After 1959, the Cuban Revolution became the focal point of U.S. policy toward Latin America. Fidel Castro’s triumph challenged the traditional relationship while espousing radical alternatives, thereby establishing an unacceptable precedent from Washington’s perspective. Successive administrations responded with efforts to contain Castro’s influence or to destroy it. Perceived as a communist vanguard in the Western Hemisphere, the new regime in Cuba provoked fears of Soviet encroachments in the Caribbean. It also provided an opportunity for asserting the utility of noncommunist models of economic development for the rest of Latin America and a justification for subsequent acts of intervention by the United States in the Dominican Republic, Chile, Central America, and elsewhere. During the ensuing decades, stalwart opposition to radical regimes became the hallmark of U.S. policy toward Latin America and the justification for supporting right-wing military dictatorships.
The rebel forces making up the 26th of July Movement took control of Havana, the capital city, on January 1, 1959. This victory marked the end of a three-year guerrilla struggle against Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban strongman who had dominated the island by one means or another since the 1930s. In 1952, Batista returned as the head of state, following a military coup d’état against president Carlos Prío Socarrás. Castro, the son of a Spanish immigrant and sugar planter, assumed the role of political activist and agitator as a young man. While earning a law degree at the University of Havana, he embraced the martyr of Cuban independence, José Martí, as his national hero. Martí’s anti-imperialist ideas would form the intellectual justification for much of Castro’s subsequent confrontation with the United States. On July 26, 1953, in defiance of Batista, he led a group of students in a failed attack on the Moncada army barracks in the southeastern city of Santiago. For his crime, he received a fifteen-year jail sentence but served only two, when Batista proclaimed an amnesty in 1955.
Castro and his brother Raúl then fled to Mexico City, where they planned an uprising against Batista for early December 1956. Following a harrowing, week-long voyage aboard an overcrowded, undersupplied, and unreliable vessel called Granma, eighty-one bedraggled, seasick invaders clambered ashore in a mangrove swamp at the southeastern end of the island, only to meet with disaster. Batista’s waiting forces killed most of the insurrectionists within a few days. No more than twenty survivors, including Fidel, Raúl, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, an Argentine expatriate who had witnessed U.S. covert intervention in Guatemala, withdrew into the mountains, the Sierra Maestra. From secret base camps, they attracted new recruits, mounted occasional attacks, and gradually extended the rebellion into the more populated regions. By the end of 1958, even though no clear idea of Castro’s intentions had emerged, most of the Cuban people had turned against Batista.1
During the insurgency, Castro assumed an eclectic, nondoctrinaire stance. In one statement, the “History Will Absolve Me” speech, delivered at the end of his trial in 1953, he invoked José Martí’s nationalism as the basis for reform and change. This lengthy self-defense drew on political philosophers ranging from Thomas Aquinas to John Locke. Among other things, he supported the principle of equality before the law, the restoration of constitutional rights, the distribution of land to landless farmers, the adoption of profit sharing for workers, the confiscation of illicit wealth stolen by public officials, and the nationalization of the electric and telephone companies.2 His indictment of the Batista regime focused on domestic developmental issues, accusations of state-directed torture of political dissidents, and labeled the president a “criminal and a thief.”3 He gave another example of his eclecticism in a dramatic interview with Herbert Matthews, a New York Times correspondent, at a backcountry base in February 1957. On this occasion, Castro placed greater emphasis on reform than on radical change. He had not yet given final form to his programs. At this juncture, moreover, he lacked any particular attachment to Marxist-Leninist ideology, or to the Soviet Union. Indeed, the Cuban Communist Party—one of the largest in Latin America, with 17,000 members—regarded him as a putschist: an adventurer and potential suicidalist engaged in premature revolutionary action.4
Nevertheless, Castro’s charismatic leadership capitalized on high levels of Cuban discontent, and the 26th of July Movement became the most visible of several armed insurrectionary groups. Under Batista, corruption, dissolution, and greed for tourist dollars had exacerbated the decades-long image of Havana as a wide-open purveyor of alcohol, narcotics, saloons, brothels, and casinos, promising satisfaction for all manner of tastes. These activities meant big profits for U.S. mobsters, such as Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante, who collaborated with Cuban criminals, but the disparities of opportunity, privilege, power, and wealth rankled other Cubans. Per capita annual income averaged $400—not so bad by Caribbean standards, but very low in comparison with the United States. In the preceding fifty years, many Cubans had come to associate well-being with U.S. levels of consumption, but by the late 1950s, these aspirations were increasingly frustrated.5 As an example, the seasonal sugar harvest required a large labor force but, once completed, left rural workers without jobs for the rest of the year. Similarly, slums and sweatshops had a pervasive presence in the towns, where the burdens of hardship and exploitation fell most heavily on Cubans of African descent. These poorest among the poor also endured the effects of racial discrimination and segregation. For discontented persons among the middle classes, the primary characteristics of a corrupted Cuban political system appeared in various forms of repression, tyranny, depravity, brutality, and inefficiency. Energized by Castro’s revolt, large segments of Cuban society coalesced against Batista, hoping for change.
As conceived by many Cubans, the traditional U.S. role in their country accentuated their problems. An object of admiration and envy for its wealth and power, the United States also seemed responsible for Cuban failures. According to this view, U.S. political and economic dominance over the years had slowed the island’s maturation by perpetuating conditions of monoculture and dependency. Cuba relied too much on sugar sales in the U.S. market; Cuban buyers purchased too many finished goods from U.S. sellers, creating an unfavorable balance of trade. Other indicators underscored the magnitude of economic presence. Direct U.S. investment in Cuba, calculated at $900 million at the time, ranked as the second largest in Latin America. U.S. companies controlled 40 percent of Cuba’s sugar production, 36 of the 161 sugar mills, 2 of the 3 oil refineries, 90 percent of the public utilities, and 50 percent of the mines and railroads. For such reasons, many Cubans looked upon their island as an economic appendage of the United States.6
Until the mid-1950s, U.S. policy under Eisenhower had supported and sustained Batista for reasons of security and order. Regarded officially as “a good thing from the standpoint of the U.S.,” the Batista regime obtained $16 million in military aid during this period, much like other Caribbean dictatorships that, according to this view, propagated stability. But then the administration shifted its ground, seeking to create at least an appearance of evenhandedness. Subsequently, diplomats were urged to avoid unduly partisan displays in Batista’s favor. In 1957, the administration sent a new ambassador, Earl E. T. Smith, a Wall Street financier and a faithful Republican, who had no diplomatic experience and no knowledge of Spanish. Upon his arrival in Havana, he supported Batista, mistrusted Castro, and soon found himself in a difficult bind.
Smith invested scant faith in the reliability of the rebel movement and hoped for an honest presidential election in November 1958 to resolve the problem of the presidential succession. But Batista’s manipulations got in the way: The dictator tried to rig the outcome in favor of his preferred candidate, Dr. Andrés Rivero Agüero. Reacting against this ploy, the Eisenhower administration somewhat unrealistically hoped to find a replacement for Batista who could head off Castro while simultaneously maintaining order and the appearance of procedural regularity. The Spanish phrase Batistianismo sin Batista affirmed the goal, calling for the preservation of the regime’s essential features but without the dictator. To pursue this purpose, the administration sent an emissary, William Pawley, a former ambassador to Brazil and Peru. He urged the dictator to resign in favor of a military junta. But Batista refused, pending a variety of assurances, terms, and conditions. Bowing to necessity, the Eisenhower administration then cut him loose, serving notice on December 17, 1958, that Batista no longer enjoyed the official support of the U.S. government.
Unsure what to expect, U.S. officials also had doubts about the intentions and capabilities of Castro and the 26th of July Movement. At the time, U.S. leaders could find no convincing evidence of communist contaminations, but could the insurrectionists exercise control over Cuba? Would they respect U.S. interests? On December 31, 1958, Batista fled from the island, taking refuge initially in the Dominican Republic, under Rafael Trujillo’s protection. When Castro took over on January 1, 1959, the United States promptly extended diplomatic recognition and, as an indication of goodwill, also recalled Ambassador Smith, now regarded in Cuba as an undesirable presence. His replacement, Philip Bonsal, a career Foreign Service officer and former ambassador to Bolivia, expressed a more nuanced attitude toward change in Latin America. Indeed, he appraised Cuba’s future optimistically, looking upon Batista’s fall as evidence of progress toward democracy and justice.
Such expectations diminished quickly in January and February 1959, when Castro allowed the Communist Party to operate legally in Cuba, ousted political moderates from positions of authority, disallowed electoral proceedings for a period of two years, and declared himself the prime minister of the country. He also inaugurated a series of public trials and executions for war crimes; through these means, he eliminated some five hundred former high-level Batista supporters. Nevertheless, when Castro came to the United States in April 1959 for an eleven-day tour arranged by the American Society of News Editors, he retained some measure of credibility, projecting in Stephen G. Rabe’s phrase “a sincere, progressive image.”7 Speaking frankly, Castro explained why conditions in Cuba required improvements and corrections. He included agrarian reform among his aims. He admitted that his plans might cause disagreements with the United States but disclaimed any intention of instituting a communist regime.
During his stay, Castro spent three hours with vice president Richard M. Nixon as a stand-in for Eisenhower, who refused an audience because of the political trials and executions. Nixon later reported in his memoirs, Six Crises, that all along he had favored a policy of getting tough with Castro. At the time, however, he displayed some sympathy and understanding, despite his suspicions of the new Cuban leader’s presumed socialist tendencies. Nixon refrained from branding Castro a communist, expressed appreciation for those “indefinable qualities which make him a leader of men,” and anticipated that he would function as “a great factor in the development of Cuba and very possibly in Latin American affairs generally.” Nixon wanted “to orient him in the right direction”—in favor of the United States.8
Castro nevertheless pursued his own course and soon offended U.S. officials. His critical understanding of Cuban-U.S. relations and his demands for respect of Cuban sovereignty angered and confused the Eisenhower administration.9 Upon his return home, he promulgated an agrarian reform law that provided for the expropriation of agrarian properties, including his father’s, larger than a thousand acres and also for compensation in the form of Cuban bonds. The values would depend on the declarations property owners had made for tax purposes in 1958. Caught in a trap of their own making, sugar growers who had submitted low estimates to justify low taxes had to endure the consequences. To make matters worse, Castro disallowed foreign ownership of agricultural properties and named Antonio Núñez Jiménez, a Cuban communist, as the administrator in charge of the expropriation.
Growing numbers of disenchanted Cubans deserted the island, often seeking safe haven in Miami, Florida, while denouncing Castro as a communist. During the ensuing months, exile groups organized an anti-Castro opposition. Among other things, they flew missions out of Florida to drop propaganda leaflets over Cuba and set fire to sugarcane fields. Castro charged U.S. authorities with responsibility for such actions and warned Cubans of an impending invasion to restore Batista to power. In September 1959, in a speech before the United Nations, he denounced U.S. imperialism as the fundamental cause of Cuba’s plight. In February 1960, he signed a commercial agreement with the Soviet Union. It provided for the annual purchase of a million tons of Cuban sugar during the next five years and for a credit of $100 million to finance the purchase of Soviet equipment and machines. This important initiative signaled Castro’s determination to weaken Cuba’s dependence on the United States and his willingness to move his country toward the Soviet Bloc.10
At least in its initial stages, then, Castro’s attempts to obtain a Soviet counterweight against the U.S. had practical purposes and effects, less connected with the requirements of Marxist-Leninist ideology than with tactical considerations and a considered realignment of Cuban allegiances.11 Anti-Castro sentiments within the Eisenhower administration grew stronger as the year 1959 advanced. Taking the lead was Christian Herter, the former under-secretary who became secretary of state when Dulles died of cancer. He advised Eisenhower on November 5 that U.S. policies should “encourage within Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America opposition to the extremist, anti-American course of the Castro regime.” Convinced that Cuban “policies and attitudes” ran counter to “minimum United States security requirements,” he reported high levels of communist infiltration into the government, apparently with Castro’s sanction. If “emulated by other Latin American countries,” Herter warned, such practices would have “serious adverse effects on Free World support of our leadership.” Moreover, he cautioned, the nationalization of property posed a danger to the U.S. business interests and menaced the principles of free trade and investment all over Latin America. Herter wanted a set of policies to bring about either “a reformed Castro regime or a successor to it.” At the same time, he advised against stirring up nationalistic responses by arousing Latin American fears of U.S. intervention. The problem was how to accomplish such contradictory aims.
The CIA spymaster, Allen Dulles, was among the first to suggest Castro’s ouster. On January 13, 1960, he expressed his view that “over the long run” the United States could not “tolerate the Castro regime in Cuba” and might have to use covert action to precipitate his downfall. About the same time, Eisenhower boiled over in a rage in which he characterized Castro as a “mad man” who was “going wild and harming the whole American structure”; Ike imagined various responses, including a naval blockade of Cuba and a buildup of U.S. forces at Guantánamo Bay. Later, he cooled down; nevertheless, a hard-line view had won him over.
On March 17, 1960, the president indicated his approval of a course of possible action suggested by a CIA task force and the NSC. It recalled the Guatemala operation, in 1954, and bore the title “A Program of Covert Action against the Castro Regime.” The recommendations consisted of four parts: first, the creation of “a responsible and unified Cuban opposition to the Castro regime located outside of Cuba”; second, the instigation of “a powerful propaganda offensive” against Castro inside Cuba; third, the establishment of a “covert action and intelligence organization within Cuba”; and fourth, “the development of a paramilitary force outside of Cuba for future guerrilla action.” Ike later placed a benign construction on such preparations by drawing a distinction between a “program” or general approach and a “plan” entailing specific acts. He also denied any connection with or responsibility for the subsequent Bay of Pigs invasion, in 1961. In Stephen G. Rabe’s view, his explanations allow for some believability, since the March 1960 decision “was not an irrevocable commitment to invade Cuba.” At the same time, it “ended any possibility of a rapprochement between the Eisenhower administration and Castro.” The United States no longer would tolerate mischief from the Cuban upstart. The decision to pursue regime change, based on the short-term success of similar actions in Guatemala, would further antagonize the tenuous relationship with Cuba.
Other undertakings in 1960 had the intention of curbing Castro’s appeal in the rest of Latin America. Leaders in the Eisenhower administration now understood more clearly some of the connections between the wretchedness of social and economic conditions for the poor and the causes of violence and revolution. To alleviate the misery, they accepted the necessity of using higher levels of economic aid and assistance as a means of promoting growth and diverting the growing international appeal of Castro’s policies. In the course of a trip to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay in February 1960, Eisenhower had something of an epiphany when he encountered placards among the crowds along the way reading, “We Like Ike; We Like Fidel Too.” Such displays underscored the extent to which Castro functioned as a symbol of hope and change in Latin America. In July, the president announced the creation of a new program for Latin America. Mainly the brainchild of Milton Eisenhower, the Social Progress Trust Fund called for $500 million in U.S. loans. Aimed at health, education, housing, and land reform, the project operated through the Inter-American Development Bank, an agency created in 1959 for this purpose. Though small in scope compared with the Marshall Plan, the undertaking established a point of departure for the subsequent Alliance for Progress under Kennedy.12
Meanwhile, the administration proceeded with plans to employ covert operations against Castro. Drawing upon the Guatemala experience and relying on some of the same men—such as Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, and E. Howard Hunt—the leaders of the CIA prepared for the training of a guerrilla force in Guatemala. They also sought to sabotage Castro’s regime, to isolate Castro economically and diplomatically, and to assassinate him. According to the November 1975 report of the U.S. Senate Select Committee, chaired by senator Frank Church of Idaho, findings based on “concrete evidence” indicated no less than eight plots to assassinate Castro between 1960 and 1965, some of which never advanced beyond “the stage of planning and preparation.” The plots involved the enlistment of gangsters and underworld characters such as John Rosselli, Morna Salvatore “Sam” Giancana, and Santo Trafficante as prospective executioners, using “poison pills, poison pens, deadly bacterial powders, and other devices which strain the imagination.” One especially exotic scheme, really slapstick, called for the use of thallium salt, a depilatory: Sprinkle the stuff into Castro’s shoes and make his body hair fall out. Bald and beardless, according to the plan, he could not hold the political loyalties of macho-minded Cubans.13
In 1960, leaders in the Eisenhower administration imposed additional penalties. They prohibited U.S. refineries in Cuba from processing Soviet crude oil, slashed the Cuban sugar quota in the United States by 700,000 tons, and imposed trade restrictions under which only food and medicine could enter Cuba. Caught up in an escalating sequence of moves and counter-moves, Castro retaliated by expropriating U.S. properties in Cuba, including sugar mills, petroleum refineries, public utilities, tire plants, and banks. These actions bolstered Castro’s domestic legitimacy and narrowed the possibility of a diplomatic solution to the growing crisis.14 By the end of October 1960, these measures had wiped out the direct investments of the United States in his country. Eisenhower then broke diplomatic relations with Castro’s government on January 3, 1961, as one of his final presidential acts.15The unsolved Cuban problem, a kind of diplomatic tiger trap, awaited the untested new administration of president John F. Kennedy.
Young, vibrant, handsome, rich, and a former Massachusetts congressman and senator, Kennedy won the presidential election by a close margin in November 1960. During the campaign, few fundamental differences in foreign relations separated the two candidates. Both Kennedy and Nixon endorsed the Containment policy, Nixon defending the Eisenhower record, Kennedy subjecting it to hyperbolic attacks. Among other things, Kennedy claimed that the United States had fallen behind the Soviet Union in the Cold War competition, specifically alleging a “missile gap,” a drop in U.S. prestige in the Third World, and a significant setback when Cuba went over to the communist side. This indulgence in political tit for tat recalled Republican charges that Democrats had lost Eastern Europe and China to the Reds. As the historian Thomas G. Paterson notes, “Apparently unaware that President Dwight D. Eisenhower had initiated a clandestine CIA program to train Cuban exiles for an invasion of the island, candidate Kennedy bluntly called for just such a project.”16 The similarity of policy across parties illustrated a remarkable consistency of United States’ perception that the Cuban Revolution represented a central threat to American dominance in the region and its global position in the context of the Cold War.
Kennedy’s appeal mobilized support among members of a younger generation. Many of his top aides and advisers had served in the Second World War, as had Kennedy himself. They looked upon themselves as “the best and the brightest” and regarded the Eisenhower administration, in contrast, as worn out and sclerotic. Through the exercise of youth, energy, and imagination, they proposed to get the country moving again, for example, by winning victories in the Cold War. For them, the omnipresent communist menace recalled the lessons of Munich in 1938. Appeasement could never stop totalitarian dictators from aggression, only vigilance and strength.17
The Kennedy administration embraced the Containment policy as a global necessity, especially in response to recent Soviet pronouncements. Two weeks before Kennedy’s inauguration on January 20, 1961, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had delivered a speech in which he prophesied an ultimate victory for his side as a consequence of communist support for “wars of national liberation.” This appeal for the hearts and minds of men, consistent with Soviet-style anti-imperialism, focused on Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Specifically, Khrushchev called for alliances between communists and nationalists in the Third World. By working together, serious radicals presumably could engage in a joint struggle in favor of self-determination and in opposition to the adverse legacies of Western imperialism.
For Kennedy, Soviet initiatives required vigorous responses. Consequently, he inaugurated a military buildup marked by a 15 percent increase in the defense budget to enhance both nuclear deterrence and conventional capabilities. Specifically, he wanted more intercontinental ballistic missiles to close the alleged missile gap, a larger number of combat-ready infantry and armored divisions to expand war-fighting abilities on the ground, and a new emphasis on counterinsurgency techniques. The last called for the development and utilization of special forces capable of employing guerrilla-style tactics against potential insurgents in the Third World. He also displayed a readiness to build upon Eisenhower’s policies by instituting larger-scale programs of economic aid and assistance.18
Once established in office, the Kennedy administration disclosed ambitious plans. One called for a means to undercut Castro through the promotion of economic growth and modernization in Latin America. Called the Alliance for Progress, this approach followed up on earlier Eisenhower initiatives and entertained grandiose expectations. The White House first announced them at a ceremony on March 13, 1961, before 250 guests, including an assembly of Latin American diplomats. The proposal called for “a vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose, to satisfy the basic needs of the Latin American people for homes, work and land, health and schools—techo, trabajo y tierra, salud y escuela.”Among other things, Kennedy sought the eradication of illiteracy, hunger, and disease. These ideas, consciously or not, paralleled many of the successful early initiatives of the Cuban Revolution. Designating the 1960s as “the Decade of Development,” JFK promised an allocation of $500 million to begin a process of long-term economic planning and integration, scientific and technical cooperation, and an expansion of cultural relations. He also called for political and social reforms to accompany material progress. Democracy, constitutional order, and a reduction of class distinctions were the goals, including the elimination of military despots, antiquated tax laws, and feudalistic systems of land tenure. Kennedy’s vision affirmed the attainability of freedom and progress within the context of democratic capitalism, a preferred and viable alternative to the Castro example.
Even higher expectations appeared in August 1961 at an inter-American conference held in a Uruguayan resort town, Punta del Este. Speaking for the Kennedy administration but without specific authorization, secretary of the treasury C. Douglas Dillon pledged ongoing U.S. support in the amount of $20 billion over the next ten years. The funds supposedly would come from public and private sources, including international lending agencies, charitable foundations, and U.S. investors. Supplemented by an additional $80 billion from Latin American sources, this expanded level of investment would generate an anticipated economic growth rate of 2.5 percent a year, about twice that of the 1950s. For good measure, Dillon also predicted the elimination of illiteracy among Latin American children by 1970.19
Such ambitious aims always exceeded capabilities and never achieved the mark. Under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, the United States made good on a large part of its share by contributing $18 billion in various forms of public and private investment. Nevertheless, the programs floundered, falling far short of transforming Latin America into the image envisioned by the U.S. planners. A variety of things went wrong. In aggregate, Latin American economies grew slowly during the 1960s, at about 1.5 percent a year. Consequently, already high unemployment increased from 18to 25 million, while agricultural production went into decline and population growth increased. In crucial areas, such as health care and education, the hope of extending life expectancy and reducing illiteracy defied fulfillment. And too frequently, the mechanisms for maintaining democratic and constitutional order broke down. In most countries, the traditional ruling elites remained very much in charge, typically in cooperation with martial leaders. During the Kennedy years, military officers ousted popularly elected presidents in six countries.20
Ultimately, as Jerome Levinson and Juan de Onís have observed, the Alliance for Progress “lost its way.” Most historians accept this appraisal but differ over the reasons. Some scholars emphasize Latin American obstacles such as the accumulation of deep-seated inequities over long expanses of time and the traditional elites’ entrenched resistance to change. Other scholars attribute the shortcomings to false expectations and faulty execution on the part of U.S. officials. Rabe shows that the interaction of both sets of causes contributed to the creation of formidable barriers.21
First, the Kennedy administration embraced inflated expectations. As Rabe explains, the leaders “undoubtedly overestimated their ability to foster change” and “underestimated the daunting nature of Latin America’s socioeconomic problems.” For example, Teodoro Moscoso, a high-level administrator, typified “naïve optimism,” in 1962, when he proclaimed “within a decade the direction and results of centuries of Latin American history are to be changed.” This sort of statement verged on hubris and, in some countries, collided with debilitating realities: 90 percent illiteracy rates, life expectancy of thirty-five years, and 11 percent infant mortality. These daunting figures applied especially to peoples of Amerindian and African descent, at a time when similar socioeconomic inequities in the United States received increased attention from international observers.
Next, U.S. projections neglected the effects of a population explosion. With an annual growth rate of 3 percent, Latin America’s population of 195 million was expanding faster than the economy. (It was cruelly ironic that a reduction in the infant mortality rate would have offset economic gains.) The problem was complicated by religious convictions and cultural mores in favor of large families. Out of expediency, the Kennedy administration sidestepped these issues, in part because of unwillingness to offend Roman Catholic opinion. Secretary Dillon dismissed the matter, affirming his belief that “in Latin America the question of population control is not as serious as it may be in other areas of the world because there are substantial resources, substantial land, substantial availability for a growing, expanding population.” According to this view, supply, not demand, would prevail in the end.
Finally, U.S. officials invested too much faith in Latin American receptivity to reform and change. Latin American nationalists could draw on clear historical examples of United States self-interested resistance to change across the region. Optimistic assessments presumed the readiness of the elites to accommodate the emerging “middle sectors.” U.S. planners counted upon these mainly urban groups, defined as democratic, capitalist, and modern, to exercise a moderating influence and to behave in conformance with the precepts of established social-scientific theory and the United States’ long-standing self-perception as benevolent instructor in modernity.22 As Louis Pérez has illustrated, the U.S. relied upon a paternalistic interpretation of Cuba’s population to justify sustained imperialism. According to the views of, for example, Walt Rostow, a presidential adviser and the author of The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960), the advent of middle-class reform movements in Latin America meant that democratic capitalism could serve as the best means for moving into the future without the costs of a social revolution.
The sources of such anticipations included misleading historical parallels and assumptions. The Marshall Plan served officials as a kind of model but led to an insufficient appreciation of important distinctions. The processes of economic development in Latin America in the 1960s differed in context from those of economic recovery in Europe in the 1940s, and responded to dissimilar incentives, stimuli, and techniques. What succeeded in Europe would not necessarily apply in Latin America. Thomas Mann, a State Department official who mistrusted the whole effort, later attributed its failure to an “illusion of omnipotence” among leaders in the Kennedy administration. Since the Marshall Plan had such good effects in Europe, they reasoned erroneously, “it’s going to work in Latin America.”
Still another misperception developed from a particular reading of U.S. history. According to this view, enlightened programs of reform and change undertaken by elites at propitious times could ward off revolutionary threats by accommodating political antagonisms and class differences. For Kennedy officials, historical experiences during the Progressive era and the New Deal confirmed the point and implied a kind of universal, at least hemispheric, applicability. In contrast, Latin American elites derived other premises from their own history. To them, reform appeared not so much as a way to head off revolution but rather as a first step toward bringing it about; therefore, tinkering with the system was a high-risk option with the potential to weaken traditional conceptions of order and constraint, to unleash pent-up furies and frustrations, and to create situations with unpredictable consequences. Clearly, this interpretation served to justify draconian repression of dissent and resistance to change, of any sort.
Following established patterns, most Latin American military organizations functioned to support their notion of stability. During the Kennedy years, army officers seized power in six countries: Argentina, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, and the Dominican Republic. In response, U.S. officials tried uncertainly to balance ideas of constitutional order against concerns over Castro and communism. Consequently, perceptions of the internal communist threat and assessments of the prevailing attitudes toward Cuba influenced administration leaders who determined the policies of diplomatic recognition. Staunchly anticommunist regimes usually obtained it. As explained by assistant secretary of state Edwin M. Martin, in October 1963, the U.S. government preferred constitutional democracy as a framework for economic development but understood the limitations, because “in most of Latin America there is so little experience with the benefits of political legitimacy.” As Martin remarked, the United States lacked the ability to create “effective democracy” by keeping “a man in office . . . when his own people are not willing to fight to defend him.”
Support for military organizations appeared prominently in Kennedy’s efforts to achieve internal security and counterinsurgency. As seen from Washington, “Communist subversion and indirect attack” had become “the principal threat.” Administration leaders particularly worried about guerrilla wars, possibly instigated by Fidel Castro in conjunction with “wars of national liberation.” As a counter, the Kennedy administration provided $77 million a year in military aid, a 50 percent increase. The emphasis fell on training programs to enhance techniques of riot control, psychological warfare, and counter-guerrilla operations. For the enthusiasts within the administration, such efforts were legitimate means of strengthening national security and, more dubiously, democratic institutions. Critics pointed out that the military officers responsible for the political overthrows usually had received training and assistance from the United States. Though unwilling to say so in public, the Kennedy administration used military aid to preserve access to and influence with the military establishments regarded as the arbiters of Latin American political life.23 This decision to increase collusion with Latin American armed forces would contribute, over the next three decades, to numerous civil wars and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people across the region.
The Cuban policy yielded two portentous episodes during the Kennedy presidency. The Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, a fiasco, by most accounts, that humiliated administration leaders and signified a damaging setback. Holding larger implications, the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 produced a confrontation between the two great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, and conjured a nightmarish prospect of nuclear war. In each instance, an incapacity to distinguish between Cuban nationalism and Soviet communism deepened the problem.
The Kennedy plan for a clandestine move against Castro took shape during the early part of the new administration. The president-elect, only forty-three years old, learned of the proposed covert action soon after his victory during the course of CIA briefings from Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell. Later, Kennedy consented to it but disallowed direct participation by U.S. forces. The earliest versions called for an invasion by Cuban exiles near Trinidad, a city near the south Cuban coast and the Escambray Mountains. Subsequently, the site shifted to the Bay of Pigs, a location about forty miles west of Trinidad along the Zapata Peninsula, where the CIA planners hoped to achieve a surprise. Isolated, remote, and removed from the mountains by eighty miles of swamp, the operation’s architects anticipated only light opposition and not much need for air cover.
Misgivings within the administration were not strong enough to head off the ensuing debacle. The Joint Chiefs of Staff reacted against the stifling secrecy, wondered about the invaders’ fighting proficiency, and warned of insufficient intelligence, both about the terrain and about Cuban political attitudes. Would the people really rise in revolt against Castro? Dean Rusk, Kennedy’s taciturn Secretary of State, reportedly questioned such assumptions in private but withheld a full articulation of his views. Other skeptics included J. William Fulbright, an Arkansas senator and the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Chester Bowles, Undersecretary of State; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a historian working as a White House adviser; and Dean Acheson, the former Secretary of State, who thought the military imbalance favored Castro. Characterizing the idea as potentially “disastrous,” Acheson correctly anticipated that some 1,500 Cubans could not cope with Castro’s forces, numbering some 225,000 regular troops and militia.24
The Kennedy administration nevertheless accepted the risks, only to experience what the historian Trumbull Higgins called “the perfect failure.” The calamity at the Bay of Pigs resulted from an underestimation of Castro’s forces, defective planning, bureaucratic malfunctions, poor leadership, and a measure of hubris. As defense secretary Robert McNamara remembered, “We were hysterical about Castro at the time of the Bay of Pigs and thereafter.”25 According to most authorities, the untried Kennedy administration disregarded an assortment of dangers and warnings. Perhaps unduly awed by the experts and equally unwilling to show doubt or weakness, administration officials unwisely accepted, at face value, the CIA’s exaggerated enthusiasm. As eager advocates for success, Dulles and Bissell lost the capacity for dispassionate appraisal; secretary of defense Robert McNamara and national security adviser McGeorge Bundy succumbed to the prevailing views and conveyed to the president a false impression of full confidence. Perhaps intimidated by Eisenhower’s reputation as “the greatest military man in America,” the hero under whom the plan initially took shape, Kennedy—untested, inexperienced, and in this instance vulnerable—became the victim of “a situation where insufficient bureaucratic safeguards existed, and the excessive security only compounded the problem.” The president and his advisers accepted the likelihood of a safe landing and a successful move into the Escambrays—through swamp, eighty miles away—while Dulles and Bissell held to a notion that Kennedy would not allow the invasion to fail.26
The rapid defeat of the invading exile force at the Bay of Pigs, according to historian Luis Martínez-Fernández, was “Kennedy’s low point [and] Castro’s high point.” The U.S.-backed force of around 1,400 was repelled by Cuban army and militia estimated at 50,000–60,000. Foreign minister Raúl Roa denounced U.S. aggression on the floor of the United Nations, while Adlai Stevenson, Ambassador to the United Nations, denied U.S. involvement. Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy that the Soviet Union would provide “all necessary assistance” to defeat the armed invasion of Cuba. This existential threat to the revolution justified increased militarization of Cuban society, further imprisonment of suspected dissidents, and likely destroyed any possibility of a diplomatic resolution. Over a year later, most of the invaders taken prisoner were exchanged for $53 million worth of food and medicine; Castro had built on military victory with a public relations triumph.27 The day after the invasion failed, Castro announced publicly for the first time that the revolution was “socialist.”
Thoroughly shaken, Kennedy wondered out loud how he could have been stupid enough to go ahead. At the same time, he retained his anti-Castro commitments. During the following year, the United States persisted in punishing Cuba by tightening the economic blockade, arranging for Cuba’s eviction from the Organization of American States, intensifying the propaganda campaign, and conspiring against Castro’s life. In addition, Operation Mongoose, another CIA enterprise, encouraged anti-Castro exiles to engage in hit-and-run attacks against Cuban economic targets. Other plans under Operation Mongoose were declassified in 1997. They include Operation North-woods, which called for fake attacks against various U.S. targets designed to “cause a helpful wave of national indignation,” and provoke war with Cuba.28 From Castro’s standpoint, the likelihood of an outright U.S. invasion appeared very high in the early 1960s, and encouraged him to obtain Soviet military assistance as a safeguard for his regime.
The consequence, a Big-Power confrontation in October 1962, ranked as one of the most dangerous periods of the Cold War. Moreover, the missile crisis originated not in Soviet aggression but in the high levels of tension in relations between the United States and Cuba. As Thomas G. Paterson explains, if there had been “no exile expedition, no destructive covert activities, and no economic and diplomatic boycott”—in other words, “no concerted United States vendetta to quash the Cuban Revolution”—then “there would not have been an October missile crisis.” Indeed, “Nikita Khrushchev would never have had the opportunity to begin his dangerous missile game.” U.S. policy makers knew of Cuban fears. A CIA report in September 1962 concluded that “the main purpose of the present military build-up in Cuba is to strengthen the Communist regime there against what the Cubans and Soviets conceive to be a danger that the U.S. may attempt, by one means or another, to overthrow it.” The U.S. threat against Cuba linked Castro and Khrushchev together in a mutual endeavor. Each calculated a vital interest in the installation of medium- and intermediate-range rockets. For Castro, such weapons were a way to discourage a U.S. invasion. For Khrushchev, they underscored Soviet deterrence capability in defense of a new ally.29
In an important book, entitled Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev, the Russian scholars Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov provide illuminating insights. According to them, Khrushchev mixed hard-boiled realpolitik with romantic, revolutionary zeal. He had initially regarded Castro and his followers “as anything but Marxists” and “discounted their chances of success.” Later, he experienced a change of heart, “embraced” the Cuban Revolution, and acquired an emotional commitment to it. Indeed, he looked upon “the young Cubans as heroes who had revived the promise of the Russian Revolution” and admired them for daring “to do it under the very nose of the most powerful imperialist country on earth.” During an encounter in New York City, in September 1960, Khrushchev hugged and kissed Castro. According to Zubok and Pleshakov, Khrushchev allowed himself “to get carried away” and subsequently gambled dangerously on Operation Anadyr, the Soviet code name for deploying missiles in Cuba.30 This emotional attachment to Cuba mirrored the sense of betrayal that underpinned U.S. policy toward the revolution.
Zubok and Pleshakov downplay the impact of strategic calculations on Khrushchev’s thinking and emphasize instead a commitment in defense of the Cuban Revolution. Khrushchev regarded the nuclear balance as an “important” but “not crucial” consideration in the conduct of Soviet international relations. More significantly, they argue, Khrushchev became “fervently dedicated” to Cuba, seeking to preserve the revolution against a possible U.S. invasion. For him, this aim became a means of upholding “the victorious march of communism around the globe and Soviet hegemony in the Communist camp.” To obtain maximum deterrent effect, the Soviets decided early in the summer of 1962 to supply medium-range (MRBM) and intermediate-range (IRBM) ballistic missiles. With surface-to-surface ranges of 1,020 and 2,200 nautical miles, respectively, these missiles could hit targets in the United States. Forty-two MRBMs arrived in Cuba; the IRBMs never made it.
U.S. officials received “hard” evidence of the missile sites in Cuba from photographs taken by a U-2 spy plane, on October 14, 1962. When informed of Soviet actions on the 16th, Kennedy, who had cautioned Khrushchev against placing “offensive” missiles in Cuba, snapped, “He can’t do that to me!” The president immediately convened a meeting of top advisers. He particularly wanted to know whether the missiles carried nuclear warheads and had the capacity of firing them. As a tentative answer in each instance, intelligence appraisals said probably not but warned that they might have operational capability in a short while. These discussions centered on possible military responses—specifically, whether to use an airstrike or an invasion as the most expeditious method of eliminating the threat. In either case, Soviet technicians and soldiers would most likely die.
In a second meeting on the same day, diplomatic considerations became more prominent. Secretary of State Rusk favored “a direct message to Castro” instead of an air attack. Sharply divided, participants such as general Maxwell Taylor, Secretary of Defense McNamara, and Secretary of the Treasury Dillon contemplated the effects on “the strategic balance.” Did the missiles in Cuba provide Moscow with an advantage or at least the appearance thereof? The advisers also wondered whether Khrushchev’s move had any bearing on Berlin, a city divided by the Cold War, or perhaps on Turkey, where the United States had based Jupiter missiles with targets in the Soviet Union.31
During the next several days an advisory group called the Executive Committee, or Ex Comm, met in exhausting, secret sessions under high pressure. The participants included national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, secretary of state Dean Rusk, secretary of defense Robert McNamara, attorney general Robert Kennedy, vice president Lyndon Johnson, CIA director John McCone, secretary of the treasury C. Douglas Dillon, chief presidential counsel Theodore Sorensen, undersecretary of state George Ball, deputy undersecretary of state U. Alexis Johnson, chairman of the joint chiefs Maxwell Taylor, assistant secretary of state for Latin America Edwin M. Martin, former ambassador to the USSR Llewellyn Thompson, deputy secretary of defense Roswell Gilpatric, and assistant secretary of defense Paul Nitze. Sometimes, UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson and former secretary of state Dean Acheson also joined in.32
The exchanges occasioned heated disagreements. As General Taylor later summarized them, the policy options, boiled down, consisted of three choices: “talk them out,” “squeeze them out,” or “shoot them out.” The majority finally settled on a middle course: a quarantine, a semantic evasion meaning but not saying naval blockade; an actual blockade under international law could not exist, except in time of war. McNamara functioned as an advocate in opposition to Taylor, McCone, and Acheson, all of whom favored an airstrike. Robert Kennedy, the president’s brother, also recommended against risky military responses, warning of a Pearl Harbor effect, in reverse, possibly leading to an atomic war.
President Kennedy, meanwhile, arrived at two decisions. First, he ordered the deployment of U.S. warships around Cuba to prevent the arrival of more missiles and to display his resolve. If subsequently challenged, he could move on to more drastic measures. Second, he chose to announce his action by means of a television address. By going public instead of relying on diplomatic channels, Kennedy presumably intended to rally opinion in the United States and to convey his seriousness of purpose to the Soviets. Unlike secret diplomacy, this gambit allowed for almost no space to maneuver. Once having stated his position to the nation, the president could not easily back down.
The president’s address on the evening of October 22 placed the responsibility for the crisis squarely on Soviet leaders. Kennedy reviewed the special relationship of the United States with other Western Hemisphere nations, recalled the lessons of Munich and the Second World War, and defined as imperative the need to resist manifestations of totalitarian aggression. He also called upon the Soviets to reverse their “deliberately provocative” behavior by dismantling their “strategic” missiles in Cuba. The quarantine constituted an “initial” step. Unless the Soviets acquiesced, other measures—unspecified—could follow. Moreover, the president warned, a missile launched from Cuba would precipitate instant retaliation against the Soviet Union. Over the facilities of the U.S. Information Agency, his words went around the world in thirty-seven languages, including Spanish. For the Cubans, Kennedy emphasized that Castro and his minions had become “puppets” of an “international conspiracy” led by the Soviet Union.
As Paterson describes the ensuing events, the missile crisis now became “an international war of nerves.” More than sixty U.S. naval vessels assumed the responsibility of patrolling Cuban waters; the Strategic Air Command went on nuclear alert, meaning that B-52 bombers with atomic weapons stood ready; military forces in the southeastern United States prepared for a possible invasion. U.S. diplomats, accordingly, informed the NATO allies of these steps; the OAS voted to endorse the Kennedy policy; and the United Nations Security Council embarked upon a debate. The Soviets, meanwhile, neither mobilized their forces nor tested the quarantine. Instead, their vessels turned around and went back home, leaving U.S. officials to wonder, what next? If the Soviets stalled on the removal of the missiles from Cuba, a military strike still could occur. Without investing too much faith in the effort, Kennedy also allowed Brazilian diplomats to act as intermediaries, urging Castro to sever ties with the Soviets.33
A means of resolution then appeared from an unlikely source. On the afternoon of October 26, a Soviet embassy officer, Aleksandr Fomin—actually the KGB chief in Washington—arranged for a meeting with John Scali, an ABC news correspondent, in the course of which he presented a proposal for transmission to the State Department. According to its terms, a straight-across deal, the Soviet Union would take out the missiles if the United States would promise not to invade Cuba. In response, Rusk sent an indication of interest. Meanwhile, a letter from Khrushchev arrived for Kennedy, conveying the same offer and a reminder that this trouble had come about because of the threatening U.S. attitude toward Cuba.
A crisis atmosphere resumed on the following day, the 27th, when a second letter from Khrushchev amplified the stakes. Possibly influenced by hard-line pressure at home, he now offered to remove the Soviet missiles in Cuba if the Americans similarly agreed to remove theirs in Turkey. This stipulation made a larger strategic connection explicit for the first time. In anger and frustration, President Kennedy spelled out the dilemma: “We are now in a position of risking war in Cuba . . . over missiles in Turkey which are of little military value.” Indeed, he already had considered the possibility of phasing them out but was unwilling to appear to be caving in before nuclear blackmail; he wanted to accept no such public obligation while confronted with Soviet pressure.
The difficulty deepened during the afternoon when a surface-to-air missile (SAM) shot down a U-2 plane over Cuba. Regarding the event as a dangerous escalation, Robert McNamara expressed his concern that “invasion had become almost inevitable.” But President Kennedy resisted the temptation, still seeking a peaceful resolution. Following his brother Robert’s advice, the president took a gamble by accepting the terms not in Khrushchev’s second letter but in the first. He also sent Robert Kennedy to confer with the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin; Kennedy would say, in effect, that if the Soviets had not begun to take out the missiles within forty-eight hours, then “we would remove them.” At the same time, he offered a concession. When Dobrynin inquired about the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, Robert Kennedy promised to get rid of them but emphasized the need for secrecy; if word leaked out, the United States would not feel bound by the offer.
Thoroughly panicked at this point by the consequences of his own rash acts, Khrushchev refrained from seeking advantage, accepted the settlement as outlined, and concluded the crisis short of the nuclear brink. An unwritten agreement called for the elimination of the MRBMs, under UN supervision, and a U.S. pledge against launching an invasion. In this way, each Great Power could claim the fulfillment of one of its goals. Later, in April 1963, the removal of Jupiter missiles in Turkey completed the remaining obligation. Castro, meanwhile, brooded and fussed. Unconsulted by his Soviet ally during the final stages, he felt betrayed and demeaned.34
Kennedy’s handling of the missile crisis has elicited divergent assessments. Enthusiastic administration memoirists depicted his performance as a model, indeed, a masterpiece of crisis management that effectively combined toughness and restraint. In this view, the president, characteristically cool under pressure, acted rationally, retained control, and skillfully manipulated rewards and punishments. His strong stand, moderated by appropriate concessions at propitious times, allowed for a peaceful denouement at acceptable cost.35 Consequently, he emerged as a kind of victor, his defense of the Western Hemisphere and the Monroe Doctrine supposedly vindicated.
Less laudatory appraisals portray the outcome as “a near miss.” Thomas G. Paterson’s account, for example, raises questions about “a mythology of grandeur,” contending that “illusion” and “embellishment” have “obscured” important facets. As John Kenneth Galbraith observed, “We were in luck, but success in a lottery is no argument for lotteries.” Paterson emphasizes the uncertainties and contingencies. What if Cuban exile groups had conducted raids or tried to kill Castro? What if Soviet vessels had challenged the blockade or merely blundered across the line? What if naval vessels or submarines had started shooting out of fear or miscalculation? What if caution and prudence had lapsed among the top leaders? Any one of these possibilities could have escalated the crisis and resulted in deeper difficulties. The tension and stress among the Ex Comm members approached the intolerable, depriving them of sleep and clearheadedness. Presumably, similar processes took place in the Kremlin. Whether Kennedy could have de-escalated the crisis sooner by accepting a diplomatic option remains a source of sharp contention.36
In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the leaders in Washington and Moscow installed a teletype hotline to place them in ready communication. The war scare in 1962 also encouraged the two Great Powers to accept the Limited Test Ban Treaty on July 25, 1963. A partial effort, disallowing nuclear explosions in the atmosphere but permitting them underground, it had only a small effect on the arms race. Indeed, the Soviets emerged from the Cuban encounter with their nuclear inferiority exposed and a strong determination to catch up. They also maintained large-scale subsidies for the Cuban economy. Still in power, Castro elicited animosity from his Cuban enemies. For them, the Cuban Revolution still constituted a source of communist contagion in the Western Hemisphere. It remained the defining issue in the New World.
President John F. Kennedy died on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, the victim of an assassin. His successor, vice president Lyndon B. Johnson, a Texan, had served in the Congress since 1938, first in the House of Representatives and later in the Senate, where he was the Democratic majority leader during Eisenhower’s second term. A sure-handed consensus builder and deal maker, Johnson practiced domestic politics as the art of constructing working majorities but lacked any equivalent experience, or expertise, in foreign relations. This shortcoming, a kind of tragic flaw, destroyed his administration after his reelection, in 1964, and later drove him out of office. Under Johnson, the escalation of the Vietnam War became the nation’s preoccupation, transforming a small-scale insurgency in a far-off place into a large-scale conflict that engaged 535,000 U.S. troops.
Among the ramifications of Kennedy’s death were changes in priority and perception. Latin Americans regarded President Kennedy with special appreciation. They liked his reputation for eloquence and idealism, his beautiful, Spanish-speaking wife, Jacqueline, and his advocacy of the Alliance for Progress. His death touched them emotionally. Johnson, in contrast, appeared more provincial and less sympathetic. Although he claimed on occasion to understand Mexicans on the basis of his dealings with them as a young man in Texas, he never persuaded Latin Americans that he knew or cared very much about them or their countries.37
Typical of his generation, Johnson embraced the lessons of Munich and the Second World War as crucial guides. For him, the communist menace recalled the Nazi threat and required constant vigilance. Collective security, alliance systems, and military supremacy ranked high as international priorities. The prospect of “wars of national liberation” in third-world regions still caused some worry. When political opposition forced the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev into retirement in 1964, his successors, Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin, inspired no more confidence in the Johnson administration. To counter Soviet activity in other countries, Johnson proposed, in a literal-minded sort of way, to uphold the containment principle wherever necessary. He also sought legitimation by claiming continuities of policy and purpose with the Kennedy administration and retained foreign policy advisers, such as William and McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, Robert McNamara, and Dean Rusk. One of the best books on Lyndon Johnson, Paul Conkin’s Big Daddy from the Pedernales, provides an insightful account.38
As a tribute to President Kennedy, Johnson pledged an ongoing commitment to the Alliance for Progress at his first White House ceremony, on November 27, 1963, where his audience included the Latin American ambassadors. Johnson’s priorities centered on political stability and economic growth rather than on democracy and reform. To an extent, this emphasis showed the influence of Thomas Mann, appointed by Johnson as Undersecretary of State for Latin American affairs. Another Texan, a career Foreign Service officer, and a former ambassador to Mexico, Mann possessed a reputation for hard-boiled practicality. He regarded the Cuban Revolution with special aversion, describing it as a “cancer” that could be remedied only by heavy doses of free enterprise and private investment. In taking over the coordination of Latin American policy, Mann encountered a variety of bureaucratic obstacles. As Joseph S. Tulchin explains, no matter what the investment of time and energy, the Johnson administration engaged primarily in improvisational responses. Tulchin characterizes them as “spasmodic reactions” to “an overpowering fear that instability would lead to ‘another Cuba’ in the hemisphere.” Unwilling to tolerate any such outcome, Johnson assumed a defensive stance toward Castro at a time when the Vietnam War functioned as a powerful diversion.39
Johnson encountered his first difficulties with Latin America over the Panama Canal. A source of contention since the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty of 1903, U.S. sovereign rights in the Canal Zone affronted Panamanian nationalists for many reasons. They objected to the imperialist implications, the division of their country into two parts, and other manifestations of inequality, such as racial discrimination and low wages. As rectification, they wanted to assert Panamanian sovereignty over the Canal Zone and to share more fully in the management and the profits. An episode on Panamanian Independence Day, November 3, 1959, suggested the magnitude of tension. A volatile circumstance turned ugly when student demonstrators, carrying Panamanian flags, marched into the Canal Zone, and ensuing encounters with police and military forces precipitated riots lasting several days. President Eisenhower, while professing puzzlement, attributed the responsibility to “extremists.”40
Panamanian officials then invited diplomatic discussions as a means of resolving the difficulties and hoped to do so on their terms. In 1962, president Roberto Chiari asked for the negotiation of a new treaty. In response, the Kennedy administration stalled, claiming a need for feasibility studies of alternate canal routes, and then permitted a modest concession: It allowed Panamanians to fly their flag at sixteen designated points in the Canal Zone. Seeking in this way to circumvent theoretical debates over the “formalisms of sovereignty,” the United States also tried to uphold its prerogatives for reasons of military defense. But the issue would not go away.
In January 1964, a series of confrontations between Panamanian nationals and Canal Zone authorities over flag-flying privileges led to more violence, killing over twenty people. As an indication of the seriousness, U.S. officials, anticipating a showdown with “left wing agitators,” evacuated the embassy staff and destroyed classified documents and code machines. Meanwhile, President Chiari suspended diplomatic relations, pending a response to his demand for the negotiation of a new treaty. When Johnson would not budge under pressure, Chiari broke diplomatic relations.
The Johnson administration ruled out large concessions. As White House adviser McGeorge Bundy explained, expediency permitted flexibility but not “retreat.” He would stand strong “on gut issues,” especially those concerned with the perpetual-rights clause and “our own ultimate responsibility for the security and effectiveness of the Canal.” Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, the president’s friend, warned against any misunderstanding and emphasized the historical context. The Panama difficulty, he explained, “comes mainly from the inside.” In his words, “Don’t credit Castro for the problems; they existed before Castro and will continue to exist as long as the canal is there.”
Meanwhile, presidential politics in each country constricted opportunities for an early resolution. For Johnson, seeking election in 1964, any concessions on Panama could serve Republican opponents as a campaign issue. Taking an unbending stance, he urged his counterpart, the Panamanian presidential candidate, Marco Robles, to appreciate the practicalities: Since economic advantages had more importance to his country than abstract notions of sovereignty, he should focus on questions of aid and assistance, profit sharing, and the like, all of which depended upon a cooperative attitude on other issues.
The election victories of Johnson and Robles subsequently allowed for diplomatic engagement. The drafts of three treaties at the end of June 1967 produced an uneven compromise, favoring the northern neighbor. Under its terms, the United States could expand the Panama Canal or build a new one. In either case the right to defend the neutrality and security of the existing canal resided with the United States. Meanwhile, Panama obtained sovereignty over the Canal Zone, but in a limited way. U.S. control of canal operations and military bases continued under extended leases. Regarded by Panamanian nationalists as unacceptable, these provisions became divisive issues provoking protest and turmoil. Consequently, treaty ratification became impossible in Panama, allowing for no settlement during the next decade.
Leaders in the Johnson administration struggled to bring coherence and focus to Latin American policy. On March 18, 1964, undersecretary Thomas Mann announced a statement of purpose and intent. Known as the Mann Doctrine, this formulation displayed insistent apprehension over possibilities of communist subversion. To defend against it, Mann favored stability and growth over democratic reform. As Tulchin explains, the latter issue, never completely absent as “a policy objective in the region,” became less conspicuous in comparison with the administration’s other concerns over Communist sedition.41
The implications of the Mann Doctrine acquired special significance in relations with Brazil. During the Cold War, the “unwritten alliance” with the United States experienced severe strains, in the Brazilian view, because of unfulfilled promises. During the Second World War, Brazilian leaders had supported the United States in the struggle against the Axis powers, anticipating a reward consisting of economic aid and assistance. But for Brazilians, satisfactory programs never developed, and the absence of a payoff, a Marshall Plan for Latin America, caused distress and disenchantment. Another contentious point concerned the means of economic development. In the U.S. view, Brazil demonstrated too much susceptibility to nationalistic formulas based on state planning and intervention and too little appreciation for proven capitalist methods—free enterprise and private investment. In the late 1950s, president Juscelino Kubitschek had produced particular irritation among U.S. officials by pressing for the adoption of “Operation Pan America,” an ambitious but vague proposal involving large-scale U.S. aid, multilateral endeavors, and anticommunism. President Eisenhower reportedly had trouble concealing his personal dislike of Kubitschek.42
Brazilian foreign policy then moved in new directions by affirming more independence from the United States. Kubitschek broke loose from traditional Cold War constraints with initiatives seeking broader international connections. In the United Nations, his government supported disarmament programs and third-world interests; it also invited more extensive diplomatic and economic relations with the communist world. In the Western Hemisphere, Brazil still functioned as a mediator between the United States and the rest of Latin America but “with an unusual twist.” Abandoning traditional efforts “to soften Latin American hostility to U.S. proposals,” Kubitschek’s government functioned as “the advocate” of Latin America, attempting thereby to bring U.S. positions into line with Brazilian inclinations.
These tendencies persisted under Kubitschek’s successor. In the election of 1960, Brazilians voted for Jânio Quadros, a former state governor of São Paulo. This choice worried U.S. leaders, who perceived Quadros as a political deviant, insufficiently tough on communists. He favored a more neutral stance in the Cold War, supported Castro’s right to maintain his regime, urged the promotion of economic growth by nationalist methods, and promised to lead Brazil toward its destiny as a Great Power. The era of the unwritten alliance was over. In 1961, a kind of transposition took place, whereby the two countries switched roles, the United States now acting as the ardent suitor. Seeking to have its way, the United States later resorted to covert actions that aided conspiratorial antigovernment groups and facilitated a coup d’état, on March 31, 1964. The result was a military dictatorship.
The Kennedy administration tried to court Quadros in conjunction with the Alliance for Progress but obtained ambivalent responses. Quadros wanted loans and assistance to cope with inflation and balance-of-payments problems but condemned intervention, including the Bay of Pigs invasion. At the same time, he opened discussions of trade-and-aid issues with West Germany and Eastern bloc nations, though without much success. Meanwhile, the Kennedy administration suppressed its exasperation while negotiating a $500-million aid-and-assistance package, hoping for good effects but worried about mass poverty and discontent in Brazil’s northeastern regions, viewed as potentially “the next Cuba.”
Confusion mounted on August 25, 1961, when Quadros suddenly and without explanation resigned his position as president. In a risky political gamble, he may have wanted the Congress and the army to insist upon his reinstatement and to lure him back by bestowing upon him special powers. If so, he lost his bet; instead, his act confirmed impressions of him as mercurial, impulsive, and unreliable. To make matters worse, his presumed successor, vice president João Goulart, seemed to share such traits, causing a coalition of congressional and military factions to stipulate the terms under which he could take office. In an extraordinary arrangement, they imposed strict controls on presidential prerogatives, resulting for a short while in the creation of a Brazilian parliamentary system. Taken unaware, U.S. leaders regarded Goulart as dangerous and demagogic but had no say in the succession crisis.
For U.S. leaders, Brazil under Goulart became recalcitrant and troublesome. For example, in January 1962, at a foreign ministers meeting in Punta del Este, Uruguay, the Brazilian delegation resisted U.S. efforts to expel Cuba from the Organization of American States. A few weeks later, Goulart’s brother-in-law, Leonel Brizola, the state governor of Rio Grande do Sul, expropriated a subsidiary of the International Telephone and Telegraph Company. Though actually the culmination of a dispute going back to the early 1950s, this act appeared to be part of a coordinated campaign against property rights in Brazil, and Kennedy officials feared there was worse to come. With Brazil suffering high inflation, low productivity, food shortages, rural unrest, and urban tension, Goulart seemed maladroit and indecisive. He could neither command congressional majorities nor articulate a viable course of action. Meanwhile, a process of political polarization dividing the country at the extremes suggested the possibility of civil war. The Kennedy administration, always on guard, reviewed the applicability of counterinsurgency plans and sent colonel Vernon Walters as a military attaché and troubleshooter. A talented linguist, Walters had served with the U.S. Army as a liaison with Brazilian forces in Italy during the Second World War and retained connections with high-ranking members of the officer corps. He now assumed a responsibility for cultivating and consolidating ties with military officials.
Relations deteriorated further in 1963. A plebiscite in January reestablished a presidential system, but Goulart made no headway against the economic crisis. In his view, the fault resided with the Kennedy administration’s reluctance to supply him with unconditional, large-scale, long-term aid and assistance. As mounting chaos in many places took the form of local protests, strikes, military mutinies, and outbreaks of rural violence, Goulart contemplated the declaration of a state of siege. U.S. ambassador Lincoln Gordon was similarly alarmed. In August 1963, he saw signs of “substantial imminent danger” of a communist takeover in Brazil.
Following the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963, the troubles deepened. According to W. Michael Weis, “a majority of Brazilians” anticipated either a communist revolution or a presidential coup. To salvage his position, Goulart tried ineffectively to win over the Johnson administration and to rally popular support, especially among the political left. By so doing, he further alienated the political right, resulting in the military coup of March 31, 1964. As Weis explains, “virtually no one” was willing “to risk anything” to save him. The takeover was quick and easy.
Elated U.S. officials applauded the outcome. The Johnson administration had considered the possibilities of direct action but preferred indirect means. On March 16, Johnson, Rusk, Mann, and other top officials endorsed stability as the main priority, thereby affirming the central premise of the Mann Doctrine. Two days later, Lincoln Gordon met in Washington with Rusk, Mann, McNamara, and CIA director John McCone to discuss policy options, including intervention, in the event of a coup d’état or a civil war. Meanwhile, conspiratorial efforts in Brazil, probably with U.S. encouragement, coalesced around general Humberto Castelo Branco, the army chief of staff. By March 27, the U.S. Embassy in Brazil had prepared contingency plans to assist the Brazilian military with arms and supplies, a decision that may have functioned as a green light. Preparing also for more extreme measures, the Johnson administration assembled a U.S. carrier task force. Code-named “Brother Sam,” this operation got under way on March 31. Fortunately for U.S. leaders, Goulart’s ouster that day nullified any need for it to proceed. An endorsement of the interim government’s legitimacy quickly followed. On April 1, U.S. officials authorized emergency aid and also characterized the change as constitutional, thereby avoiding the question of diplomatic recognition. Johnson sent “warmest wishes” to the new leaders, commending them for resolving the Brazilian crisis “within a framework of constitutional democracy and without civil strife.”43
Such euphemistic words served the U.S. interest in order and sustained the Brazilian army in the creation of a dictatorship. On April 9, 1964, the Supreme Revolutionary Command issued the first of a series of “Institutional Acts,” the effects of which were to consolidate military control and suspend constitutional privileges. They also allowed for the declaration of a state of siege and the denial of citizenship rights to persons regarded as threats to national security. This latter provision soon took effect against three former presidents (Kubitschek, Quadros, and Goulart), two members of the Supreme Court, six state governors, fifty-five congressmen, and three hundred other political figures. On April 11, under careful military supervision, the Brazilian Congress elected general Castelo Branco as president. He became the first of five military dictators to rule Brazil through 1985. They functioned as the conservators of internal security and national development, operating under the auspices of political authoritarianism and market capitalism.44
Another such experience became a defining episode for the Johnson administration, during the U.S. military intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965. As Tulchin explains, “crisis management” in the Western Hemisphere became a short-term substitute for the articulation of long-term goals and objectives, coupled with the suppression of perceived communist threats. Without a crisis to manage, regional specialists had difficulty getting Johnson to pay much attention at all. The Dominican crisis revealed some of the pitfalls of improvisation.
The Dominican Republic, a former protectorate, had experienced U.S. interventions before. In 1905, president Theodore Roosevelt took control of the customs offices to ward off the possibility of European intrusions. As justified by the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the president chose to exercise an international police power to ensure civilized behavior. Later, U.S. Marines occupied the country from 1916 until 1924. When they withdrew, a police constabulary, established by U.S. authorities, served as a base for an aspiring dictator, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina. For three decades after he took power in 1930, Trujillo and his family ruled the Dominican Republic as a fiefdom, growing ostentatiously rich over the years. Posing much of the time as a champion of anticommunism, Trujillo operated with U.S. tolerance if not outright support. Yet by the late 1950s, embarrassment over his heavy-handed excesses and murderous ways encouraged the Eisenhower administration to initiate an anti-Trujillo operation. This policy persisted under President Kennedy who demonstrated his unhappiness with Trujillo while courting Latin American reformers. Trujillo’s enemies in the Dominican Republic gunned him down on May 31, 1961—possibly with CIA assistance: Tulchin asserts that “the story of CIA involvement in the assassination . . . told in many versions . . . is no longer disputed.”45
The ensuing crises over political succession then produced an intervention. Following the dictator’s death, the United States used various means, including diplomatic influence and the deployment of warships off the coast, to prevent Trujillo’s sons and brothers from retaining power. Meanwhile, the Dominican military exercised authority until a presidential election took place in December 1962—the first free exercise of voting rights in thirty years, possibly ever. The victor, Juan Bosch, a prominent reformer and social democrat, identified his political program with the goals and aspirations of the Alliance for Progress but could not contain fractious disputes over land and labor reform and military prerogatives. Conservative opponents among the propertied elites and the military officers undermined his regime. Moreover, because his shows of radicalism appeared to leaders in the Kennedy administration as evidence of a pro-Castro proclivity, they accepted without much complaint his ouster by Dominican military contingents in September 1963.
From exile, Bosch placed the blame for his downfall on the United States and urged support from his loyalists. Subsequently, as Tulchin notes, “jealousies among the military leaders and the absence of any strong civilian alternatives to Bosch made the transition back to civilian rule very complicated.”46 Nevertheless, preparations proceeded for a new election, but before it took place, a military contingent loyal to Bosch attempted a seizure of power, on April 24, 1965, seeking to put him back in office. During the next few days, civil war threatened as a consequence of the struggle between pro- and anti-Bosch elements in the Dominican military.
The Johnson administration, in what critics regard as an overreaction, allowed the requirements of crisis management to override the nonintervention provisions of the OAS charter. On April 28, seeking to protect the rights and interests of U.S. citizens, Johnson ordered five hundred U.S. Marines into the capital city, Santo Domingo. Subsequent reports, probably overstated, indicated high levels of violence and atrocities with a strong likelihood of communist involvement. Unwilling to permit another Cuba, Johnson then authorized a full-scale military intervention with twenty-three thousand troops, intending to keep Bosch out of office, to eliminate the chances of a communist takeover, and to “avoid another situation like that in Vietnam.” Throughout, according to Tulchin, “Johnson exaggerated the danger to U.S. lives” and used the threat of communist subversion mainly as a “gambit” to arouse public support. His main concern was to prevent another Castro, but he lost interest when Bosch faded as a threat. Disgusted by what he saw as the “venality” of Dominican politicians and “the corruption and deceit of the military leaders,” Johnson arranged for an OAS “cover,” calling upon a multinational peacekeeping force, from Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Brazil, to enforce the ensuing cease-fire agreements.47
Through a difficult sequence of failed efforts and diplomatic breakdowns, U.S. officials subsequently obtained the means of safeguarding order and authority. To facilitate the process, as sardonically noted by the historian Robert Freeman Smith, many of the factional leaders in the Dominican military accepted overseas jobs. An agreement signed on August 31, 1965, called the Act of Dominican Reconciliation, provided for an interim government until elections could take place in 1966. The winner, Dr. Joaquín Balaguer, a politician with Trujillista antecedents, served two consecutive terms, represented elite interests under a democratic facade, and became a fixture in Dominican politics for the next twenty-five years. For U.S. officials, the Dominican intervention as an exercise in crisis management constituted an acceptable outcome, admittedly costly but nevertheless a pointed demonstration of administrative resolve against radical threats. As suggested by the Kennan corollary years earlier, it showed a readiness to act in support of anticommunist stability within the U.S. sphere of influence, no matter what the effects on the OAS charter. To Johnson’s growing legion of critics, in contrast, it seemed an unhappy regression to the imperialist practices of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, part of a larger pattern exemplified by the Vietnam War.48
After the Dominican crisis, U.S. policy toward Latin America concentrated on “damage control,” that is, “trying to salvage something from the ashes of the dream.” Thomas Mann left the government early in 1967. Johnson became even more absorbed with Vietnam. When on occasion he showed concern for Western Hemisphere issues, he focused on “specific, uncontroversial development projects, such as roads.” Improvements in physical infrastructure became “his mantra in conversations with visitors from Latin America.” Though Cuba remained an obsessional subject, the Alliance for Progress became a lost cause for administration leaders. They blamed the failure on Latin Americans, whom they regarded as self-centered, irresponsible, and unwilling to engage in “constructive cooperation” with the United States to safeguard the hemisphere against internal and external threats.
Latin Americans likewise became disenchanted with the United States. A mounting sense of alienation disposed many of them against U.S. definitions of multilateral endeavor and hemispheric security.49 For them, the Cold War fixation entailed neglect and subordination; indeed, it perpetuated ongoing patterns of exploitation and underdevelopment. To counter them, Latin Americans recast the issues on a North-South basis, highlighting the asymmetries between “modern” and “modernizing” nations and the alleged responsibility of the former for conditions of poverty and destitution among the latter. In the versions called “dependency theory,” this formulation contrasted starkly with the East-West emphasis, that is, the tendency to understand most international issues as a function of U.S.-Soviet relations.
Dependency theory adapted Marxist analysis to account for the prevalence of poverty and inequality. Among other things, it posited the existence of a world capitalist system by which the very structure of economic relationships enabled the metropolitan centers—London in the nineteenth century and New York in the twentieth—to maintain ascendancy by expropriating the wealth of peripheral regions in the Third World. According to this critique, the terms of exchange operated as a form of neo-imperialism, assuring economic subservience by discriminating against those countries that produced cheap primary materials and favoring those that turned out more expensive “finished goods.” Moreover, a central part of this analysis asserted that the system operated in such a way as to perpetuate underdevelopment and dependency in large portions of the world, keeping them subordinate, unless the victimized regions could find viable ways of breaking loose through the adoption of more equitable, conceivably noncapitalist alternatives. In whatever form, the North-South perspective established different categories for understanding the plight of third-world nations in a world dominated by the East-West considerations of the Cold War.50
The Johnson administration’s self-destruction over Vietnam opened the way for a Republican restoration in January 1969. Richard M. Nixon, the new president, had served Eisenhower as vice president during the 1950s, and failed in his run for the presidency against Kennedy in 1960. As the Republican candidate in 1968, he unveiled a “new” Nixon, supposedly more mellow and less partisan. Claiming foreign relations as his expertise, he promised peace with honor in Vietnam. His partner, national security adviser and later secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger, shared the president’s proclivities. A professor of political science from Harvard University, previously a minor player in the national security establishment, and a German Jew whose family had fled from Hitler in the 1930s, Kissinger brought with him to the White House an attraction for European frames of reference. Conceptions of realpolitik in his usage allowed for limited notice of Latin America.
As conservative geopoliticians, Nixon and Kissinger regarded order and equilibrium among the Great Powers as essential requirements. As political realists, they disliked utopian designs, eschewed idealistic and moralistic abstractions, and favored stability as the road toward peace and predictability in a dangerous world. Their statecraft, seeking détente, or a relaxation of tension, centered on relations with the Soviet Union, Western Europe, Japan, and the People’s Republic of China. Premised on the possibility of achieving some measure of consensus and cooperation, this strategy anticipated the concentration of power among the Great Powers and provided incentives for accepting the essential parts of the international status quo. Once created, a community of common interest might result in the containment of communist expansion by subtle means and the enlistment of Soviet and Chinese assistance in the termination of the Vietnam War.51
In peripheral regions such as Latin America, the intricacies of Nixon-Kissinger diplomacy, with its balancing and calibration of Great-Power interests, suggested a perception of second-class status. When confronted with such matters, Kissinger sometimes showed impatience. In June 1969, for example, the Chilean foreign minister, Gabriel Valdés, criticized U.S. policy for disregarding economic development in Latin America. Kissinger disparaged his concerns: “Nothing important can come from the South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South has no importance.” When Valdés responded by suggesting that Kissinger knew nothing of Latin America, the so-called Doctor of Diplomacy replied, “No, and I don’t care.”52 On another occasion, Kissinger dismissed Chile on geopolitical grounds, describing the country as “a dagger aimed at the heart of Antarctica.”53 Subsequently, in writing their memoirs, neither Kissinger nor Nixon displayed much interest in Latin American affairs. For them, Latin America functioned primarily as an annoyance when North-South issues intruded upon the more significant patterns of East-West relations.
For such reasons, Cuba remained a source of irritation, following the missile crisis. Perceived as a Soviet stand-in, Fidel Castro espoused a brand of revolutionary romanticism, supposedly a threat to the stable countries of Latin America. Often out-of-sync with more cautious Soviet renditions of Marxist doctrine and practice, Castro’s long, emotional speeches presented a radical call for heroic struggles against daunting odds. His rhetoric anticipated the advent of revolution throughout the Third World, igniting many Vietnams and precipitating a collapse of world capitalism by means of violent overthrow. Yet the extent to which Castro supported his words with acts is subject to debate. On at least one occasion, in Bolivia, his proposed strategy for exporting the revolution failed dramatically in actual application.
Headed by Ernesto “Che” Guevara, an Argentine revolutionary associated with Castro since Mexico City days, the Cuban expedition into Bolivia late in 1966 obtained a base in the southwestern part of the country, in the Andean foothills. Modeling his efforts on Castro’s experience in the Sierra Maestra, Guevara expected to set off uprisings among the rural poor with subsequent domino effects into Peru, Paraguay, and adjacent regions. But false hopes and defective plans caused setbacks in an inhospitable environment. Uncooperative and hostile, the native peoples spoke a dialect of Guaraní, not the Quechua that Guevara had anticipated, and received the revolutionary message with incomprehension. Guevara could not adapt. Forlorn and isolated, the Cuban revolutionaries experienced a sequence of breakdowns culminating in disaster: In October 1967, Guevara was captured by contingents of the Bolivian army and executed before a firing squad soon thereafter. As the historian Robert Quirk explains, his memory then passed from history into myth. After death, his reputation for heroism as a guerrilla fighter, however much embellished, became part of radical iconography around the world.54
Allegations of Cuban support for third-world revolution distressed Richard Nixon. His friend Bebe Rebozo, an anti-Castro Cuban, reinforced his suspicions. Kissinger once suggested that Nixon had “a neuralgic problem” on the subject. Cubans reciprocated in kind. They looked upon the new president, an old enemy, as a fascist. To underscore the point, Cuban propaganda employed a distinctive spelling of his name, replacing the “x” in Nixon with a swastika.55
Trouble developed in August 1970, when photographic reconnaissance over Cuba discovered an installation under construction, in the harbor at Cienfuegos. To some intelligence analysts, the images looked like a Soviet base for nuclear submarines. Kissinger accepted this appraisal. With Sherlockian powers of deduction, he observed soccer fields in the picture and warned of possible war, explaining, “Cubans play baseball. Russians play soccer.” His inference, though partly wrong—Cubans do play soccer—correctly identified a Soviet submarine facility. In September, Kissinger told Nixon that such a base could mark “a quantum leap in the strategic capability of the Soviet Union against the United States.”56 With no need to return home for service and maintenance, Soviet submarines with nuclear weapons could multiply in number off the Atlantic coast.
Back in the limelight as an East-West issue, Cuban malfeasance aroused Kissinger’s indignation. Viewed as a violation of bans on offensive weapons during the missile crisis, Soviet actions as Kissinger portrayed them could have produced another confrontation. But in these circumstances, Nixon for his own reasons chose another course. He wanted no political uproar over Cuba to place his administration on the defensive before the congressional elections in November 1970. Moreover, he attributed higher priority to questions of détente in relations with the Soviets. As described by his biographer, Stephen E. Ambrose, his display of “intelligent and admirable restraint” allowed for quiet diplomacy, enabling the Soviets to save face while accepting retreat. No threat of war developed. As before, Cubans had no say in the resolution.
Cuban revolutionary enthusiasms still nettled administration leaders and warded off suggestions for placing relations with Castro’s government on a more regular basis. During Nixon’s second term, discussions in the Organization of American States over the possibility of dropping economic and diplomatic sanctions against Cuba went nowhere. Opposition among anti-Castro exiles obstructed any such process, as did questions of compensation for U.S. losses to Cuban nationalization and Castro’s leadership efforts in the Third World. Indeed, Castro ruined all hope of rapprochement in the mid-1970s when he sent Cuban troops into a complex civil war in Angola, a former Portuguese colony in Africa. Something of a public relations coup for the Cubans, the intervention highlighted Castro’s claim to champion revolutionary nationalism in the Third World. Kissinger railed against Castro’s audacity, viewing it as a consequence of Soviet manipulations.
The geopolitical propensities of the administration continued to arouse Latin American misgivings, and Kissinger sometimes responded to them. In October 1972, he attended a luncheon with Latin America delegates to the United Nations. As described by an aide, William J. Jorden, once “warmed by the evident good fellowship in the room,” Kissinger waxed eloquent and promised the beginning of “a new dialogue” on hemispheric affairs. Though rhetorical in intent, Kissinger’s statement engaged Latin American diplomats, who showed signs of taking it seriously. To an extent, this expectation formed a context for and perhaps moved the administration toward a softer line when a new round of discussions got under way with Panama over the canal and the 1903 treaty.
These issues ranked among the most conspicuous legacies of U.S. imperialism in the Western Hemisphere. For the Panamanian government, now dominated by the military strongman Omar Torrijos, the renegotiation of terms and provisions retained a vital importance but initially did not for President Nixon; during his first term, he avoided discussions of them. After his reelection he shifted ground. Perhaps in a gesture to mollify third-world opinion, his administration reopened the talks, with Ellsworth Bunker in charge. An experienced diplomat, Bunker encountered a complicated array of competing interests and objectives, including questions of sovereignty and the management and defense of the canal. Unsusceptible to easy resolution, the difficulties remained unsettled when Nixon resigned the presidency because of the Watergate scandal in August 1974. Subsequently, under president Gerald Ford, fundamental differences prevented further progress in part because leading Republicans such as Ronald Reagan, the former governor of California, vehemently opposed concessions to Panama.57
Another set of issues came about in relations with Chile during the presidency of Dr. Salvador Allende Gossens—a murky episode over which suspicions, allegations, and polemics have abounded. Allende’s government fell from power in September 1973 during a military uprising in the course of which Allende died under mysterious circumstances, by either suicide or assassination. Critics attributed complicity to the United States for supposedly orchestrating a campaign against him.
Allende, a physician of bourgeois origins but with Marxist philosophical tastes, had unsuccessfully sought the presidency in 1958 and 1964 before his victory in 1970. As a Socialist party member, he denied communist affiliations but accepted communist support and campaigned on the need for radical changes. His priorities included the redistribution of land and wealth and the nationalization of basic enterprises, including banks, insurance companies, public utilities, and extractive industries. For an assortment of reasons, his presence in La Moneda, the Chilean executive mansion, disconcerted Nixon and Kissinger, who pressed for countermeasures.
Large-scale U.S. political involvements in Chile had accelerated in the 1960s. A tempestuous, multiparty democracy, inhabited by ten million people, Chile experienced economic distress during the postwar period because of high inflation, maldistribution of income, and heavy reliance on copper exports, especially those of the U.S.-owned corporations Anaconda and Kennecott. The 1964 election of president Eduardo Frei Montalva, a reform-minded Christian Democrat supported by CIA funds, made Chile a centerpiece during the Alliance for Progress. An adherent of democratic capitalism, Frei favored land, labor, and tax reform and a larger share of the profits from the copper companies but failed to achieve his goals. Moreover, his independence in foreign relations offended Richard Nixon who viewed him as a creature of previous Democratic administrations. By 1970, Nixon was happy for Frei’s term to end.58
To replace Frei, the presidential campaign of that year featured a three-way race. Allende, a Socialist, ran with communist support against Radomiro Tomic, a Christian Democrat, and Jorge Alessandri, a conservative former president. U.S. officials opposed Allende but had trouble choosing between the other two. Their apprehensions deepened when Allende won a plurality with 36 percent of the vote. Kissinger complained of standing by and letting Chile “go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” He anticipated no more free elections if Allende took office. The geopolitical implications for South America and the effects on U.S. corporations also caused worry. For such reasons, Kissinger and Nixon considered various means of preventing Allende from becoming president. One possibility entailed political manipulation. Since under law the power of choice fell to the Chilean Congress when no candidate obtained a majority, deals among other parties might head him off. Another option was covert action, possibly leading to a military coup, but this route became impossible when resistance developed among military officers, some of whom took threats of civil war seriously. When anti-Allende conspirators botched an attempted kidnapping in October 1970 and shot to death general René Schneider, an opponent of military intervention, Chileans closed ranks in support of the constitution and inaugurated Salvador Allende as president in November.59
Allende subsequently challenged the status quo. He blamed economic woes on dependency and exploitation, supposedly the consequences of an alliance between foreign capitalists and domestic elites who looted resources and sent them overseas. To retain the wealth for Chile’s benefit, he favored nationalization and expropriation. He also identified his positions with third-world radicals, such as the Vietcong, and underscored the point by establishing diplomatic ties with communist countries: Cuba, the German Democratic Republic, North Korea, North Vietnam, and the People’s Republic of China. For him, the apparatus of hemispheric cooperation, including the Organization of American States, functioned as a tool of U.S. dominance. He regarded it as a “servant” of the United States in the Cold War, operating “against the interests of Latin America.” Such expressions animated Allende’s foreign policy. For Chileans to become free, they required liberation from U.S. hegemony, capitalist exploitation, and economic dependency.
For Allende and his supporters, U.S. corporations in Chile became powerful symbols of an assortment of ills. Anaconda and Kennecott, for example, controlled the country’s most important resource, copper, which accounted for most of the state revenue and hard currency. Chileans with otherwise divergent political views agreed on a need to share more fully in the profits. Eduardo Frei had favored a strategy of buying into the companies with stock purchases; Allende wanted to take them over and, soon after assuming office, he introduced nationalization legislation. Under the prescribed proceedings, as subsequently enacted into law by the Chilean Congress, compensation was subject to special terms. If foreign companies had earned “excess profits,” as calculated by the government, then the totals would shrink by that amount. For Anaconda and Kennecott, the calculations permitted no compensation at all, and the companies complained of confiscation. The U.S. State Department objected to Chilean deviations from “accepted standards of international law.” As punishment, the Nixon administration arranged for restrictions on international credit through private U.S. banks, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the World Bank which reduced Allende’s capacity to finance his economic programs. Significantly, no equivalent acts stopped military aid to the Chilean armed forces.60
A sequence of domestic crises later engulfed Chile. State-run enterprises functioned inefficiently and output declined. Consequently, inflation mounted as did worker discontent. A truckers’ strike in October 1972 caused special embarrassment. Other difficulties developed over food shortages, urban protests, and rural violence. Nevertheless, the government retained power, until September 11, 1973, when the Chilean military executed a coup d’état. The circumstances of Allende’s death during the fighting, around La Moneda, remain the subject of speculation and polemical debate.
The same is true of allegations of U.S. responsibility. According to critics, the Nixon administration engineered the drive against Allende for geopolitical and economic reasons. Allende’s death, though probably unintended, nevertheless came about as a consequence of U.S. policies, especially its clandestine efforts to destabilize the regime, engender economic distress, and mobilize the opposition. By cutting off bank credit while allowing military aid, the Nixon administration sent unmistakable signals, in effect inviting a move by the military. Other accounts place the blame on Allende, who compounded the deleterious effects of economic coercion with chronic mismanagement. According to this view, his regime collapsed as a result of its own incompetency and failure. These divergent accounts test the capacity of scholars to tolerate high levels of ambiguity, uncertainty, and contradiction.61
Yet, by 2016, most of the mystery surrounding Allende’s death and Pinochet’s rise to power had been settled. The U.S. intervention in Chile after the election of Allende was widespread and sinister. There were covert payments and arms shipments to anti-Allende forces from the CIA. President Nixon ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream”—that is, create an environment in Chile whereby price inflation and scarcity would ensue. After Nixon’s disgraceful departure from the White House, less than one year after President Allende’s death, the United States Senate felt the need to reassert control over the rogue, runaway administration. Senator Frank Church of Idaho organized a long, public series of congressional investigations in 1975. The “U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities” (the Church Committee) issued a scathing, but dispassionate account of covert activities in Chile (Staff Report, “Covert Action in Chile 1963–1973”). Further U.S. complicity in the downfall and death of Allende was made public in 2003 when the American scholar Peter Kornbluh unveiled a cache of documents, through the National Security Archive, at George Washington University in Washington, DC; the documents were declassified in 1999 during the Clinton administration and published in book form as The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability.
Following the military takeover in Chile on September 11, 1973, a junta under general Augusto Pinochet Ugarte instituted its authority by repressive means. Although estimates vary, as many as ten thousand Chileans suspected of pro-Marxist sympathies were killed during the ensuing roundup and crack-down. Later, many more spent hard time in prison, fled the country, turned up dead as victims of political murder, or simply disappeared. General Pinochet, sometimes compared in his methods with Spain’s Francisco Franco, became the embodiment of order and an object of derisive, international criticism among human rights advocates. His government ruthlessly secured Chile for anticommunism and free enterprise. Under his purview, Anaconda and Kennecott obtained payments in cash and bonds for their mines and equipment, and the country again became receptive to infusions of foreign investment. Free-market economic doctrines associated with Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, and the “University of Chicago Boys” became the official guides. Subsequently, under Nixon and Ford, U.S. dealings with Chile became more satisfactory. Pinochet’s government assured anticommunist stability and a friendly environment for foreign capital—while Chilean political dissidents paid for their opposition with their lives.62
In 1976, a political outsider from Plains, Georgia, won the presidency for the Democrats. James Earl Carter, better known as Jimmy, came out of nowhere by capitalizing on public disenchantment with the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. The Nixon administration had accomplished an important goal late in January 1973 by disengaging U.S. forces from the fighting and calling the outcome “a peace with honor.” In May 1975, North Vietnamese forces won the war by sweeping into Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital, and taking control of the country. Meanwhile, Nixon’s presidency had collapsed under high crimes and misdemeanors. When he resigned in August 1974, vice president Gerald R. Ford became the president and effectively ended his chance for election in his own right by pardoning Nixon. U.S. voters wondered how to account for such disasters. The political effects made Carter a winner.
A 1946 U.S. Naval Academy graduate, Carter carried out his service obligation until 1953 when he returned home to Georgia for a career in agriculture, business, and politics. As governor in the early 1970s, he decided to run for the presidency. A devout Baptist, he aspired to make politics conform more closely with his personal standards. His insistence upon ethical integrity, an essential part of his message, later hamstrung him because political success at the national level required both obfuscation and deception. According to his critics, a puritanical streak and an absence of savoir faire reduced his political effectiveness. In a more favorable assessment, Gaddis Smith has characterized his term in office as a creative attempt to reconcile the imperatives of morality and reason with power.63
In foreign affairs, Carter possessed strong convictions but no experience. For Gaddis Smith, such traits recall “the ghost of Woodrow Wilson.” Nevertheless, Carter sought to enhance his understanding, in 1973, by accepting membership in the Trilateral Commission. This elite group, based in New York City, consisted of business, political, and academic leaders who defined the triangular relationship of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan as critical. However vague and unformed, Carter’s views during the campaign suggested his readiness to move away from the geopolitical formulations of Nixon and Kissinger. Espousing more principled approaches, he wanted to slow the arms race, diminish competition with the Soviets, and overcome outdated Cold War notions in East-West relations. At the same time, his absorption with questions of human rights disposed him more readily toward the Third World and North-South issues.
Once in office, Carter had trouble bringing focus to his policies, partly because of his choice of top advisers. Secretary of state Cyrus R. Vance, a Yale-trained lawyer and pillar of the foreign-policy establishment, operated in the traditions of Elihu Root, Charles Evans Hughes, Henry L. Stimson, and Dean Acheson by moving easily among power elites in the corporate world and the government. Also, the well-connected head of the National Security Council, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Harvard-educated political scientist and Columbia professor, resembled other university-based social scientists and policy makers, such as McGeorge Bundy, Walt and Eugene Rostow, and Henry Kissinger. In the Carter administration, Vance and Brzezinski, both strong-willed and assertive, produced confusion for outside observers by giving divergent, sometimes contradictory signals. Vance, a proponent of accommodation with the Soviet Union, responded with sympathy to North-South problems. Brzezinski, more inclined toward Cold War orthodoxies, accepted East-West definitions of international relations as the dominant reality.
For the Carter administration, Latin America presented an opportunity to open “a new, happier era of relations.” The defense of human rights became an organizing theme. As Gaddis Smith notes, new presidents often engage in “a ritual” of proclaiming a “more sensitive and understanding approach,” but in Carter’s case the promise assumed some measure of actuality. During the campaign, he vowed to move away from responding with “an attitude of paternalism or punishment or retribution” if Latin Americans did not “yield to our persuasion.” This statement implied an aversion to any more invasions or interventions or exercises in destabilization. Vance and Brzezinski shared Carter’s view. Early on, Brzezinski noted that in the United States the Monroe Doctrine might appear as “a selfless . . . contribution to hemispheric security,” but “to most of our neighbors to the south it was an expression of presumptuous U.S. paternalism.” As Gaddis Smith observes, administration speakers never used the term “Monroe Doctrine” in public.
Carter took something of a personal interest in Latin America. He knew some Spanish and, with his wife, Rosalynn, traveled in Mexico and Brazil. He saw the region as an appropriate place to apply what Smith calls his “philosophy of repentance and reform,” that is, “admitting past mistakes” and “making the region a showcase for human-rights policy.” Moreover, at least in the beginning, he perceived Soviet involvement in the Western Hemisphere as insufficiently large or purposeful to warrant much concern. His priorities included negotiations with Panama, to resolve the status of the Canal Zone, and efforts to engage with Castro’s Cuba. Ironically, it was his much criticized reaction to a Latin American issue, the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979, that helped establish his reputation for incompetency in foreign affairs. This perception, as much as anything, made him a one-term president.
Stalled for a dozen years, negotiations over the status of the canal assumed a top priority. Carter wanted a success, hoping to obtain “a positive impact throughout Latin America” and “an auspicious beginning for a new era.” But domestic politics got in the way. Conservatives, represented by the former actor Ronald Reagan, then California governor, strongly opposed concessions. For them, a compromise on this matter signified a loss of will, steadfastness, and national greatness. As a candidate for the Republican nomination in 1976, Reagan had made the canal a central issue. His applause line affirmed an unbending position: “We bought it, we paid for it, it’s ours and we’re going to keep it.” For Carter to prevail, a new treaty would have to reconcile an assortment of rival demands and expectations.
Under general Omar Torrijos, a shrewd leader, the Panamanian government had kept the canal issue in the international spotlight. Consequently, in 1974, secretary of state Henry Kissinger and Panamanian foreign minister Juan Antonio Tack agreed to a set of principles. They called for the eventual abrogation of the 1903 treaty and the negotiation of new terms, providing for a fixed termination of the date and a more generous distribution of revenues for Panama. In addition, Panama would assume full sovereignty over the Canal Zone and responsibility for operating the waterway, at some point in the future. At the same time, Panama would have to grant to the United States the right to protect the canal.64
The urgency appeared obvious. In 1976, a U.S. Commission on Latin America headed by Sol Linowitz, a Xerox Corporation executive, described the Panama problem as one of the most pressing in the region. The Carter administration went into quick action. Soon after the inauguration in early 1977, the leaders endorsed the Kissinger-Tack principles as the basis for diplomatic discussions. As a negotiator, Sol Linowitz teamed with Ellsworth Bunker, a veteran diplomat. U.S. ambassador William Jorden has described the ensuing processes in detail.
Three principal issues confronted the diplomats. How much money should go to Panama? How long should the United States retain authority over the canal? What words should describe U.S. rights, once Panama took control? Through patience and effort, the diplomats found solutions. Wisely, they drafted two treaties. The first set the termination date of U.S. control over the canal for December 31, 1999, and granted Panama joint responsibility in the interim; meanwhile, Panama would receive $10 million a year and additional sums out of operating revenues. The second defined U.S. rights to defend the canal thereafter. As described by Brzezinski, these accomplishments represented for Carter “the ideal fusion of morality and politics.” They did “something good for peace,” responded to “the passionate desires of a small nation,” and helped “the long-range U.S. national interest.”
Nevertheless, tough fights lay ahead. To put the treaties into effect, both Panamanian voters and two-thirds of the U.S. Senate had to register their approval. For political reasons, Torrijos had to claim the acquisition of full sovereignty and a permanent end to the threat of U.S. intervention. Similarly, Carter had to affirm an ongoing prerogative to safeguard access to the canal, in all circumstances. Such contradictions elicited intense debate. When senator Dennis DeConcini, a Democrat from Arizona, proposed an amendment authorizing all necessary measures, including the use of force, to keep the canal open, he nearly stalled the proceedings. Panama would not accept any such amendment. Happily for the Carter administration, DeConcini consented to place his affirmation of U.S. prerogatives in a reservation; as such, it required no Panamanian approval. Nevertheless, the terminology almost provoked General Torrijos into forsaking the effort. As it turned out, the treaties won acceptance by Panamanian voters and the U.S. Senate, where ratification took place in March and April 1978 by identical margins of 68 to 32. A shift of two votes would have resulted in a defeat. Torrijos later said that he would have destroyed the canal if the proceedings had gone the other way. Normally, Gaddis Smith notes, “a President grows stronger by winning a hard political fight.” But Carter’s narrow victory brought him no credit among the constituents of the conservative right. In fact, the treaties turned into liabilities when Ronald Reagan, the most likely Republican challenger in 1980, assailed them as signs of weakness. According to Reagan, the Carter administration had given away the Panama Canal, thereby running a risk of making “this nation Number Two.”
A second risky endeavor for President Carter concerned clear overtures to Fidel Castro, seeking a return of normal diplomatic relations. As Cyrus Vance explained to Carter in October 1976, “The time has come to move away from our past policy of isolation.” As reasons, he claimed that “our boycott has proved ineffective, and there has been a decline of Cuba’s export of revolution in the region.” Moreover, he suggested, Castro might reciprocate with greater restraint in Africa. Though ambivalent during the campaign, Carter subsequently removed restrictions on travel to Cuba and authorized “interest sections” in third-world embassies to facilitate quasi-official communications. Castro responded with caution, indicating that he welcomed better relations and might release some American prisoners from Cuban jails.
Nevertheless, there were insuperable problems. Officials in the Carter administration objected to the presence of Cuban troops already in Angola, and to a parallel move into Ethiopia, early in 1978. In the U.S. view, these acts in unstable African regions served Soviet interests, not legitimate Cuban concerns. Other difficulties arose with reports of Soviet misbehavior in Cuba. In 1978, Carter’s critics alleged the arrival of twenty-three Soviet MiG fighter-bombers, presumably in violation of earlier agreements, and, in 1979, a combat brigade. Though unsubstantiated and probably overdrawn, such suspicions effectively ruined all hopes for a Cuban rapprochement during the Carter presidency.
Finally, the Carter administration’s advocacy of human rights pertained most directly to the ABC countries. Historically different from the smaller and weaker nations of Central America and the Caribbean, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile on occasion had displayed more capacity to resist pressures from Washington. During the Carter years, they had all operated under authoritarian military rulers who lacked much sensitivity to human rights. In fact, murderous campaigns against political dissidents had resulted in outrageous violations. Moreover, each regime responded with fierce resentment to criticism from the Carter administration. As Brzezinski noted, the United States consequently ran the risk “of having bad relations simultaneously” with all three.65
In Argentina, a military junta under army chief of staff Jorge Rafael Videla took over on March 24, 1976. Seeking order after a period of instability, inflation, and despair, the government cracked down on dissent, waging “a dirty war” at home, with scant recognition of traditional political or civil rights. Armed gangs, ostensibly operating with official sanction, attacked suspected subversives. They often vanished without a trace, becoming known as desaparecidos; probably as many as ten thousand were killed. The ensuing mix of authoritarian politics and free-market economics constituted an intriguing contradiction.66
Such violations ran counter to Carter’s human rights policy. To ignore them would render the policy meaningless. Soon after taking office, Secretary of State Vance in February 1977 expressed disapproval by announcing a $17 million dollar reduction in foreign aid. Argentine officials responded with denunciations of U.S. interference in their internal affairs. Meanwhile, human rights champions in the U.S. Congress also demanded cuts in military aid. The Carter administration agreed and arranged to block Argentine loans through the Inter-American Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank and to impose trade penalties. How to measure the consequences is a problem. In all likelihood, the sanctions had more impact on U.S. companies doing business in Argentina than on the government. Still, President Videla promised, in March 1978, to restore civilian government in another year or so—a promise he did not keep—and he also released some political prisoners. “On balance,” Gaddis Smith explains, “the application of human-rights principles” in relations with Argentina was a mixed thing, a combination of sticks and carrots, favoring the former. As Smith also suggests, it was “not pure, but it was good.” In response, the junta may have adjusted its practices somewhat.
In relations with Brazil, defined as the most developed country in the Third World, the era of the “unwritten alliance” had long since passed away. For the most, part the military authoritarians in control since the mid-1960s had pursued their own course, more or less independent of the United States, unless they found it advantageous to do otherwise. Carter had offended them during the campaign by characterizing their regime as “a military dictatorship” that was in many instances “highly repressive to political prisoners.” Consequently, early in 1977, when the State Department issued a report on Brazilian human rights violations, president Ernesto Geisel simply canceled a 25-year-standing military assistance agreement. In this way, he rejected the aid before the Carter administration could deny it.
Another issue in Brazilian relations concerned nuclear proliferation. In 1967, Brazil refused the Treaty of Tlatelolco, banning nuclear weapons from Latin America. Then, in June 1975, Brazil struck a deal with West German suppliers to increase nuclear-generating capability and to acquire the means for reprocessing uranium for weapons production. Distressed by the implications, U.S. officials objected, and the Ford administration tried without much success to mitigate the effects. Upon assuming the presidency, Carter authorized a protest to chancellor Helmut Schmidt of West Germany against sales of nuclear materials to Brazil, which outraged Brazilian leaders who claimed that this was an unwarranted and devious interference in their affairs. Seeking then to repair the damage, the Carter administration let up on the pressure over human rights and nuclear issues and, instead, commended Brazil for moving toward a more open political system. For symbolic reasons, the administration also arranged for a series of official visits to Brazil, in 1977 and 1978, by Cyrus Vance, Rosalynn Carter, and the president himself. Despite such shows, the United States could not persuade Brazil to participate in the grain embargo against the Soviet Union after the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Relations with Chile also soured during the Carter years. The regime under General Pinochet was friendly toward U.S. corporations but not to Carter who, during the campaign, had attacked the Nixon administration’s complicity in the overthrow of Salvador Allende. Though the worst excesses had ended by 1977, the State Department remained critical of human rights violations and cut back aid. Pinochet in turn aroused U.S. anger by refusing to extradite three Chileans accused of murdering a Pinochet opponent, Orlando Letelier, in Washington.67 Poor relations persisted. The record of accomplishment for human rights advocacy remained mixed.
The Carter administration’s effort to break loose from traditional Cold War constraints fell short of its aims. The Panama negotiations, despite treaties, entailed damaging political costs because of Republican attacks. The Cuban issue defied settlement, and attempts to uphold human rights in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile had ambivalent consequences. The defense of morality and reason in conjunction with power had side effects, sometimes unforeseen, that almost always precipitated complications in relations with countries defined as friendly. For the Carter administration, everything got worse during the disastrous year of 1979. A resurgence of Cold War tensions following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan altered the international context and enhanced perceptions of Carter as a weak and ineffective president. The triumph of revolutionary movements in Nicaragua and Iran had similar effects, and Carter’s critics eviscerated him. In 1980, Ronald Reagan and the Republicans promised to set things right.
1. Robert E. Quirk, Fidel Castro (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), chaps. 1–6; Morris H. Morley, Imperial State and Revolution: The United States and Cuba, 1952–1986 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), chap. 2.
2. Thomas G. Paterson, Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 20.
3. Fidel Castro Ruz, History Will Absolve Me (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975).
4. Stephen G. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 118.
5. Louis Pérez, Jr., On Becoming Cuban (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
6. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America, 120; Paterson, Contesting Castro, chaps. 1–4; Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), chaps. 8–9.
7. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America, 120–23.
8. Richard M. Nixon, Six Crises (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), 352; Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America, 124.
9. Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All : Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), chaps. 5–7.
10. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America, 124–25.
11. Richard E. Welch, Jr., Response to Revolution: The United States and the Cuban Revolution, 1959–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 9–26; Pérez, Cuba and the United States, chap. 9; Paterson, Contesting Castro, chaps. 21–22.
12. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America, 127–33, 141, 149.
13. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America, 137; Thomas G. Paterson and Dennis Merrill, eds., Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 2 vols., 4th ed. (Lexington, MA.: D. C. Heath, 1995), 462–67, chap. 2.
14. Luis Martínez-Fernández, Revolutionary Cuba: A History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014).
15. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America, 163–73.
16. Thomas G. Paterson, “Fixation with Cuba: The Bay of Pigs, Missile Crisis, and Covert War against Fidel Castro,” in Kennedy’s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961–1963, ed. Thomas G. Paterson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 126.
17. Thomas G. Paterson, “John F. Kennedy’s Quest for Victory and Global Crisis,” in Paterson, Kennedy’s Quest, 3–23.
18. James N. Giglio, The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), 45–48.
19. Stephen G. Rabe, “Controlling Revolutions: Latin America, the Alliance for Progress, and Cold War Anti-Communism,” in Paterson, Kennedy’s Quest, 105–22.
20. Rabe, “Controlling Revolutions,” 105; Edwin Lieuwen, Generals vs. Presidents: Neo-militarism in Latin America (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964), 10–68.
21. Jerome Levinson and Juan de Onís, The Alliance That Lost Its Way: A Critical Report on the Alliance for Progress (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970); Rabe, “Controlling Revolutions,” 110–13.
22. Louis Pérez, Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
23. Rabe, “Controlling Revolutions,” 110–12, 115–19; Edwin McCammon Martin, Kennedy and Latin America (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), chap. 10.
24. Giglio, Presidency of John F. Kennedy, 52–55.
25. Thomas G. Paterson, ed., Kennedy’s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961-1963 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 123.
26. Trumbull Higgins, The Perfect Failure: Kennedy, Eisenhower, and the CIA at the Bay of Pigs (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989); Giglio, Presidency of John F. Kennedy, 51, 55, 57.
27. Martínez-Fernández, Revolutionary Cuba, 76–80.
28. Martínez-Fernández, Revolutionary Cuba, 80–82.
29. Higgins, Perfect Failure, chaps. 7–8; Paterson, “Fixation with Cuba,” 132, 136–41.
30. Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 206–7.
31. Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, 260; Paterson, “Fixation with Cuba,” 142–43.
32. Giglio, Presidency of John F. Kennedy, 193; Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963 (New York: Edward Burlingame Books, 1991), 450.
33. Paterson, “Fixation with Cuba,” 143–45.
34. Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, 262, 266–68; Paterson, “Fixation with Cuba,” 145.
35. Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy (New York: Dell, 1964), chaps. 13–16; Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1965), chap. 30; Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), chap. 24.
36. Paterson, “Fixation with Cuba,” 148–55; Richard J. Walton, Cold War and Counter-Revolution: The Foreign Policy of John F. Kennedy (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972), chap. 7.
37. Joseph S. Tulchin, “The Promise of Progress: U.S. Relations with Latin America during the Administration of Lyndon B. Johnson,” in Lyndon Johnson Confronts the World: American Foreign Policy, 1963–1968, ed. Warren I. Cohen and Nancy Bernkopf Tucker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 211.
38. Paul K. Conkin, Big Daddy from the Pedernales: Lyndon Baines Johnson (Boston: Twayne, 1986), 176–200.
39. Tulchin, “Promise of Progress,” 219–20, 227–28.
40. John H. Coatsworth, Central America and the United States: The Clients and the Colossus (New York: Twayne, 1994), 96; Michael L. Conniff, Panama and the United States: The Forced Alliance (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 116–25.
41. Tulchin, “Promise of Progress,” 228–32; Coatsworth, Central America and the United States, 112, 14–16.
42. Gerald K. Haines, The Americanization of Brazil: A Study of U.S. Cold War Diplomacy in the Third World, 1945–1954 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1989), chaps. 4–8; Samuel L. Baily, The United States and the Development of South America, 1945–1975 (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976), chap. 5; W. Michael Weis, Cold Warriors and Coups d’Etat: Brazilian-American Relations, 1945–1964 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 135; Elizabeth A. Cobbs, The Rich Neighbor: Rockefeller and Kaiser in Brazil (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
43. Weis, Cold Warriors, 134, 138–39, 141, 143–46, 149–57, 162, 166–67.
44. Weis, Cold Warriors, 166–68; William O. Walker III, “Mixing the Sweet with the Sour: Kennedy, Johnson, and Latin America,” in The Diplomacy of the Crucial Decade: American Foreign Relations during the 1960s, ed. Diane B. Kunz (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 62.
45. Tulchin, “Promise of Progress,” 233–35; Piero Gleijeses, The Dominican Crisis: The 1965 Constitutionalist Revolt and American Intervention, trans. Lawrence Lipson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), chaps. 1–3; G. Pope Atkins and Larman C. Wilson, The Dominican Republic and the United States: From Imperialism to Transnationalism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), chaps. 4–5.
46. Tulchin, “Promise of Progress,” 235.
47. Robert Freeman Smith, The Caribbean World and the United States: Mixing Rum and Coca-Cola (New York: Twayne, 1994), 49; Tulchin, “Promise of Progress,” 236.
48. Tulchin, “Promise of Progress,” 236–37; Atkins and Wilson, Dominican Republic and the United States, chaps. 6–8.
49. Tulchin, “Promise of Progress,” 236–37, 241.
50. Introductions to dependency theory appear in Andre Gunder Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution: Essays on the Development of Underdevelopment and the Immediate Enemy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969); Ronald H. Chilcote and Joel C. Edelstein, eds., Latin America: The Struggle with Dependency and Beyond (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974); Chilcote and Edelstein, eds., Latin America: Capitalist and Socialist Perspectives of Development and Underdevelopment (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986); and Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). Robert A. Packenham, The Dependency Movement: Scholarship and Politics in Development Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), presents a devastating criticism, seeking to disenroll dependency theory as a form of knowledge.
51. Robert D. Schulzinger, Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
52. Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the White House (New York: Summit Books, 1983), 263.
53. Paul E. Sigmund, The United States and Democracy in Chile (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 91.
54. Quirk, Fidel Castro, 567–85; Jorge Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution: Cuba’s Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), chap. 8.
55. Michael J. Francis, “United States Policy toward Latin America during the Kissinger Years,” in United States Policy in Latin America: A Quarter Century of Crisis and Challenge, 1961–1986, ed. John D. Martz (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 35.
56. Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon, 3 vols. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 381, chap. 2.
57. Ambrose, Nixon, 382–83, chap. 2; Francis, “Kissinger Years,” 39–42; Coniff, Panama and the United States, 128–34.
58. William F. Sater, Chile and the United States: Empires in Conflict (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 139–58.
59. Hersh, Price of Power, 265, 278; Sater, Chile and the United States, 167–71.
60. Sater, Chile and the United States, 167–71.
61. Sater, Chile and the United States, presents a balanced view. Hersh, Price of Power, and James D. Cockcroft, Latin America: History, Politics, and U.S. Policy, 2d ed. (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1996), chap. 17, are critical of the U.S. role. Mark Falcoff, Modern Chile, 1970–1989 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions, 1989), holds Allende responsible for his own demise.
62. Sater, Chile and the United States; Sigmund, United States and Democracy in Chile.
63. Gaddis Smith, Morality, Reason, and Power: American Diplomacy in the Carter Years (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), chap. 1.
64. G. Smith, Morality, Reason, and Power, 15, 40, 109–13.
65. G. Smith, Morality, Reason, and Power, 115, 117, 127; William J. Jorden, Panama Odyssey (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984).
66. Joseph S. Tulchin, Argentina and the United States: A Conflicted Relationship (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 141–45.
67. G. Smith, Morality, Reason, and Power, 129–31.