THE TRAGEDY OF CUBA
Rubin, Morris H.
THE TRAGEDY OF CUBA No country in Latin America has progressed so rapidly in the past two years in the social and economic fields as has Cuba. No country in Latin America has retrogressed so...
...Cuba, for many years, had provided the United States with about one-third of its raw sugar...
...Sometimes he said six months...
...So friendly were the dictatorships of Cuba to American business interests that by 1956 the United States controlled eighty per cent of the Cuban public utilities, ninety per cent of the mines, ninety per cent of the cattle ranches, forty per cent of the sugar industry, and, with the British, virtually one hundred per cent of the oil industry...
...We say we despise the corrupt dictatorships of' Latin America, but we recognize them, trade with them, and aid them...
...Emphasis added...
...It is also true that at first the Communists distrusted me and us rebels...
...There is mounting evidence today that the Communists may be ready now to make their move toward more formal consolidation with the remnants of Castro's 26th of July movement—which takes its name from the date in 1953 when Castro and 170 of his followers launched their first abortive efforts against the Batista regime with an uprising against the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba...
...sugar imports...
...This story of disenchantment with democracy and kinship for Communism has its other side—a side which does not pretend it isn't true but rather attempts to explain why and how it happened...
...It turned out that they thought I was a member of the Belgian Embassy staff...
...It was a justified distrust, an absolutely just position, ideologically and politically...
...Speaking softly would not work...
...The result was disastrous for all concerned...
...ambassador's gestures of affection and adoration...
...We must remain on a war footing until we have achieved our sovereignty and the threat of counter-revolution is destroyed...
...There can be only one realistic answer: immediate American destruction of the Castro regimentation...
...I want now to discuss the mutual recriminations on the subject of negotiation...
...I mean that a few Communists, or men controlled by them, whose policies and tactics are directed either by Moscow or Peking . . . are in control of Cuba's resources, its territory, and its voiceless people...
...The Communist Party wins only where misery, hunger, and illiteracy are dominant...
...Raul Castro and Guevara are indeed strong friends of the Communist Party although neither will own up to carrying a card...
...Nothing is irrevocable," he replied...
...Here the traveler runs into a mass of conflicting testimony which ranges from Cuba's best-foot-forward, homegrown socialism with a Marxist tinge, to the official U.S...
...On these so-called cooperatives, farm hands work for wages...
...Castro does not talk this way anymore...
...Liberty is all but extinguished...
...Look," he said as he reached for a book, "this is a textbook for very young children or illiterate adults learning the alphabet...
...As I was about to leave, I was introduced to the mill's chief fabricator...
...It emphasized that payments should be "prompt, adequate, and effective" and that "the views" of U.S...
...American so-called capitalism is not a religion or a dogma...
...When attempts at bilateral negotiations collapsed, both sides began to jockey for position before international bodies...
...There is, for example, only one party—the Communist Party...
...Like the Cuban adults with whom I talked, the boys complained bitterly that "the United States hasn't given us a chance—the chance we needed to get our revolution off to a good start...
...It is a humiliating insult to the sovereignty of Cuba to have a slice of our country occupied by your military establishment...
...The subject infuriates Raul, but Guevara, an Argentine-born professional revolutionist with enormous gifts, is less reluctant to discuss his ideological identification, however evasive he is on occasion...
...Torroella argued that while democracy is the goal desired, Cuba is not ready for it and must work with whatever instruments are at hand, including the Communists, to ride out the first and decisive stage of the revolution...
...The United States had its way, in part, when the OAS called a Foreign Ministers Conference in San Jose, Costa Rica, last summer...
...2) support the counter-revolution...
...I discovered early that "Cuba si, Yanqui no" is a slogan in the abstract designed to convey total rejection of American corporate domination of Cuba, not of Americans as people...
...They are confident that Premier Castro's nationalistic revolution is only a transitory stage on the way to Communist rule in Cuba and the rest of Latin America...
...in other words, there would be no favored status for the United States, as there has been for sixty years, and no favored status for any other country...
...In the words of Fidel Castro, we have no error to hide...
...It was in existence when the Castro regime took over," he replied...
...The Piatt Amendment was abrogated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934, as part of his Good Neighbor Policy, but our economic control remained unshaken...
...No one who pores over the record, it seems to me, can escape the judgment that there is blame enough for both sides, although one would suspect from reading the American press that Castro & Company are wholly at fault, just as one would be convinced from reading the Cuban press that the United States is solely responsible for the present miserable situation...
...position, as expressed in a recent "White Paper" of the State Department, that Cuba today is a Soviet-style dictatorship influenced if not dominated by the Kremlin...
...On lands on which there were tenant farmers and sharecroppers, INRA has turned the land over to them—in parcels running up to sixty-six acres...
...Schools are springing up everywhere, teachers are being trained at a phenomenal rate, and a crash program designed to abolish illiteracy this year is now in operation...
...Castroists were to be proven right in their predictions on other counts...
...When I asked what Cuba could do to improve the situation, the youthful leader said the Castro regime "stands ready at all times to negotiate with the United States on a basis of equality...
...For the moment we must work through the chief of state and those he selects to share leadership with him," the psychologist argued...
...Much of the content, I suspect, will be heavy laden with government propaganda...
...So we had to turn elsewhere...
...Without that income, Cuba faced collapse...
...And yet you Americans are so thoughtless as to criticize us, by calling us Communists, because we turned to the only door that was open to us...
...The United States, he insisted, "cannot afford to ignore the fact that this is not Cuba...
...The exiles were trained by U.S...
...In this respect, Cuba was much like the Iron Curtain countries in which I have traveled...
...He is now economically dependent upon Russia and the Communist powers...
...It would destroy Cuba's sovereignty in violation of our solemn commitments under the OAS...
...They seemed unmindful of the fact that most of our major allies trade with the Communists, as do several other Latin American nations with whom we have cordial relations, including Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina...
...But I do not believe that Cuba is "just as much a Communist satellite as Hungary or North Korea...
...Far and away her largest source of foreign exchange was at stake...
...The law specified that the land seized was to be paid for in twenty-year bonds bearing 4.5 per cent interest...
...The world's largest producer of sugar cane, Cuba is always searching for new markets, but historically, the Cuban sugar industry has always been dependent upon the U.S...
...Guevara: "Marx was right in certain things...
...In January this year Fidel Castro announced that Cuba was ready to "begin anew" working out a pattern of relations with the United States...
...The revolutionary government has abolished all fees...
...Even if and when it gets the 150 Communist MIG fighter planes . . . there is ho serious menace to [our] security...
...Even as the current crop of dictators in Latin America—in Haiti, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Paraguay—play ball with the Communists when it suits their fancy, so did Batista...
...The representative of Ecuador expressed the view that if the dispute continued, the long-run victim would be ". . . the Cuban people . . . and subsequently the other American peoples...
...An editor in Havana had assured me that the U.S...
...If While some of the Cuban refugees in Miami, New York, and elsewhere are rich, arrogant reactionaries, many of those who have fled are earnest supporters of social reform who could no longer tolerate the suppression of freedom and the choking off of all forms of dissent...
...He balked for a time at going even to such functions as had been planned for him, and conducted himself in every way as a man who didn't want to get along with the Americans...
...The real dilemma is the long-building pressure within us to look at other peoples as either for or against the Communists, or for or against us...
...cities are hotbeds of anti-Castro counterrevolutionary sentiment...
...Under Batista's corrupt regime, a small number of wealthy landowners, powerful entrepreneurs, and foreign investors lived in royal luxury while the rest of the 6,500,000 Cubans, except for a modest if growing middle class, barely managed on the ragged edge of subsistence...
...If Nasser reacted violently to the beginning of a game of tit-for-tat, Castro can be expected to react ten times more violently...
...They didn't look for soft positions...
...This attitude, he maintains, forced him on behalf of the Cubans to "choose between an agrarian reform and nothing...
...There was a time, however, when the State Department emphasized that it had expressed a willingness to negotiate matters on more than twenty-five separate occasions...
...This, too, proved an accurate prediction...
...why an initial force of only twelve men, eventually increased to 6,000, was able to triumph over Batista's army of 46,000 men trained and equipped by the United States...
...For the urban worker there has been a slash in rents and utility services, a home-building program that will enable tens of thousands of Cuban workers to own their homes, increased wages in some cases, steady prices, many new schools, greatly improved and less expensive medical services, and a network of playgrounds, beaches, and yacht clubs for the poor...
...As a result, the Communists captured ten seats in the Chamber of Deputies in the elections of July, 1940, and a Communist was elected mayor of Santiago de Cuba, second largest city in Cuba...
...A man," said Thomas Wolfe in the Washington Post, looking back on the Batista period, "might have to go three miles for water . . . forty miles for a doctor, and ten miles to bury the dead...
...In the background, the colossal power of the United States looms as the fundamental reality...
...He seems to have a genuine passion for the poor...
...The only way we have to show the truth of what we are doing is to have Americans come here and see for themselves...
...There has been little time to prepare the spirit of the people...
...We do not even recognize Communist China, but its envoy and ours meet regularly in Warsaw to haggle over differences...
...he has tied himself tightly to the Soviet apparatus, partly because of what he said and did...
...Suddenly, there loomed on a hillside acres of neatly terraced new homes—500 of them, of five rooms each, of varying colors and designs, all with lighting, plumbing, and kitchens...
...Communism kills a man by wiping out his freedom...
...The forty or so per cent of cultivated land which was tilled by small farmers before the revolution remains in their private hands...
...There has been waste and duplication, poor management resulting from a lack of trained personnel, and often a harsh policy of land seizure—the success of the program rests in some measure on the very fact of confiscation...
...I declined with thanks, but I chatted with them for an hour...
...Two—In the area of individual freedom and civil liberties, the Cubans emulate almost completely the Soviet pattern of total suppression and regimentation...
...One evidence of the new moral climate is that many thousands of common law marriages have now been legalized...
...This country has traditionally taken sixty to seventy per cent of Cuban exports and supplied seventy to eighty per cent of Cuban imports...
...The ideas were not clear to us, although we wanted with all our strength to destroy tyranny and privileges...
...Your Central Intelligence Agency managed to get rid of the pro-Communist Arbenz regime in Guatemala a few years ago, and you must now do the same for Cuba if you want to preserve democracy in the hemisphere...
...Under the agrarian reform, INRA has seized all sugar fields and all estates of more than 990 acres...
...The Cuban Communists who advocate this strategy do so because it conforms to their estimate of the progress of history...
...Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower has now admitted this...
...When I argued that the threat of invasion had been grossly distorted and suggested that it was being used to whip the people of Cuba into making greater sacrifices, I was told to wait and see...
...Statements were issued in their behalf of which they had no knowledge...
...I would say several things about this concern: One—The Russian-Cuban alliance is purely defensive, involving only a situation in which the United States would first attack Cuba...
...It is worth noting that while Cuba benefited greatly by receiving a price above the world market price, the American price for Cuban as well as all other foreign sugar was set at a high level to protect our domestic sugar industry...
...Cuban youth greatly admires American clothes, music, and movies...
...But out in the small towns and villages and along the rippling fields of sugar cane, where Castro has brought homes and work—and most of all, hope—there is militant enthusiasm, and something resembling love, for the curious character who leads the Cubans...
...The Chilean delegate made much the same point: "For us this is a most painful moment which we deplore more than most because we are linked to those countries by ties of all kinds, by a tradition that has never been interrupted and by bonds that we have always endeavored to strengthen...
...Anything else, it seems clear, would result in a resumption of the perilous game of tit-for-tat which can only widen the gulf and magnify the crisis...
...For a year or more U.S...
...ground, sea, and air weapons...
...In those three weeks and 2,000 miles, no one laid a rough hand on me...
...As Senator John F. Kennedy, then a Presidential candidate, pointed out last fall, American investors dominated the Cuban economy—and, I add, controlled it and shaped it to their purposes...
...Profits ranged up to twenty-three per cent per year—one hundred per cent of the investment in little more than four years...
...I saw their children running around naked in the afternoon sun...
...It was a sort of comic opera affair, or more properly, Greek tragedy, because neither would move...
...Or at least a solid majority does...
...The fact that we turned to the Soviets for help, when you refused to come to our assistance, does not mean we are Communists...
...And finally, the Castro spokesmen had assured me that "when the invasion comes, the people of Cuba will show their devotion to Fidel by refusing to join in the rebellion...
...This, clearly, was the moment to which Berle referred when he contended that we should have encouraged, canalized, and assisted the revolution when it was still democratic, anti-dictatorial, and anti-Communist...
...I have sought earlier to relate some of the steps in the disastrous game of tit-for-tat played by both sides on the economic front...
...military specialists and armed with U.S...
...But life is vastly more complicated than that, especially in dealing with a young, proud, sensitive, revolutionary regime like Castro's...
...I spent nearly three weeks in Castro's Cuba, traveling some 2,000 miles by car through five of the six provinces of yellow-green fields and blue-green mountains caressed by a friendly sun...
...owners, which it couldn't afford...
...government...
...Typical of press coverage of Cuba before the April invasion was this depressing incident: Cuba's Foreign Minister Roa sent a note to the various Latin American embassies...
...Only nine per cent of rural homes had electricity, only two per cent inside piping for water, only three per cent toilets...
...And yet we have no difficulty understanding together the urgency of our problems and the need for affirmative action, by whatever name it goes...
...Here was a visitor then at the high tide of his popularity, acclaimed throughout all Latin America as the greatest hero since Bolivar, and yet the President skipped town when he reached Washington...
...Congressmen began to question the size of the Cuban quota in light of Cuba's belligerence and seizure of American-owned properties...
...Many couples did not get married in the past because they could not afford the fee...
...The United States has vast reserves of good will among the people of Cuba and the , Communists do not...
...Today he is widely and deeply detested in the United States as a sinister charlatan who has betrayed his promises and sold his country into bondage to the dark forces of Communism...
...You have made our task vastly more difficult than it might have been by mistrusting us, calling us Communists, and seeking to array the whole world against us...
...government hurled a counter-accusation that Cuba's action was "arbitrary and inequitable" and another example of a "pattern of relentless economic aggression by the government of Cuba . . . designed to destroy Cuba's traditional investment and trade relations with the free world...
...The disciplined Communist Party, which counts itself a true member of the international Communist movement, is content to stand behind the banner of Cuban nationalism and to lend its considerable organizational and political talents to Premier Castro...
...There is tacit acceptance of the fact that, with all its faults and excesses, the Castro regime has achieved a measure of social and economic progress...
...Obviously we wrote this language into the OAS charter to protect Latin America from Communist infiltration, but can any honest American doubt that our policy toward Cuba has violated both the letter and spirit of our own creation...
...Emphasis added...
...The need for reform, or more accurately, revolution, was great and urgent...
...Increase the pressure, and he will demand the evacuation of Guantanamo naval base...
...on the other, it kept the great mass mired in poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, and disease...
...They said, "Of course, come in...
...Castro himself, when he first seized power, sought to give his revolution a name by calling it "humanism" to distinguish it from both Communism and capitalism...
...Testifying before the Senate Internal Security Committee at the end of 1959, General C. P. Cabell, deputy director of the CIA, had this to say: "We know that the Communists consider Fidel Castro as a representative of the bourgeoise, and were unable to gain public recognition or commitments from him during the course of the revolution...
...Historians will have to ask themselves how much the American attitude and policies forced Fidel Castro into this position...
...But just at the moment when Cuban public opinion veered sharply toward Fidel Castro, then fighting his way through the Sierra Maestra mountains, Smith decided to embrace Batista...
...The New York Times reported in a series of dispatches: "Their [the rebels'] activities were directly supervised by the CIA...
...R. Hart Phillips, long-time New York Times correspondent, wrote in her book, Cuba: Island of Paradox, that Batista said on one occasion: "I'm glad Ambassador Gardner approves of my government, but I wish he wouldn't talk about it so much...
...citizens "when deemed necessary for the national interest...
...Only after it was clear the invasion was going to fail were they consulted by top-ranking U.S...
...Moreover, as in avowed Communist countries, there is a widespread secret police and an informer system...
...I don't think so," he responded...
...The leaders of Cuba's Communist movement," wrote Frankel, "are confident that they have won the battle for Fidel Castro's mind and are striving, under his protection, to convert the Cuban people to their ideology...
...I am obliged to rely rather heavily in this phase of my report on personal impressions rather than on official statistics, for the latter are inadequate, inaccurate, and often out of date before they are published...
...He is weakest in Havana and other urban centers where the middle class is being destroyed through expropriation and nationalization...
...The fishing community consists of 400 to 500 squalid bohios huddled together near the sea, with docks so rotten they are near collapse, and a fleet of rotting boats that have long been cheating Davey Jones' locker...
...officials spurned the proposal on the grounds that we would not negotiate outstanding differences with Castro's regime until Cuba renounced Soviet military protection...
...The conflict over Cuba's sugar quota came before Congress early in 1960...
...Nearly all the families need medical care, so INRA is building a medical center...
...However, an American correspondent who covered Castro during his entire American visit does not believe this version of Castro's attitude is accurate...
...The U.S...
...It was not a spectacularly successful conference...
...Russian oil came in barter, involved no expenditure of precious dollars, and was cheaper...
...We are different from the Communists in that we believe, or say we believe, that law must prevail over power...
...We used to work under slave labor conditions...
...Gardner was so effusive in showing his veneration for Batista that the dictator squirmed in embarrassment...
...More drastic and deep-going than any such program in the Western Hemisphere, the Cuban law inevitably provided for the expropriation of vast land estates...
...Five—Restore diplomatic relations between the two countries, but this must be done on a basis of equality...
...Democracy, in your American sense, does not command much prestige in Cuba, for we had so little of it and know less about it...
...When we reached the scene of the demonstration, a swirling mob of teen-agers surrounded my cab, waving fists and shouting insults...
...We feel grown up and want to be treated as such...
...I asked him if he were under surveillance...
...In the farm sections ninety per cent of the people suffered from worm diseases . . . dysentery or anemia...
...But beyond all these considerations is the rarely expressed fact that the United States is prohibited by the charter of the OAS, in whose preparation we played a decisive role, from directly or indirectly intervening in Cuba's revolution...
...That was all on this theme...
...We must emphatically not be stampeded by jingoists into invading Cuba...
...A year ago, Joseph Alsop, who has never been accused, however faintly, of appeasement, warned where our game would lead us: "The people at home who have begun to talk loudly about Cuba will do well to remember how the Suez crisis started...
...There are only three courses open to the United States now: 1) recognize and work with Castro...
...Alsop's prophecy of March, 1960, has been borne out with startling completeness—and yet there are men high in the Kennedy Administration, not excluding the President, who are playing around with a further extension of the game of tit-for-tat that can lead nowhere except down the same dead-end street of reprisal and recrimination...
...Tears came to his eyes as he replied: "I have worked in this mill for fifty-two years, ever since I was eleven years old...
...Two—The enormous Soviet capability to deliver thermonuclear weapons from Russia with pin-point accuracy greatly lessens Cuba's importance as a military base "only ninety miles from our shores...
...Only once, and with noteworthy brevity, did the document acknowledge that we too might share a bit of the blame for what has gone wrong in Cuba, and even here it was not clear whether reference was being made to events in the history of Cuba before Castro or during Castro's regime...
...Guevara: "I have never worried about how I should be described politically...
...As recently as last fall, Adolf A. Berle, Jr., one of our ablest and most thoughtful students of Latin America and currently President Kennedy's task force chief south of the border, wrote in Foreign Affairs: "Factually, for a substantial period of time, the aggregate morale of the Cuban revolution was democratic, anti-dictatorial, and anti-Communist...
...INRA has organized the men into a fishing cooperative, INRA provides the homes and the boats which will belong to the fishermen when they pay INRA back...
...Break diplomatic relations and he will make Cuba into a Soviet base in our hemisphere...
...Equally significant was Cuba's dependence on one country, the United States...
...Why are we unwilling to compete in Cuba...
...The Soviet Union offered help and we took it...
...is "playing around in Florida with the least progressive of those who oppose Castro...
...Almost every Cuban I encountered, whether pro- or anti-Castro, expressed resentment over the colonial status assigned Cuba by the United States...
...The Communist Party became a brilliantly organized force...
...Each side was waiting for the other to make the first move on the all-important question of loans...
...Capitalism," he used to say, "may kill man with hunger...
...market...
...In that way the Communists fall behind in their appeals and slogans...
...His is a fuzzy form of socialism that springs more from the heart than from any mastery of dialectical materialism...
...to take whatever steps it deems necessary . . . in the defense of the legitimate rights and interests of its people," which have been "adversely affected by the unilateral acts" of Cuba...
...It was he who legalized the party and paved the way for its subsequent strength...
...I asked him if he cared to compare conditions now with those prevailing before the revolution...
...The speeches to him are, in effect, state of the union messages, and the inevitable wild applause the mandate to proceed...
...Most of our textbooks of the past were written in Spain by Spanish priests who presented a completely reactionary viewpoint...
...Gone are the widespread graft and corruption of Batista's time...
...My driver locked me in the car and went out to talk to the leaders...
...The nonsense that they were built for purely defensive purposes has now been confirmed for the lie it was...
...You are bound by international agreement not to interfere in our affairs, and yet you and your CIA are doing everything in your power to destroy the regime which is so popular with the people of Cuba...
...But he had, vividly...
...It is conceivable that if we met and talked, and they listened to our side of the story and we to theirs, we might find a spot of common ground...
...The Cuban government refused, but Foreign Minister Roa told the conference that Cuba stood ready to negotiate "in a bilateral way, on a footing of equality . . . her grave differences" with the United States...
...Investigation of the files of American newspapers of the period will show that it was at this time that the press began to take a surly view of the Cuban revolution and started to create a public opinion hostile to the Castro regime...
...Both statements seem to me to be slightly exaggerated—but only slightly...
...I thought there might be trouble if they spotted me as a Yanqui...
...His view of capitalism remains unchanged, but he is unmistakably soft on Communism...
...Compared to Castro, Nasser is humble, sluggish...
...One of the most striking features of the agrarian reform is crop diversification...
...Castro insists that the United States really wanted Cuba to pay cash, which it didn't have, and at prices set by U.S...
...What precisely was this Marxist turn of events and what caused it...
...Management personnel to supervise the farms is provided by INRA...
...After a bitter fight within their own ranks, the Communists have decided to consolidate their position of great influence here and to forego an open bid for total power...
...The foregoing principle prohibits not only armed force, but also any other form of interference or attempted threat against the personality of the state or against its political, economic, and cultural elements...
...It was Batista who then proceeded to legalize the Communist Party...
...That is why the press has been used to incite people to an understanding of the perils that confront us and the need to be ever vigilant...
...It is what a great majority of Cubans want now...
...This Cuban, who holds clandestine conferences with others who share his view, begged me to see that "if you allow Castro to survive and flourish, you will open the floodgates to Communism through all Latin America...
...It is operated by the Instituto Nacional de la Reforma Agraria (INRA...
...Our whole approach is pragmatic and instrumentalist...
...In fact, this little island country became our sixth largest customer...
...And only last month, after the April invasion attempt, the State Department coldly rebuffed a new Cuban offer of negotiation— this one proposed by President Osval-do Dorticos Torrado...
...In Cuba, the grin and the wink that accompanied "Cuba si, Yanqui no" told much the same story...
...Its operations are so wide-ranging—land reform, shipping, home building, school construction, factory operation, credit financing, commercial fishing, and a host of other activities—that it is a state-within-a-state...
...But he^embraced me, Latin style, told me the province was mine to explore any way I wanted to, and he pleaded with me to send more Americans "so that more of you can see and understand our revolution...
...I am painfully aware of the fact that the American press and American politicians have so conditioned the thinking of the American people that it would be quite improbable if not impossible to crack the wall of resistance to a more affirmative policy than we are currently pursuing...
...I told the boy and his friends that I was quite well acquainted with the history of this dark period in American relations with Cuba and that many well-informed Americans knew and were ashamed of that sad story, but Osmundo and his classmates persisted in wanting to uncover and hold up for inspection every last sin of U.S...
...policy toward Batista...
...Is it not logical to hope that a more creative approach, based on mutual respect and genuine negotiation, might loosen the Soviet-Cuban hug...
...The only alternative to forbidden intervention, it seems to me, is genuine negotiation, or, at the very least, the hands-off policy inflexibly required by the OAS Charter...
...Shortly before the Sugar Act controversy, the Cuban government had asked the Esso, Texaco, and Shell oil refineries in Cuba to process Soviet oil...
...I was slightly alarmed and wanted to melt into the walls...
...Speaking to the Life Insurance Association of America earlier this year, Watson said: "Castro took a group of hungry and illiterate Cubans—most of the population—and offered them something better than was being provided by the five per cent of the population that was governing Cuba under Batista...
...Everywhere in the world, said James Reston of the New York Times recently, the United States is "trying to defend or establish a simple overriding principle: that force shall not be used, directly or indirectly, to achieve political ends, and that all international disputes shall be settled by negotiation...
...In February Castro again held out an olive branch, saying he wanted to establish friendly relations with the United States— on condition that we cease supporting the enemies of his revolution...
...For its part, the U.S...
...It was a most unpleasant feeling...
...INRA provides, on credit, the plans, the materials, the manpower, and the supervision for all the projects...
...You said nothing then...
...It is not altogether an idle fear...
...f The firing squads have been more numerous than many Cubans believe necessary...
...It is never too late for men of good will...
...Theoretically they are supposed to share in profits at the end of each year—but it will be years before there is anything to distribute, so deeply are they in debt to INRA...
...Civil liberties have all but been abolished...
...Several months later, the youth division of Castro's 26th of July movement and the official Communist youth organization joined forces to form the Jovenes Rebeldes (Youth Rebels...
...It is the only Cuban party," Castro replied, "that has always clearly proclaimed the necessity for a radical change of structure, an absolutely correct structure, of social relationships...
...Typical of this considerable group was Dr...
...f There is only one political party in Cuba, as in Communist countries— the Communist Party (PSP...
...It has provided them with better jobs, better homes, better medical services, and better schools for children than they ever dreamed they would have when they were the forgotten families of Cuba...
...I talked with virtually all the American correspondents in Havana —and the correspondents of Canadian, British, and German newspapers as well...
...The April invasion attempt showed how closely our CIA works with the conservative crowd among the exiles...
...This is true...
...The agrarian reform program, keystone of Castro's revolution, is modeled in some respects on the Soviet system of state farms...
...some of the largest of these were owned by American investors...
...I have talked with Cuban counter-revolutionaries in New York City, Washington, and Miami who insist that Castro secretly preferred to have it that way, that he was even then anti-American and preferred to go home an empty-handed martyr...
...We reject the ideology of Soviet Russia, but we recognize her, trade with her, and exchange cultural relations...
...Of course there are some Communists in the government, but the party as such is not gaining, but rather losing strength...
...There is tragically little evidence that either our country or its leadership is prepared to pursue the only road that offers a measure of long-range hope—serious negotiation of the differences that divide us...
...government has abandoned its earlier claims that it is seeking negotiation with Castro's Cuba...
...The pressures are great for inflicting a total embargo of trade on Cuba—to starve her out if we can...
...Fidel didn't want to be received formally, and he was determined not to seem to be a lackey of American capitalism...
...That force could and should have been encouraged, canalized, and in the hour of its success, given every assistance...
...It has instilled hope and self-confidence in many thousands of peasants and farm workers...
...f Youth has been militarized in the Patrulla Juvenil, which seems designed to develop chauvinism in Cuba's children and to draw them away from church and church-related organizations...
...to offer Castro (assuming he did not choose to be an enemy of the United States as apparently Castro has done) a means of financing his agrarian reform and his state-owned program of industrialization...
...We proceeded to commit our first fatal mistake...
...A task force at Northwestern University, in a report prepared for a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, contended after exhaustive investigation little more than a year ago—just before the issue came to a climax—that the "OAS takes as its objective, in large measure, the restoration of peace and the status quo ante, not the resolution of underlying conflict...
...What happened in these two short years...
...The note contained the usual tirades against North American imperialism, but the heart of its contents was a plea to the Latin American governments to use their good offices to explore the prospect of negotiations between Cuba and the United States...
...note also specified that before embarking on any negotiations it would want to "explore" through normal diplomatic channels the subjects to be discussed and "manner and place" of negotiations...
...Herbert Matthews put it moderately when he said: "Once Castro turned toward the Soviet bloc for economic and then political help, his freedom of action was jeopardized...
...The facts are hard to come by...
...In subsequent debates at the United Nations, and on other occasions, several Latin American diplomats expressed the hope that negotiations between Cuba and the United States might be resumed...
...This would officially commit no one, but it might lay the ground work for later formal negotiations...
...American politicians and the American press were especially wrathful over Cuban willingness to trade with the Soviet bloc...
...But Cuba mistrusted the OAS, arguing that it was a tool of the United States...
...The INRA store is a fixture now in rural Cuba...
...This spirit of hope and national consciousness does not apply to those who have suffered greatly under the Castro regime—the upper class and much of the middle class—but it does extend to the great mass of poverty-stricken campesinos and factory workers who have never had it so good...
...Before they embark on an explanation, Cubans point out, rather bitterly, that when Fulgencio Batista played around with the Communists and called them "genuine democrats," American politicians and the American press, now thundering against Communist influence in Castro's Cuba, were totally silent...
...This is a two-sentence summary of what I saw and heard in Cuba during my travel there this spring...
...They had no plumbing, inside or out...
...One of the most dramatic experiences I had in Cuba happened in Manzanilla, in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra mountains of Oriente Province...
...officials...
...The AFL-CIO, through its executive council, has asserted that "the latest manifestations of the Castro regime have revealed unmistakable signs of a definite trend toward a totalitarian state...
...Six—Cuba, as James Reston, chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times, pointed out recently, "is not a present danger to the United States...
...The difference may not seem great, but it strikes me as having some significance...
...Four—If it is complained that while Cuba might not be used as a military but rather as a propaganda base against the United States for all Latin America, I would argue that we have a far greater capability, if we would only use it, to influence the course of events in Latin America along democratic lines, than have Castro and the Communists to influence it along totalitarian lines...
...Why not, then, compete by embarking on a program of creative negotiations designed to reach, if nothing more, a live-and-let-live agreement...
...The next development came the following month when the Castro government embarked on its greatest adventure—the Agrarian Reform Law of May 17, 1959...
...Cuban Foreign Minister Roa called the OAS the "Ministry of Colonies" of the United States...
...It is noteworthy in this connection that although we were released from our obligation by mutual agreement, the United States continued to pour arms into Batista's military establishment until March, 1958—Batista fell in January, 1959—and that even after cutting off aid, our military mission stayed on, training Batista forces until the very end, thus in great measure wiping out the effect of the arms embargo...
...I complained to Soto about the strident, almost hysterical tone of the Cuban press and its hate-America theme so reminiscent of the press I had encountered in out-and-out Communist countries...
...they didn't keep looking at their watches or care about rain or mud if there were work to be done today, whatever their long-range goals may have been...
...or 3) send the marines to invade Cuba...
...What," the Italian correspondent asked Castro, "is your opinion of the Partido Socialista Popular, the party of the Cuban Communists...
...This, of course, is the heart of our concern—the fear held in the United States that what Walter Lippmann called "a phony military deal between Castro and the Soviet Union" will endanger our security...
...What began as a movement to enlarge Cuban democracy and freedom," the paper notes, "has been perverted .. . into a mechanism for the destruction of free institutions in Cuba, for the seizure by international Communism of a base and a bridgehead in the Americas . . . "It is the considered judgment of the United States of America that the Castro regime offers a clear and present danger to the authentic and autonomous revolution of the Americas—to the whole hope of spreading political liberty, economic development, and social progress through all the republics of the hemisphere...
...Gardner's successor, Earl E. T. Smith, was thought at first to represent a basic change in U.S...
...He replied that "there are strange cars parked in the neighborhood that come and go...
...But the newspaper killed the story, preferring for its Cuban coverage that day a wire service report that two Catholic nuns had been arrested and detained for six hours...
...I inspected factories, state-owned farms, private farms, schools, hospitals, stores, government agencies, military barracks, and homes...
...We whole-heartedly endorse the statement adopted by this conference," he told a cheering throng of Muscovites...
...The boys' leader said: "One—Stop helping the counterrevolutionaries...
...Many Latin Americans were bitterly disappointed at the outcome of the conference...
...They say the CIA precipitated the attack without adequate coordination with the Cuban underground and without including groups experienced in guerrilla tactics...
...And yet during the military phase of his revolutionary struggle, Castro made an "absolute guarantee" of "full and un-trammeled" freedom of public information and all communication media...
...These two "don'ts" represent the minimum requirements of a wait-and-see policy...
...Anyone who is anti-Communist is branded a counter-revolutionary...
...Guevara guardedly stated his views in a recent interview: Question: "It has been speculated that you are a Communist...
...Che Guevara said last July that the United States and Cuba "could settle their differences tomorrow" if Washington would only recognize that "Cuban sovereignty was the basis and spirit of the revolution," and in January this year he hinted that Castro "is ready at any time for a man-to-man talk with the new Administration...
...Question: "Would you please elaborate...
...They are jumping on our bandwagon, not we on theirs, because we are more progressive and aggressive than they are...
...my wife is a devout Catholic who hates Communism...
...Identifying himself as a John Dewey type of instrumentalist, Dr...
...It sells almost everything—from nails to nail polish— and at prices that often run twenty per cent below those in the private store...
...I saw thousands of militiamen in my travels but not one who was drunk...
...That was all...
...The answers varied greatly, but I came away with the conclusion that Castro still holds the support of some fifty-five to sixty per cent of the Cuban people...
...The petroleum incident was part of the game of tit-for-tat both sides have played so disastrously...
...Absolute rubbish," he said, "and the proof is that Castro tolerated the Communists in his regime and made an economic deal with Mikoyan even before the United States took its first reprisals against Castro...
...Again, earlier this year, President Arturo Frondizi of Argentina appealed to President Kennedy to negotiate American-Cuban differences, saying that such a course would be looked on with favor by Latin America...
...We are not wedded to a specific blueprint or ideology—except that we are determined to banish poverty, disease, and illiteracy by whatever means work best for us...
...The U.S...
...These shipments represented Cuba's quota under the U.S...
...The choice for us became one of death or survival...
...They were not permitted to join the rebel forces or speak in their own name...
...The uproar in the American press was wild and long-lasting, but nobody bothered to point out that there was nothing else Cuba could do if she hoped to survive...
...The Castro government decided not to dissolve it but rather to let it fade out by itself...
...Herbert Matthews of the New York Times said it all in a frequently quoted observation: "In my thirty years on the New York Times I have never seen a big story so misunderstood, so badly handled, and so misinterpreted as the Cuban revolution...
...I was told repeatedly by Cubans, including many middle-of-the-roaders, that the heart of Cuba's concern, the cause of her frenzied accumulation of Soviet weapons, and the source of much of the hysteria and intransigence could be found in the fear of imminent invasion from the United States or Latin America...
...There was no protest or critical comment in the American press...
...When the Sugar Act came up for renewal in 1960," the report notes, "sugar lobbyists, both domestic and foreign, began to argue against the Cuban subsidy...
...Of this I feel reasonably certain...
...f Virtually all significant dissent, including resistance to ever-tightening ties with Communism, is treated as counter-revolutionary...
...After all, we have left them only the Communists to talk to...
...Three—Give us back Guan-tanamo...
...He had no radio and no daily newspaper...
...The first answer, of course, is that our press has done a miserable job of reporting Cuba...
...Under Batista's crooked tyranny, twenty-five per cent of the people were permanently unemployed, nearly thirty-five per cent were illiterate and another one-third semi-literate, and nearly fifty per cent were plagued by disease and malnutrition...
...American press and radio management has made clear it prefers stories of violence and defection to interpretative reports of social and economic progress in Cuba—or Cuba's occasional desire to talk things over with the United States with the view to reaching a settlement of outstanding differences...
...The New York Post reported: "The CIA held the six leading members of the Cuban Revolutionary Council incommunicado near an abandoned airfield somewhere in Florida while the 'invasion' was under way...
...Cuba's fears of shabby treatment before the OAS may have been premature and exaggerated, but few objective students of the OAS doubt the pervasive influence of the United States in its deliberations...
...Now, virtually every Cuban charge during the past year has been confirmed by the shocking disclosures that followed the ill-fated invasion in April...
...However, I do think that socialism is a science which includes a number of objective facts which no one can deny...
...The CIA masterminded the operation for the American government, first during the Eisenhower Administration and then under President Kennedy...
...In the last months of his tenure the American ambassador tried desperately but vainly to arrange an election under Batista's auspices which was widely considered a cloak to maintain the substance of Batista's fall...
...He was the first Communist to attain cabinet rank in any nation of the Western Hemisphere...
...Later on, when Argentina made a tentative offer to mediate the dispute, State Department officials said it was "quite obvious" that the United States would reject it...
...As someone wisely observed in Manas sometime back, our trouble is that "we want a clean, simple identification of good and evil in the Cuban revolution and we cannot have it...
...On land belonging to the confiscated great estates, the latifundias, INRA has settled thousands of new farmers who belong to what are known as cooperatives but more realistically are state farms in the Soviet manner...
...Often as he talked, he and his friends would look up to the wall on which hung the portraits of their classmates who had been killed by Batista's men in the revolution...
...It is true, as the Cubans had charged, that the invasion plans were in the making for more than a year, for the evidence is conclusive now that the Eisenhower Administration turned the CIA loose on the invasion project a year ago this spring...
...Official American enthusiasm for negotiation in response to Cuba's February proposal may be judged by this pertinent passage in the U.S...
...Three—I could discover no evidence, and our government has never charged, that the Cubans are allowing the Soviets to build missile or any other kind of bases in Cuba, although, to be sure, the Soviets have supplied Castro with arms—after we refused...
...I visited four or five of them, including one in which twelve people lived in a single room, somehow using cloth partitions and one thing and another to provide a modicum of privacy for the grownups and make their sordid home look tolerably decent...
...People simply refuse to hate, especially the sunny people of sundrenched Cuba, many of whom have happy relatives in the United States...
...Castro has stated his willingness to cease efforts to export the Cuban revolution to the rest of Latin America if we will end our encouragement of and assistance for the Cuban rebels in the United States...
...In the main, the OAS has been a conservative organ providing little support for significant political change...
...Cut the quota, and Castro will seize the American investments still untouched in Cuba...
...They do...
...No country in Latin America has retrogressed so rapidly in the past two years in the fields of individual freedom and civil liberties as has Cuba...
...Without them, the economy of Cuba would utterly collapse...
...But they are quick to rationalize this development and earnest in their plea to Americans to try to understand...
...Torroella expressed deep disappointment over President Kennedy's sharp criticism of the Castro regime...
...This landscape of what Cuba was like under Batista should help Americans understand why so many Cubans responded to Castro's revolution...
...Perhaps the best interpretation of Communist strategy in Cuba was written recently by Max Frankel of the New York Times, a seasoned observer of Communist ways who, because of this report, was refused reentry into Cuba when he sought to return after a swing through parts of Latin America...
...Cuba was too bankrupt to pay promptly, adequately, and effectively, but we threatened, nevertheless, to "seek solutions through other appropriate international procedures" if the Cubans did not pay up...
...f Press, radio, and television are completely under the thumb of the government...
...Certainly the failure of the recent abortive invasion to spark uprising within Cuba confirms the depth of Castro's support...
...the Soviets have simply been too shrewd to insist on this kind of relationship...
...Our spokesmen in the United Nations countered Cuban accusations by giving solemn assurances that we were in no way involved in invasion plans, if indeed there were any...
...Said Senator Mike Mansfield to his colleagues in the Senate: "We had better face the fact that there will be no victory for one side or the other...
...When I asked about the dominance of Communists in the government, he made no effort to minimize the extent of Communist penetration, but he sought to explain it in these words: "You must remember that it was Batista who made the Communist Party the force it became...
...Herbert Matthews of the New York Times noted that another result was the development within the Cuban people of a strong sense of being a colony of the United States...
...In Moscow, last December, for example, Guevara, the bearded boss of Cuba's economy, lauded "as one of the most important events of recent times" the just-approved declaration of eighty-one Communist parties detailing an ideological program for achieving world Communism...
...It is they and their plans for invasion that maintain the crisis atmosphere here...
...For what it seems to want out of Cuba, the American press would do better to staff its Havana offices with police reporters rather than with foreign correspondents...
...I asked him how, as a supporter of Castro, he accounted for the failure to hold free elections as promised so frequently and solemnly...
...Many of the new boats were to be ready for the fishermen as soon as the move was completed in May, but twenty of them stood in the ways— unfinished...
...The story of Cuba has been the story of sugar...
...The technicians in charge, who have been imported from behind the Iron Curtain, are not thinking of what is best for Cuba, but rather what is best for the Communist camp throughout the world...
...The people of Cuba remain our brothers," said the State Department paper...
...I think it is no exaggeration to suggest that if we did not actually push Castro into Soviet arms, we at least greased the wheels that carried him there...
...There was, according to Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, "a pent-up mass hunger for land, understandable in a country where less than one-tenth of one per cent of the farmers own one-fifth of all agricultural land, and eight per cent own seventy per cent of the land...
...The independence of the judiciary has been destroyed by the purge of 120 Cuban judges on charges of counter-revolutionary attitudes or immoral conduct...
...The information was confirmed in almost every detail by Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, the Communists' leading ideologist, in a long conversation...
...Actually we are taking the reactionary propaganda out of the school books...
...Adolf Berle's conviction that the first phase of the Cuban revolution was democratic and anti-Communist is paralleled by his equally firm insistence that the current phase is totalitarian, collectivist, and pro-Communist...
...H The jails are full of political prisoners, many of them held incommunicado indefinitely...
...And yet before he came to power Castro frequently made a "formal promise" that the "prime duty" of holding "free and honest elections" would be met in twelve months...
...A one-crop economy—sugar—provided only three to four months employment during the year for tens of thousands of campesinos who spent the rest of the year struggling to stay alive on what they had earned in the cane fields...
...An earnest, almost humorless young man, he seemed too grim and unsmiling for his age—although I found him far better prepared to argue Cuba's case than most American boys of seventeen are to defend the American position...
...The varied unease one finds in the cities, among those of the middle class who feel that Castro's will is drawing them inexorably toward Communism, is absent in rural Cuba where there is little thought and less concern about ideology...
...But more than that, it would recreate, all over Latin America, the image of Yankee imperialism and gunboat diplomacy...
...Habeas corpus has been suspended for those arrested on charges of counter-revolution...
...All conflicts within the labor movement are resolved in favor of the Communist bloc...
...It is Cuba plus Russia, plus Czechoslovakia, plus China...
...The U.S...
...government did nothing—absolutely nothing—to encourage, canalize, and assist the Cuban revolution in its democratic, anti-dictatorial, anti-Communist first phase...
...We are threatened every minute with American warships, planes, and marines...
...Every time we try to negotiate, the United States treats us as children...
...Many rebels accuse the CIA of monumental mismanagement...
...Gustavo Torroella, professor of psychology at the University of Havana and director of the National Institute of Applied Psychology, with whom I talked for several hours...
...Cuba, not unnaturally, turned to the Soviet bloc to find markets for its sugar...
...Castro is now no longer a free agent...
...Havana, once the Caribbean capital of sin, with its widespread pattern of bribery, its gambling casinos run by American gangsters, and its heavy traffic in prostitution and dope, has been cleaned up drastically...
...James N. Wallace, a Wall Street Journal correspondent who spent a year in Cuba, returned with strong anti-Castro convictions but cheerfully conceded that Castro has "given many Cubans a genuine sense of national consciousness for the first time...
...I do think that Cuba is an "advanced outpost" not so much for the Kremlin's "drive to infiltrate the New World" as it is for the export of the Cuban type of revolution, rather than the Russian or Chinese...
...They don't care what the system is called as long it helps defeat hunger and misery...
...For example, one correspondent who has been strongly anti-Castro in his commentaries confessed he was confused, that there was much good mixed with the bad, although he emphasized the latter in his reports "because that's what they seem to want back home...
...Louis Post-Dispatch put it this way: "The CIA . . . helped organize, train, finance, and arm the Cuban refugees...
...sugar act which prorates the market among domestic producers and certain foreign producers...
...The Mexican delegation added a caveat that the declaration was in no way "a condemnation or threat against Cuba, whose aspirations for economic improvement and social justice have deepest sympathy in the government and the people of Mexico...
...It may seem superfluous at this point to nail down the role we played in the disastrous invasion scheme, but for the record it may be well to quote from a few of the major American anti-Castro sources, all of which relied on the off-the-record briefings of high Administration officials...
...military experts...
...It is important for Americans to understand," he replied, "that the people do not feel betrayed on this account...
...I was treated everywhere by everyone with unfailing courtesy and kindness...
...If you lived under the daily threat of invasion from a powerful enemy," said one schoolteacher in Oriente Province, "you too would behave as we do...
...These new buildings, each with its own little plot of land, were to become the homes this spring of the fishing folk we had just left behind in their miserable bohios...
...An American correspondent heard of the note forty-eight hours before it was released to the public...
...I have already discussed the first error—President Eisenhower's disappearance from Washington when Castro came to town in April, 1959— and the first omission—our failure to hold out a helping hand to the infant regime at a time it desperately needed help and at a time, too, when we were aiding every despicable dictatorship in Latin America...
...Why can't there be an informal committee of American and Cuban citizens to explore the possibilities of later negotiation at a round-table conference...
...These media spew out a torrent of "hate America" propaganda—which the people take in stride— and glorify almost everything the Sino-Soviet bloc does...
...Far from it...
...f The Prensa Latina news agency, which now monopolizes the news in Cuba, undeviatingly follows the Communist Party line in all its interpretations of world affairs...
...we love to talk with Americans...
...My own judgment, after wrestling with the problem for several weeks and after hearing and reading just about everything said and published by both sides, is three-fold: One—On the social and economic level, Castro's Cuba has borrowed heavily from Marxism, but has transplanted the seeds it borrowed to Cuban soil, with the result that it is a domestic, Cuban variety of the original seed...
...Fidel Castro decided to pay a visit to the United States...
...The contrast was awesome...
...The crowd loved it...
...it is a way of getting things done which works extremely well in the United States—and may be quite inappropriate in many other situations...
...If this is what he wanted all along, there is nothing the United States could have done to prevent it...
...As I think over my talks and arguments with earnest, sincerely democratic Cubans who sought to explain the basis for the invasion psychology that gripped Cuba, I can see now how right they were, in this respect, and how wrong $ was to accept the solemn commitrrrent of American officials who hooted at the very thought that we, through our CIA, were planning the military overthrow of the Castro regime...
...After all, he added, "the mere presence of military force in a weak country is not necessarily a threat to a strong country...
...As Time, the New York Times, and other publications revealed, leaders of the Cuban rebels were kept under guard in Florida so they could not meddle in CIA operations...
...And most of all, it would fatally impair one of our most treasured concepts, one stemming from the Declaration of Independence, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, for it is clear that Castro still retains the support of a majority of his people...
...President Kennedy knew D-day in advance, and had approved...
...We have tried almost everything else...
...Nearby, there are new shipways building, new docks, new boats—everything new to make a fresh life for the fishermen and their families...
...I found striking similarities between the Cuban practice and the practice of the Communist countries I visited in Europe...
...Can anyone now doubt that we have given aid, direct and indirect, against "the personality" of the Cuban state and against its "political, economic, and cultural elements...
...I am the leader of the revolutionary group here...
...Castro himself sets a high standard of incorruptibility and his regime is relentless in ferreting out waywardness and extreme in meting out punishment...
...There were no schools and no church...
...Some of the leaders began to rock the car...
...The Cuban government accused them of arbitrarily violating the Cuban law and seized their property at the end of June...
...The Cuban government felt obliged to make this request because the Venezuelan oil normally used by the refineries cost dollars, which are mighty scarce in Cuba...
...There is a significant undertone in the last comment by the man I have been quoting...
...But the friendly hand of the Soviet Union, extended to us, shields us from the enemy as an invisible armor...
...Dr...
...We are facing up to our problems, doing much today and planning still more for tomorrow...
...The bohios in which the families exist look as if they were too dilapidated to stand much longer...
...It was Batista who first permitted the Communists to found a daily newspaper, Hoy, which began publication on May Day, 1938, and flourishes today under Castro...
...They range from Batista's butchers on the far right to genuine social reformers on the democratic left...
...Cuba now sends hundreds of her children to the Soviet Union for training and education...
...The U.S...
...Gardner was photographed one day hugging Francisco Tabernilla, Batista's butcher-murderer...
...their bloated bellies told the cruel story of malnutrition...
...I laboriously collected masses of statistics at the Ministry of Education, but most of them are hopelessly out of date by now...
...They had hoped there might be direct talks between the Americans and Cubans, but U.S...
...Incidentally, I found pro-Castro and anti-Castro spokesmen equally excitable, equally emotional, and equally given to a rush of passionate speech when given the opportunity to confer with an American editor...
...Yet, the fact persists that we demanded that Cuba hear or heed "the views" of the powerful corporations and individuals owning vast estates in Cuba, and that she pay up "promptly, adequately, and effectively," which she could not possibly do...
...Such a course would be morally reprehensible and legally wrong...
...Castro was not even formally received by the State Department—on the idiotic pretext that his visit was not official...
...What happened is crisply set forth in an unusually able report prepared for the American Friends Service Committee, and based in great measure on the official documents of the U.S...
...Emphasis added...
...English, he told me, is an extremely popular subject in the schools...
...The temptation to begin a game of tit-for-tat with Fidel Castro is already strong, and it is likely to grow stronger...
...They are ruffled by the fact that the United States claims credit for victory in the Spanish-American War, whereas they believe we entered the war when it was already won and almost ended...
...note of February 29, 1960: "The United States cannot accept the condition for the negotiation . . . [because] the government of the United States must remain free...
...I felt from what I saw and heard that there was more propaganda than preparation...
...I came away convinced that they are far more torn by doubt about Castro's Cuba than their dispatches would indicate...
...Many Cubans, who are otherwise pro-Castro, are greatly disturbed over the regime's deepening kinship with Communism...
...President Eisenhower, who thought there was something unclean about Castro and his crowd, decided to get out of town when Castro reached Washington in order to avoid receiving him...
...The Cubans," he said, "are not an ideological people...
...This was the same President who had pampered Latin American dictators and lavished decorations on them, the same President who had gone hundreds of miles out of his way to shake Franco's bloody hand...
...The glittering but vulgar facade of Havana, with its lush hotels, gambling casinos, lavish restaurants, and luxurious houses of prostitution, concealed from most American tourists the grim realities of absentee landlordism, almost profitless share-cropping, gouging company stores, and the brutality of a corrupt soldiery trained in the ways of torture...
...He chose the former...
...Two—We must do nothing to encourage the restoration of the status quo ante, for this could only pave the way for new violence and bloodshed in that tragic island...
...Everywhere I asked the question— "How large a following does Castro command after two years of defections and disillusionment...
...I turn again to President Kennedy's chief trouble-shooter in Latin America, Adolph Berle: "It would have been perfectly possible...
...The fact is that the dispute has already caused serious damage to Cuba, to the United States, and to the Western Hemisphere...
...Last summer, at the Eighth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party, its secretary-general, Bias Roca, appealed for the "fusion" of all the revolutionary forces "in a single movement...
...If we decide not to negotiate with Castro's Cuba—and I am aware that there is powerful public opinion, based on distorted press reports, hostile to the notion of negotiation— we ought at least do two things—or, rather, not do two things...
...Now we continue to work together, loyally and fraternally...
...After the abortive invasion, the New York Times disclosed that the most socially forward-looking/ of the anti-Castro forces, the Peoole's Revolutionary Movement, "is reported to have received no financial support and almost no equipment...
...officials had derided Cuban charges that we were assisting exiles in their plans to invade the island...
...government—were convinced that the Castro regime was irrevocably aligned with the Sino-Soviet bloc and had become a hopeless pawn of the Kremlin and Peking in the cold war struggle...
...At the Santa Clara University library, I saw a number of American books, including Karl Menninger's The Human Mind, Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln, Irwin Edman's John Dewey, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.'s Path to the Present, the Encyclopedia Americana, and a volume of plays by Rodg-ers and Hammerstein...
...For all practical purposes, Cuba is just as much a Communist satellite as Hungary or North Korea," he has said...
...The Castro charge, made long before the invasion attempt, that the whole scheme was largely a CIA show, was confirmed when the invasion came...
...There is bread in Cuba, but there is terror too...
...And so friendly was the American government to the Cuban dictators that at least one, bloody Batista, who killed more than 20,000 Cubans, was acutely embarrassed by the U.S...
...Fidel's brother, Raul, and his close adviser, Ernesto ('Che') Guevara," he said, "are both strong friends of the Communist Party," but "we believe Fidel Castro is not a member of the Communist Party, and does not consider himself to be a Communist...
...Finally I was able to get them to discuss what they thought could be done to improve Cuban-American relations today...
...When they heard I was an American journalist interested in finding out the truth about Cuba, their wrath turned to smiles...
...investors should be heard...
...The United States failed to get a clear-cut condemnation of Soviet interference in hemisphere affairs, but was obliged to content itself with a declaration that reaffirmed "faith in the regional system" and condemned in a general way extra-continental intervention and the acceptance of extra-continental intervention by any American state...
...Osmundo recited a remarkably complete catalogue of American sins since Cuba won technical independence nearly six decades ago...
...Under President Eisenhower's businessman's Administration, the only question seemed to be how fast and fully Cuba would pay for what she took...
...There are still remnants of the old traffic in prostitution, but it has been reduced greatly...
...This is one of the few facts about Cuba of which I am unshakably confident...
...Capitalism can either go peacefully or it can go out with a struggle, which would be horrible...
...Guevara's views are important not only because he is the second or third most powerful figure in Cuba, but also because he occasionally says things which Fidel Castro believes but prefers not to say...
...The melancholy story begins in April, 1959, three months after the victorious entrance of the revolutionary forces into Havana...
...The families of the villages live on the ragged edge of despair...
...He can in fact be expected to play out the game of tit-for-tat to the limit of his resources...
...I was taken to the platform to meet and talk with the speaker...
...Ernest Betancourt, then strongly devoted to Castro but now a militant rebel, told me, for example, that he accompanied Castro on his trip to Washington and had the next hotel room...
...But the Communists," I argued, "have powerful positions in the government and do much to shape both domestic and foreign policy...
...It was you who pushed us ever closer into the arms of the Soviets...
...Castro was not that standoffish...
...Each side has accused the other of refusing to negotiate differences...
...Like you, I do not find some of our press pleasant, but I understand that it is necessary because we are still at war, almost daily facing the threat of invasion...
...Soto denied this emphatically, but went on to add: "Of course we are revising textbooks in history and the social studies to emphasize the significance of the revolution and provide our children with objective accounts, not Communist propaganda, of Cuban and world affairs...
...Brazil, too, has indicated she views our position as dangerously intransigent...
...Several months after that, in February, 1961, Castro, in an interview with I'Unita, the Italian Communist organ, was in a rare mood to be contrite, penitent, and apologetic—on the subject of his former relationship with the Communist Party—and boldly affirmative regarding his present feelings...
...In his State of the Union message to Congress earlier this year, President Kennedy won the hearts of democratic men of good will everywhere when he said, "If freedom and Communism were to compete for man's allegiance in a world of peace, I would look to the future with ever increasing confidence...
...The document skillfully seeks to identify the United States with the social aspirations of the original revolution, but it is unsparing in its denunciation of the course the revolution has taken...
...Then we met...
...Cuban counter-revolutionaries are hopelessly divided on what kind of regime should succeed Castro's if and when he falls...
...The five per cent, who should have been spending part of their time finding ways and means of making the lives of the people broader and more fruitful, were actually involved in rigidly controlling the wealth of the country and serving their own selfish interests...
...It was necessary to instill revolutionary spirit in the people, to whip them up to work and sacrifice ever harder so they would understand the danger of the counterrevolution...
...Batista, moreover, allowed the Communists to infiltrate the labor movement and even to exert significant power in the Ministry of Labor- And all this happened when Fidel Castro was a schoolboy specializing in basketball...
...When the United States-Cuban dispute came back to the Security Council in January, 1961, United Nations delegate Benites Vinueza of Ecuador said that his delegation was taking part in the debate "with an obvious feeling of sadness" since both states "are linked to my country by ties of close friendship...
...Members of the Communist Party were highly skilled and ready to work hard...
...Recently, the U.S...
...He added that ". . . the Cuban government has shown a legitimate insistence that in regard to Cuba there should be respect for the central principles of international co-existence, such as the principle that negotiation should be based on the legal equality of states and on respect for their sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence...
...This is endlessly true, as I was soon to discover when I took to the road for my 2,000-mile journey through little Cuba...
...This hurts us more than you Americans realize...
...Often now there are mass weddings, so great is the demand for legalization...
...As I traveled about Cuba, I became increasingly convinced that Cuba is heading toward collectivism, that it has acquired many of the trappings of a totalitarian state, and that it is ardently pro-Communist in all its international relations...
...According to Tad Szulc, who covered the conference for the New York Times, the foreign ministers of Venezuela and Peru did not sign even the watered-down resolution because they were personally opposed to it...
...But Communist domination in this hemisphere can never be negotiated...
...But the program in general has worked remarkably well...
...power, including even rockets with nuclear warheads, has been situated in Turkey for a long time, but the Russians, while annoyed by this fact, have not felt obliged to use their power to invade Turkey...
...There has been much disturbing evidence that some of the counter-revolutionary forces we are encouraging and assisting are bent on sweeping out much of the good as well as the ill of Castro's revolution...
...General Cabell added the other two members of the ruling triumvirate are strongly pro-Communist...
...Certainly it would never diminish Castro's dependence on the Communists or bring him an inch closer to us...
...It called the power granted the President to cut the sugar quota "a weapon of political action against Cuba" which "obliged the revolutionary government to adopt without hesitation all the measures that it considers pertinent for the defense of national sovereignty and of free economic development...
...Whenever and wherever my driver and I stopped to ask directions or inquire about a suitable hotel, the word would pass quickly that an Americano was in the car, and a crowd of people would collect quickly, all of them eager to be friendly and all of them reluctant to part with me...
...It "constitutes for us not merely a source of sorrow, but also and equally a danger," he said as he urged "conciliation...
...I went to the embassy by taxi...
...There must be some explanation for this startling change in so short a time...
...Word of my visit spread through the school, and soon there were twenty students, then about forty-five, and finally, when our two-hour talk came to an end, I noticed the room was packed to the door...
...The ambassador was Arthur Gardner, a businessman who was selected by President Eisenhower to be our ambassador to Cuba as a thank-you gesture for campaign assistance...
...I talked with hundreds of people, both pro- and anti-Castro...
...In March, 1943, Juan Marinello, a major Communist figure, was invited into the national government as minister without portfolio...
...But they also fear that a premature bid for greater power would alienate the Cuban people, possibly arouse the wrath of the Fidelistas and almost certainly cause military intervention by the United States and possibly other Latin countries to destroy the Castro regime and its Communist adherents...
...Many thousands of acres of tillable land—seventy-three per cent, in fact—were not cultivated but were denied to trte&e who longed to have a piece of land of their own...
...He gravely nodded as if in agreement, and then hastened on with his explanation: "You must remember we are only a tiny country that feels so helpless and insecure beside the powerful United States which is seeking to destroy our revolution by aiding and arming the counter-revolutionaries in Florida and elsewhere...
...Sidney Lens, an unusually able observer and interpreter who visited Cuba recently, had this to say by way of summary: "The effects of our materialist policy were two-fold: on the one hand it created a class of corrupt Cuban politicians and hangers-on who looted the country and kept it stagnant...
...We Cubans desperately lacked technical and organizational ability to mobilize for the affirmative phase of the revolution...
...It was the only party to survive...
...Under the Piatt Amendment we intervened three times with military forces, usually to protect property, never to preserve individual liberty...
...Why," I asked, "is the Communist Party the only party in Cuba...
...The land reform program itself is more widespread and runs more deeply by far than any I encountered in my travels through ten other Latin American countries...
...Walking through the corridors of the high school one evening, I came upon a room where half a dozen students were arguing earnestly...
...I feel rather certain," he said, "that there is a widespread, almost block-by-block system of surveillance, that telephones are tapped, and that this is now a police state without the one hundred per cent efficiency of other dictatorships...
...It was Batista who called in newsmen to announce: "The Communist Party, according to its constitution, is a democratic party which pursues its ends within the framework of a capitalist regime and renounces violence as a political means, and consequently it is entitled to the same status as that of any other party in Cuba...
...It started, in effect, because the late John Foster Dulles began a game of tit-for-tat with Gamal Abdel Nasser...
...it was like traveling a thousand years in time from a medieval dungeon to a new modern concrete home complete with garden...
...But Castro is not a Communist...
...None of the bonds has yet been distributed...
...There is nothing in the record to show why the United States did not offer to help Cuba finance her land reform program...
...The St...
...After all, we have done this for several Latin American countries and for Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines...
...You refused to help us...
...For years before the revolution, the Cuban peasant worked three or four months of the year in the sugar fields, and was thrown on the scrap heap for the rest of the year...
...On the vast state farms, INRA builds low-cost housing, schools, recreational facilities, medical centers, stores, and libraries...
...The fact that Cubans do not accept Fidel Castro's anti-Americanism does not mean they do not accept Fidel Castro...
...We just couldn't sit and wait to die...
...Where do we go from here...
...If he did not, as many of us believe, then the position taken from the beginning by the American press, radio, television, Congress, Pentagon, State Department, and business world, and so forth, helped to build up Communism and drive Cuba irresistibly into the Communist corner...
...The territory of a state is inviolable...
...My notion that Castro is not a Communist is, or was, shared by our own Central Intelligence Agency...
...the sea accommodated their needs...
...they invited me to come out and meet them, and when I did, they asked me to head their picketing procession...
...Two experiences may help illuminate this point: On the day I arrived in Havana, I was told there would be a student demonstration at the Belgian Embassy to protest the murder of Patrice Lumumba...
...The militia itself is unique—a national army said to number a half-million men and women equipped with automatic arms, most of whom work in factories or on farms between military assignments...
...But Cuba we have cut dead...
...We acknowledge past omissions and errors in our relationship to them...
...Manzanilla is a tiny fishing village whose people are wholly dependent on their catches...
...The United States will be fouling its own concept of world order unless it ends its sullen refusal to negotiate with Castro's Cuba...
...Time put it this way: "Through the offices of the 'Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon, the United States had done everything to assure success [of the invasion] short of providing an air cover or sending in the marines...
...I suggested that perhaps it was already too late, that Americans—certainly the U.S...
...I visited a number of these INRA establishments and found an extraordinary pride of achievement and sense of belonging among many farm families...
...Hardly a month after I left Cuba the blow they had feared came in much the manner the Cubans had predicted—except, of course, for the extraordinary inept-ness that accompanied the invasion attempt in mid-April...
...Walter Lippmann, who had earlier suggested that the United States ask its Latin neighbors to help resolve the quarrel with Castro, reaffirmed after the San Jose declaration that "it would have been better to shrug off the phony military deal between Castro and the Soviet Union and to put our main emphasis on appealing to the American states to mediate actively the useless and senseless quarrel which Castro provokes...
...why Cuba's middle class, which was eventually to be destroyed by Castro's revolution, supported him enthusiastically until its own doom was decreed by the Marxist turn of events...
...Agrarian reform is the heart of the Cuban Revolution...
...Three—Much of what has happened under points one and two, which most Americans despise, are in part the direct consequence of hostile American policy toward the Cuban revolution when it was still, in Berle's words again, "democratic, anti-dictatorial, and anti-Communist...
...They have all the earmarks of a well-planned strategy designed to make Cuba an advanced outpost of the Soviet Union's drive to infiltrate the New World...
...The Communists have given much blood, much heroism, to the Cuban cause...
...How would you classify yourself...
...It is vital," he said, "for your President Kennedy to see to it that what comes afterward does not represent a setback in social and economic terms...
...Two—Stop calling us Communists...
...During the United Nations discussions last summer, the Argentinian representative observed that the continuing dispute between the United States and Cuba "harms all the other countries of the continent...
...You have only to know the recent history of Cuba to know how absolutely corrupt these elections were...
...Dependence on the one crop of sugar was staggering: more than one-third of the nation's gross national production and more than eighty per cent of its exports were involved...
...The Communists were right to be distrustful because we of the Sierra, leaders of the guerrillas, were still full of petty-bourgeoise prejudices and defects, despite Marxist lectures...
...K Vigilante organizations have been established to pry and spy in an effort to wipe out pockets of resistance to the Castro regime, especially among the middle class...
...These are the people who love Castro—and will fight for him and what they think he stands for...
...At the very least," he told me, "It is exaggerated...
...But it hasn't faded," I protested...
...They were anxious to make amends for their earlier behavior, determined to tell me about their "glorious revolution," and eager to get the names of potential pen-pals in the United States with whom they could correspond "so we can tell your people the truth about us...
...Cuba turned, with classic inevitability, to the Soviet bloc...
...I had been told by critics of Castro in Havana, men and women of great integrity, that the new Cuban textbooks were heavily larded with anti-American and pro-Communist propaganda...
...This Cuban expressed complete revulsion over the program of indoctrination of school children...
...government formally complained...
...The CIA, a division of the government operating under the President and the National Security Council, helped organize, train, finance, and arm the recent unsuccessful efforts of the Cuban refugees to overthrow the Castro government...
...You Americans don't seem to realize that we are still at war, that we face the threat of counter-revolution which you are encouraging...
...Perspiration was still rolling down his face after his frenzied effort...
...Quite a different viewpoint, naturally enough, was expressed by the anti-Castro Cubans with whom I talked...
...I spent an hour at the Julio Reyes Sugar Mill in Jovellanos watching the sugar-making process...
...The whole operation was based on the false assumption that A popular uprising against PremierjCastro would follow the first landing...
...They resent even more deeply the fact that we refused to let Cuba be represented at the peace treaty in Paris, and that we subsequently foisted on them the Piatt Amendment, which assigned the United States the right to intervene in the affairs of Cuba whenever it felt that Cuban independence or "the maintenance of government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty" was threatened...
...Another fact persists that we made no effort to help Cuba finance our proposed scheme for paying up...
...We have nothing to lose by trying and a world of peace and hope to gain...
...It was his feeling that far from having been too tough on Castro, the United States has been much too patient...
...How does one account for Castro's hold on the majority if everything or anything we read in the American press is true...
...The management of the newspaper cabled its Havana correspondent a sour message pointing out that it was not especially interested in interpretative stories of the kind filed on Cuban willingness to negotiate— although it was a clear scoop on a story that was to break in all the papers in a day or two—and that it was interested only in "hard, head-lineable news"—stories of bombs going off or nuns being arrested by Castro's police...
...Our own policy toward Cuba has been a stagnant policy of doing very little and hoping to have a government there oriented in a friendly way toward the United States...
...I asked if I might come in...
...His speeches, which Cubans find moving and eloquent but I thought grating and lugubrious, often reveal his deep concern for the plight of the underprivileged...
...It seems clear to me, as it does to many of our friends around the world that, in encouraging and assisting the April invasion attempt, we violated both the letter and spirit of Articles Fifteen to Seventeen of the Charter which say: "No state or group of states has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other state...
...Adolf Berle summed it up when he said that the chief result of the economic relationship between the United States and Cuba was "great luxury for a relatively small group in Havana and a small rise above the starvation level for the masses...
...Here, with a powerful giant opposed to a tiny island, is our chance to prove we mean what we say...
...Although Cuba grew and exported vegetables before the revolution, there is now a greatly magnified diversification which provides nearly year-round employment for many thousands of agricultural workers...
...This frigid response created consternation in a number of Latin American capitals...
...exploitation of Cuba...
...One professional, who spoke to me only after receiving my solemn assurance that his name would not be used, snorted at the notion that America's negative policies had forced Castro to seek help from the Communists...
...But we did nothing but express a series of nagging complaints as the revolution took shape and it became clear that drastic reforms were to be undertaken—some that were long overdue but which might disturb the sanctity of the twenty-three per cent profits of American investors...
...This man was a true believer in social and economic reform along democratic lines...
...President Eisenhower promptly wiped out twenty-six per cent of Cuba's quota for the year, and in December he announced that the United States would not import any more sugar from Cuba under the existing legislation...
...For them parties and elections symbolize corruption and the pay-off because these were the characteristics of the major political movements in Cuba before the revolution...
...Humanism, he was fond of saying, provides "liberty with bread without terror...
...Here under the letter 'K' it says that in the United States 'K' stands for Ku Klux Klan, which means race hatred, and in Russia it stands for Khrushchev, Cuba's friend...
...Thousands of young students, with little or no training, have been released from school this spring to teach illiterate adults...
...Days later, in the central province of Camaguay, I attended a mass-meeting at which the principal speaker was the provincial leader of the agrarian reform program...
...It is true, as the Cubans had charged, that our Central Intelligence Agency was master-minding the plans for invasion— so much so, it turned out, that when the hour to strike came, the Cuban leaders of the revolt were held incommunicado in Florida while the CIA took complete command...
...This assessment of the Communists' situation in Cuba represents the substance of interviews with many Cubans and foreign observers in Havana...
...Perhaps the best explanation of Castro's hold on the majority of Cubans comes from an enlightend, thoroughly anti-Castro American business tycoon, Thomas J. Watson, Jr., president of the International Business Machines Corporation...
...I had an unusual opportunity to be exposed to the thinking of revolutionary Cuban youth in Santa Clara...
...Castro's triumph over Batista was well received in the United States...
...They were awaiting, the men told me bitterly, the fiberglas that would not come from the United States...
...Cuba has now become a Communist stronghold, used for propaganda and the indoctrination of revolutionary leaders for all Latin America...
...It is unthinkable that the United States should allow this Communist beachhead in Latin America to stand unmolested...
...The Cuban government has charged that it offered to launch bilateral negotiations in February, 1960, but the United States refused...
...State Department issued what is in effect a "White Paper" on Cuba in whose preparation President Kennedy took a deep interest...
...It is more powerful than it ever was before...
...The gulf is indeed great between Berle's estimate of the Castro revolution as democratic, anti-dictatorial, and anti-Communist, and his subsequent evaluation, hardly a year later, that Castro's Cuba was a satellite of the Soviets...
...we understood each other and began to collaborate...
...And there is, as many a voluble Cuban who isn't even faintly pro-Communist will tell you, given half a chance...
...He demanded that the United Nations handle the controversy...
...I have doubts about the success of the crash program, for it is all being done in strident, almost hysterical fashion...
...Apart from the agrarian reform and the massive program of home building, I was most impressed on the affirmative side, during my journey through Cuba, with the great development in education...
...They spotted me all right, as they passed me, but they grinned and winked as if to say, "Don't take this personally...
...He cabled a story to his newspaper, emphasizing the revival of official Cuban sentiment for negotiation with the United States...
...Another intangible, impossible to evaluate statistically, is the spirit of hope that rides through this sundrenched island...
...No state may use or encourage the use of coercive measures of an economic or political character in order to force the sovereign will of another state...
...The United States should be able to work in entire cordiality with any kind of social system which does not insist on being its enemy...
...I encountered much the same mood in Santa Clara, a provincial city on the road from Havana to Santiago de Cuba, where I met an unusually articulate apologist for the Castro government—Eloy Soto, an American-trained teacher of English and counsellor to the students...
...Why...
...There were a number of American films showing in Santa Clara when I was there, as there were in most of the other communities I visited...
...Many government agencies, including the Central Planning Board, the Agrarian Reform Institute (INRA), the National Bank of Cuba, the Ministries of Economy, Health, Education, Communication, Labor, and Public Works, are staffed in their middle and in some cases in their upper echelons either by avowed Communists or by individuals whose ideology is hardly distinguishable from that of Communism...
...f Free elections are nowhere in sight...
...The Cuban government used much the same language, in reverse, when it retaliated soon thereafter with a law expropriating any property owned by U.S...
...But the U.S...
...This land, which you took from us for a naval base when we were too weak to protest effectively, belongs to the Cuban people...
...The government of the United States," said Castro at the United Nations last September, "does not deign to discuss matters with the small country of Cuba on Cuban problems...
...It is the United States, with its sanctions, embargoes, and finally, the break in diplomatic relations, that drove us to seek help from the Soviets...
...You took steps to strangle us economically...
...The boy who served as spokesman for the student council was Osmundo Betancourt, a seventeen-year-old senior who is going on to college to study chemical engineering...
...The Communists are a shrewd and able lot, zealous, hard-working, and dedicated, but they are rent by internal strife between the older Stalinists who have more ideological kinship with Communist China than with the Soviet Union and the younger group that finds its philosophical source in the competitive coexistence creed of Khrushchev and the Kremlin...
...We students are willing to make any sacrifice to reestablish relations between our countries on the one condition that it will not lessen our personality as a grown-up nation...
...When Castro came to power, the Communists were the only party in Cuba and the only organization capable of action...
...There are equally disturbing pressures to embark on full-scale military invasion, with American forces...
...It is held by many Americans of good will and undoubted conviction that Cuba has needed a social revolution—democratic style...
...There is not the least possibility of the Communists dominating the government," he said with infuriating serenity...
...We scoffed repeatedly at specific Cuban allegations of U.S.-led rebel forces training in Florida and Guatemala...
...Turkey, for example, [right on Russia's border] has been getting from the United States far more power than Castro ever dreamed of getting from the Russians...
...All this makes the whole problem much more than just a Cuban problem...
...Ninety-five per cent of the families are illiterate, so INRA is building a school...
...Now we are the bosses, and we are proud, and we work hard, and we work overtime, and we know it is for us, the people, and not for some wealthy Cuban lying by his swimming pool or a foreign investor living on our sweat and profiting from our hopeless conditions...
...The people of Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany were most kind and cordial to me when I visited those countries several years ago—despite the relentless barrage of anti-Americanism loosed on them by press and politicians...
...Still, there is a remarkable spirit of service and dedication among the young and they may do a better job than I believe they will...
...It is clear nowadays that the decision up to the United States is whether it is to go peacefully or not...
...The invaders—all Cubans—were trained by the United States, supplied by the United States, and dispatched by the United States to carry out a plan written by U.S...
...In fact, INRA is everywhere...
...The refineries refused to process the Soviet oil...
...It is true, as the Cubans had charged, that we had built invasion airfields in Guatemala...
...He is gambling on getting economic help without having to pay a political price, which is what Nasser did...
...Let us have an end of recriminations," he pleaded...
...A young, handsome man, who had fought and been wounded in the revolution, he embarked at once on a fiery tirade against North American imperialism...
...He is temperamentally unable to accept any discipline...
...Castro, incidentally, regards his interminable speeches to live and television audiences as a form of, or substitute for, the more traditional instruments of democracy...
...The destructive activities of the Cuban government can no longer be lightly dismissed as the outburst of inexperienced youthful leaders swept by the upsurge of economic nationalism...
...The government did nothing but harass you with soldiers, rural guards, and taxes...
...At first the talk was largely a tirade against the economic stranglehold long held by American corporate interests...
...This pattern of cordiality prevailed throughout all my travels in Castro's Cuba...
...that it did not decline to negotiate in February, 1960, but merely declined to accept the conditions laid down by Cuba—that the United States would not take any "unilateral" action affecting the Cuban economy and its people while the negotiations were going on...
...The CIA preferred to play with tj(e more conservative rebels in Florida—the generation that had failed in Cuba—decent democrats perhaps, but Cubans who had ceased to represent anything significant in their homeland...
...When she did not or could not pay, when she nationalized American property, we retaliated, childishly, with a series of reprisals that choked Cuba's lifelines...
...It was a dismal scene that confronted me when I arrived...
...This means crisis government, rather than democracy, so long as the crisis lasts...
...policy should be toward this tragic island...
...Apparently some of the participants agreed...
...I saw on farm after farm, as far as the eye could see, vast fields of tomatoes, potatoes, beans, rice, peanuts, corn, and other produce that provide food for the table, cash income, and year-round employment...
...A liberal democracy as well as drastic social reform was what Cuba wanted when it revolted against Batista...
...I come now, in my conclusion on Cuba, to the most difficult part of my assignment—an attempt to suggest what U.S...
...When the program ended, the people in the hall snake-danced their way out, chanting "Cuba si, Yanqui no...
...Although Castro's stock has slumped sharply throughout the portions of Latin America I visited, I found in some responsible quarters the uneasy feeling that the United States has been too headstrong, that if it was at all willing to negotiate, which they doubted, it was willing to proceed only on terms that would deny Cuba her sovereign right to make political and economic deals with whomever she chose...
...President Kennedy expressed this concern with great clarity when he said in his State of the Union message: "Questions of economic and trade policy can always be negotiated...
...Five—We know from everything that has happened up to now that our negative approach of reprisals, non-intercourse, and encouragement of invasion has tended to solidify the relationship between the Cubans and the Communists...
...One—We must not be lured again by the CIA and other adventurers into embarking on further military action against Cuba...
...Alfred E. Kahn, chairman of the economics department at Cornell University, asserted that "the suspicion will be very strong" that the United States slashed and then abolished the Cuban sugar quota in reprisal for the Cuban seizure of the Esso and Texaco oil refineries in Cuba...
...This last point is far more significant than most Americans realize...
...There is no doubt in my mind that the poor in Cuba are immeasurably better off than they were—and this goes especially for the rural folk...
...The preamble of the new law described the American policy on sugar as an attitude of "constant aggression, with political aims, against the fundamental interests of the Cuban economy...
...Four—Lift the prohibition against American travel in Cuba...
...Not the least of Castro's achievements is the new moral tone that permeates Cuba today...
...The second will lead, inevitably, to the third, and that is as it should be if we hope to rescue the Western Hemisphere...
...This may be true...
...Far from resting on these two negative concepts, the United States, I believe, should begin to explore the possibilities of a modus vivendi, perhaps to propose the establishment of the kind of informal committee the psychologist in Havana suggested—a committee that would probe for roads to understanding and agreements without at first committing anyone...
...Another critic I interviewed had occupied a rather high place in the Castro regime until he was fired at the very moment he planned to resign...
...The bill, as finally passed, extended the Sugar Act to March 31, 1961, and gave the President complete authority to determine Cuba's share of U.S...
...We now have a half million men and women in the militia, each with automatic arms...
...We left this dying village and drove several miles down the road that curves along the green-blue Caribbean...
...I want now to examine these points...
...Mister, I can't find the words to explain the improvement...
...The United States wanted the dispute aired before the Organization of American States, contending that this type of regional handling would be in conformance with the provisions of the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance and the OAS charter...
Vol. 25 • June 1961 • No. 6
