give me the word and I’ll turn that f
____
island into a parking lot.”
9
His eloquence captured vividly the long-standing frustration in Washington about “that infernal little Cuban republic”—Theodore Roosevelt’s phrase as he ranted in fury over Cuban unwillingness to accept graciously the invasion of 1898 that would block their liberation from Spain and turn them into a virtual colony. Surely his courageous ride up San Juan Hill had been in a noble cause. (Overlooked, commonly, is that African-American battalions were largely responsible for conquering the hill).
10

Historian Louis Pérez writes that the intervention, hailed at home as a humanitarian act to “liberate” Cuba, achieved its actual objectives. “A Cuban war of liberation was transformed into a US war of conquest”—the “Spanish-American War,” in imperial nomenclature—designed to obscure a Cuban victory that was quickly aborted by the invasion. The outcome relieved American anxieties about “what was anathema to all North American policymakers since Thomas Jefferson—Cuban independence.”
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How things have changed in two centuries.

There have been tentative efforts to improve relations in the past fifty years, reviewed in detail by William LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh in
Back Channel to Cuba
.
12
Whether we should feel “proud about ourselves” for the steps that Obama has taken may be debated, but they are “the right thing,” even though the crushing embargo remains in place in defiance of the entire world (Israel excepted) and tourism is still barred. In his address to the nation announcing the new policy, the president made it clear that in other respects, too, the punishment of Cuba for refusing to bend to U.S. will and violence will continue, repeating pretexts that are too ludicrous for comment.

Worthy of attention, however, are these words of the president:

Proudly, the United States has supported democracy and human rights in Cuba through these five decades. We’ve done so primarily through policies that aim to isolate the island, preventing the most basic travel and commerce that Americans can enjoy anyplace else. And though this policy has been rooted in the best of intentions, no other nation joins us in imposing these sanctions and it has had little effect beyond providing the Cuban government with a rationale for restrictions on its people … Today, I’m being honest with you. We can never erase the history between us.
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One has to admire the stunning audacity of this pronouncement, which again recalls the words of Tacitus. Obama is surely not unaware of the actual history, which includes not only the murderous terrorist war and scandalous economic embargo, but also the military occupation of southeastern Cuba (Guantánamo Bay), including the country’s major port, despite requests by the government since independence to return what was stolen at gunpoint—a policy justified only by a fanatic commitment to block Cuba’s economic development. By comparison, Putin’s illegal takeover of Crimea looks almost benign. Dedication to revenge against the impudent Cubans who resist U.S. domination has been so extreme that it has even overruled the wishes of powerful segments of the business community for normalization—pharmaceuticals, agribusiness, energy—an unusual development in U.S. foreign policy. Washington’s cruel and vindictive policies have virtually isolated the country in the hemisphere and elicited contempt and ridicule throughout the world. Washington and its acolytes like to pretend that they have been “isolating” Cuba, as Obama intoned, but the record shows clearly that it is the United States that has been isolated, probably the primary reason for the partial change of course.

Domestic opinion no doubt is also a factor in Obama’s “historic move”—though the public has been in favor of normalization for a long time. A CNN poll in 2014 showed that only a quarter of Americans now regard Cuba as a serious threat to the United States, as compared with over two-thirds thirty years earlier, when President Reagan was warning about the grave threat to our lives posed by the nutmeg capital of the world (Grenada) and by the Nicaraguan army, only two days’ march from Texas.
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With those fears now having somewhat abated, perhaps we can slightly relax our vigilance.

In the extensive commentary on Obama’s decision, a leading theme has been that Washington’s benign efforts to bring democracy and human rights to suffering Cubans, sullied only by childish CIA shenanigans, have been a failure. Our lofty goals were not achieved, so a reluctant change of course is finally in order.

Were the policies a failure? That depends on what the goal was. The answer is quite clear in the documentary record. The Cuban threat was the familiar one that runs through Cold War history. It was spelled out clearly by the incoming Kennedy administration; the primary concern was that Cuba might be a “virus” that would “spread contagion.” As historian Thomas Paterson observes, “Cuba, as symbol and reality, challenged US hegemony in Latin America.”
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The way to deal with a virus is to kill it and inoculate any potential victims. That sensible policy is just what Washington pursued, quite successfully. Cuba has survived, but without the ability to achieve its feared potential. And the region was “inoculated” with vicious military dictatorships, beginning with the Kennedy-inspired military coup that established a terror and torture regime in Brazil shortly after Kennedy’s assassination. The generals had carried out a “democratic rebellion,” Ambassador Lincoln Gordon cabled home. The revolution was “a great victory for free world,” which prevented a “total loss to West of all South American Republics” and should “create a greatly improved climate for private investments.” This democratic revolution was “the single most decisive victory of freedom in the mid-twentieth century,” Gordon held, “one of the major turning points in world history” in this period, which removed what Washington saw as a Castro clone.
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