Where the News Ends:
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin The Results Of Hitting Soft Perhaps it is "the luck of the Irish." In any case, it seems amazing that, after precipitating one of the most...
...What he reaped, after the tragic debacle of liberty-loving Cubans in the Bay of Pigs, was the familiar bitter consequences of hitting soft...
...persecution of religious institutions...
...Armed uprising and civil war are certainly not desirable, in themselves...
...But the only chance of achieving a truly free Cuba lies in the overthrow of the bearded demagogue and his crew of international and homegrown Communist associates...
...collective farms instead of individual ownership of land by the peasants...
...As for elections Castro has gone Moscow one better...
...This would breach the dike against a Communist flood throughout Latin America...
...The President had a choice between not sanctioning any large-scale landing by Cuban refugees or backing up such a landing with United States air and naval power to such a degree that it could not have failed to establish a hold on Cuban territory which would have warranted the proclamation of a free Cuban government...
...It will no doubt take some time to apportion fairly and accurately the share of blame on various individuals and organizations for launching this ill-starred venture, the most humiliating fiasco for a Western power since the Suez invasion in November 1956...
...A great power should only resort to force if it has at least a 90 per cent prospect of success...
...ubiquitous spying...
...To plead self-determination for a regime as totalitarian as Castro's is to make a mockery of a fine ideal...
...But Castro has decided to dispense with all elections...
...Nothing in international relations produces such a bad effect as feeble, ineffectual violence...
...In any case, it seems amazing that, after precipitating one of the most inglorious rebuffs in American history, President Kennedy's popularity—according to the public opinion polls—remains very high...
...wholesale executions and mass arrests...
...Either of these courses would have been better than the one which was actually followed: limited help with training, transportation and arms for a force that was quickly decimated by Fidel Castro's planes and tanks...
...These include the strengthening— temporarily at least—of Castro's totalitarian dictatorship, giving a psychological excuse for a reign of terror and the death and capture of many of the Cubans whose services were most needed for restoring genuine liberty to that unhappy island...
...Cuba today has put into effect every distinctive feature of Soviet Communism: wholesale confiscation of private property, domestic and foreign...
...But one fact seems to stand out fairly clearly...
...And Secretary of State Dean Rusk is now beset with the same difficulty that wearied his predecessor, Christian Herter—trying to persuade balky Latin American governments to take cognizance of a fact that is as plain as the nose on anyone's face: Castro's Cuba is Moscow's first Western Hemisphere satellite...
...use of universities, schools, press and radio for indoctrination and brainwashing...
...A Communist regime is not entitled to quarter because it gives no quarter, either to dissenters at home or to enemies abroad...
...Terrorized, propagandized, caught in the web of an espionage system so far-reaching that, especially in the larger cities, almost everyone is forced to spy on almost everyone else, how can the Cuban people make their wishes known...
...And—a little ironically, in view of Harvard's considerable contribution to the present Administration's "brain trust"—the intellectuals in the Greater Boston area have touched off a "Be Nice to Castro" movement...
...To send a limited force of Cuban exiles, without American air and naval support, against Castro's tanks was to risk at least a 90 per cent likelihood of failure, with all its sickening accompaniments...
...the resort to these desperate remedies, as the experience of Castro's own rise to absolute dictatorial power by mouthing slogans of liberty and democracy shows, may lead to evils at least as great as those of the tyranny which has been overthrown...
...There are periodic "elections" in the Soviet Union and its satellites, elections for one list of candidates, totally rigged and without any significance...
...There has been some moralizing over the fact that most Americans have been more concerned over the failure of the Cuban landing than over the question whether the amount of U.S...
...It seems to me that the instinct of the average American is sounder than the elaborate arguments of the legalistic moralizers...
...support for the enterprise could be squared with obligations under the inter-American treaty...
...For the United States to back down and try to curry favor with Castro would not only be ignominious, but completely futile...
...abolition of all civil liberties...
...An "Open Letter to President Kennedy," published as an advertisement in the New York Times, urged no further support for an invasion of Cuba by exile groups and an effort "to detach the Castro regime from the Communist bloc by working for a diplomatic detente and a resumption of trade relations...
Vol. 44 • May 1961 • No. 22
