What role did external pressures—specifically, Washington’s strong opposition to the Cuban revolutionary government—play in Cuba’s decision to join the Soviet camp? For a long time, the predominant view among liberals and many leftists has been that U.S. Cold War foreign policy during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations was responsible for pushing Fidel Castro and his government into the arms of the Soviet Union and Communism. This approach has shown remarkable endurance among North Americans to the left of the political center as the predominant commonsense explanation of the fate of the Cuban Revolution and its relations with the United States. Such a view clearly implies that the United States could have adopted significantly different policies and that the actions of Cuba’s revolutionary leaders can be explained primarily as reactions to the American foreign policy of the time.1
Other interpretations have given a great deal more importance to the ideas and actions of the Cuban revolutionary leaders. Thus, for historian Richard E. Welch Jr., Cuban leaders established the main course of the revolution. Welch acknowledges what he sees as the many errors of American policy: U.S. officials placed undue emphasis on cash compensation for American properties expropriated by the agrarian reform law, the Eisenhower administration could have offered economic assistance to the Castro regime rather than waiting for requests that never came, the United States was negligent in patrolling Florida airfields and policing the activities of Cuban refugees, Washington was guilty of pressuring some of its European allies not to sell arms to Cuba on the basis of overstated claims that Havana was inspiring rebel invasions against dictatorial regimes in the Caribbean, and finally the United States exaggerated Communist influence in Cuba during the early period of the revolution.2 Nevertheless, Welch finds it “doubtful” that “these errors singly or collectively altered the course of the Cuban Revolution or fundamentally determined the domestic and foreign policies of the Cuban government between January 1959 and March 1960. Possibly they accelerated in a limited way the radicalization of the revolution.”3 While Welch’s analysis recognizes the centrality of the Cuban leaders’ initiatives and actions in determining the direction taken by the revolutionary process, he seems to assume that in so doing, they somehow diminished the importance of U.S. policy. In other words, he implicitly discarded the possibility that although the Cuban leaders may have been responsible for the revolution’s course, the United States still played a major role in the revolution’s development.
Part of the problem with Welch’s analysis as well as that of many other historians and social scientists is that he restricts his focus to the explicit decisions made and policies implemented, omitting key questions pertaining to the institutionalized power relationships between the United States and Cuba. Such relationships unquestionably express themselves in specific policies, but only an institutional power analysis can determine the relative importance of different kinds of policies and provide knowledge of the systemic and powerful constraints on governmental policy making in general.
Welch identifies various “errors” in the U.S. Cuban policy in the early period of the revolution: some indeed were errors in the sense that alternative courses of action might have been compatible with U.S. interests; others, however, were not errors at all but inflexible policies institutionally determined by the system of U.S. imperial commitments and business needs. For example, the demand for cash payment for expropriated American properties was more institutionally determined than Washington’s “negligence” (if it really was negligence) in not patrolling Florida airfields to prevent hostile flights over Cuba near the beginning of Castro’s rule. An institutional analysis requires some overall notion of what kind of revolution, broadly speaking, the United States would and could have accepted in the Latin America of the 1950s and 1960s. Thus, if it can be shown that the United States was not willing to accept a radical social revolution, then the actions taken by the revolutionary leaders acquire a different meaning, particularly if their actions represented a well-founded anticipation of what Washington would not allow. These leaders might have opted for the tactic of striking first to compensate for their weakness in relation to the United States and to take advantage of the element of surprise. In this sense, the question of whether Fidel Castro—or, for that matter, Eisenhower and Kennedy—acted first in any given context is of secondary importance, at least as far as the issue of assigning moral and political responsibility is concerned.4
With these analytical considerations in mind, we now turn to an analysis of the policies that Washington pursued. First, it is important to consider the historical context, to remind ourselves that U.S. interest in Cuba goes back well into the nineteenth century, when at various times members of several powerful circles spoke of annexing the island.5 A critical period was the late 1890s, when the Spanish atrocities against the Cuban fighters for independence became grist for the mill of the yellow Hearst press. Hearst’s pioneering efforts in mass propaganda facilitated the imperial ambitions of key sections of the American ruling class by manufacturing popular support for the Spanish-American War and subsequent occupation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. This first occupation lasted four years and ended in Cuba winning nominal independence in 1902 under U.S. control, as guaranteed by the Platt Amendment, which gave the United States various rights, such as the right to maintain military bases in Cuba (eventually reduced to one in Guantánamo). The most important American prerogatives were spelled out in title III, which gave the United States “the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property and individual liberty,” and in title IV, which ratified and validated “all acts of the United States in Cuba during its military occupancy.”6 The latter provision was quite important because while occupying Cuba, U.S. military authorities had given concessions to U.S. enterprises in various fields, particularly public utilities. Title IV ensured that none of those concessions would be altered or declared invalid by any future Cuban government.
The situation essentially represented de facto if not fully de jure colonialism. For more than three decades, U.S. economic and political control of the island republic was quite open and was often reinforced by actual or threatened military intervention. Foreign domination, in combination with the native class system, produced a political system dominated by two almost indistinguishable political parties, the Conservatives and Liberals, who alternated in office under the leadership of their usually corrupt chieftains. Cuban politicians accommodated themselves to the internal and external status quo, and some had direct ties to U.S. business.
The frustrated revolution of 1933 altered and complicated this arrangement with the eventual development of a Cuban domestic equivalent of the U.S. New Deal, which was enshrined in the democratic and progressive 1940 constitution. However, important parts of this document (e.g., agrarian reform) were never implemented during the period of constitutional rule, which lasted through 1952. As we saw in greater detail in chapter 1, the Cuban state also acquired a major role in the regulation of economic activity. Thus, by 1937, a number of laws, including the Ley de Coordinación Azucarera (Law of Sugar Coordination), had legalized state control of all sugar-producing land, provided for state allocation of quotas to producers and regulation of prices and wages, and established measures protecting the rights of the small and medium-sized sugar farmers (colonos). These laws did not apply to nonsugar farmers, who had less legal protection, and to squatters, who had none. These laws of course could not have solved the agrarian problem since they left untouched most of the evils of rural Cuba described in chapter 1.
The post-1933 period could be described as a transition from a de facto colonialism to a neocolonial arrangement. The Platt Amendment was repealed; in exchange, Cuba agreed to lease to the United States the land for the Guantánamo Naval Base in perpetuity, and the two countries signed a trade reciprocity treaty that institutionalized Cuba’s sugar monoculture and economic dependence on the U.S. market. U.S. economic power remained formidable, although in a developing partnership with Cuban capitalists who achieved considerable economic power, especially in the boom years during and after World War II. Thus, while in 1939 Cuban sugar capitalists owned only 28 percent of the country’s sugar mills, that proportion increased to 45 percent in 1946 and 59 percent in 1955. Similarly, the proportion of total domestically owned deposits in Cuban banks (as distinct from deposits in foreign banks in Cuba) grew from 16.8 percent in 1939 to 60.2 percent in 1955.7
Neocolonialism in Cuba meant that U.S. political control became substantially more indirect, coming to depend to a considerable degree on Cuban politicians’ willingness to ingratiate themselves and anticipate the wishes of Washington and of U.S. business interests rather than on day-to-day U.S. interference in Cuban political decision making. In spite of the relatively greater independence achieved after 1934, the political maturity and self-reliance of Cuba’s political establishment and the economically powerful did not appreciably develop, primarily because these Cubans became accustomed to the idea that they had no need to worry about major social and political threats to their power. The United States would take care of any such threats that arose. This sentiment formed part of a much more generalized attitude among the Cuban people that nothing could be done if the United States did not approve.
During this period, Washington’s policy toward Cuba essentially remained one of law and order and business as usual, not significantly different from its policy toward the rest of Latin America. The Cold War context added new political priorities to the long-standing U.S. concern with protecting its economic interests in Latin America and maintaining its geopolitical hegemony on the continent. Washington now had to line up Latin American governments to act in concert and protect the Western Hemisphere against “foreign subversion” from the Soviet Union and the international Communist movement. These governments acquired a new role as faithful clients whose votes could be counted on at the United Nations and other international organizations such as the Organization of American States. In practice, the defense against Communism meant U.S. endorsement of and support for any and all Latin American governments professing anti-Communism, regardless of whether they had been democratically elected or were military dictatorships, a group that included Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Somoza in Nicaragua, and Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela.
This political context explains why the United States quickly granted diplomatic recognition to the Batista government, established by a March 10, 1952, military coup d’état that put an end to twelve years of elected, constitutional governments. The constitutional period was rife with governmental corruption and violent conflict among political cliques, but it was generally characterized by open and free political life and by the willingness of labor to strike to strengthen its bargaining power. U.S. and Cuban businesspeople welcomed Batista’s return to power after his 1944 electoral defeat, perceiving it as the beginning of a period of stability, law and order, and the reestablishment of labor discipline.8 Washington supported the dictatorship in a variety of ways, particularly by providing military hardware, supplies, and training. This policy persisted until March 1958, when it became clear that the Batista regime faced a serious crisis and would not survive for long. The total absence of Cuban support for Batista brought about a significantly different relationship of political forces that compelled the United States to withdraw most of its previous support for the dictatorship.
The standard model of a business-as-usual, law-and-order foreign policy was no longer adequate to deal with a rapidly changing and potentially dangerous political situation. After March 1958, the U.S. government shifted to a more finely tuned policy toward Cuba, with the eventual goal of getting rid of the no-longer-reliable Batista while preventing the rise to power of Fidel Castro and his rebel army.9 The United States suspended arms shipments to the Batista regime, although some loopholes in this policy remained in place, and the U.S. military mission continued to provide its services to Batista’s armed forces. From March 1958 until Batista’s overthrow on January 1, 1959, the principal issue for Washington was not the claims and rumors about possible links between rebel army leaders such as Raúl Castro and Communism, although these claims were of course hardly reassuring. Nor had the multiclass democratic movement led by the rebel army adopted a clear anti-imperialist, nationalist political posture. Contrary to the claims of many authors,10 an open and explicit anti-imperialist nationalism became a defining feature of the movement only after the rebel victory. The real issue for the United States in the months leading up to the triumph of the revolutionaries was the fact that the movement led by Fidel Castro was not part of Cuba’s traditional political forces and was therefore not a known and tested entity of the sort with which Washington much preferred to deal. The 26th of July Movement was too independent and did not exhibit the reassuring political behavior necessary to earn the U.S. seal of approval. Friction had already occurred, as when Raúl Castro’s rebel forces kidnapped several American citizens in June 1958 to protest the Guantánamo Naval Base’s assistance to the Batista regime.11 However, although even at this early date Washington saw Fidel Castro as an unpredictable wild card who could not be counted on to safeguard U.S. interests in Cuba, it does not automatically follow that he was already viewed as a declared anti-imperialist nationalist—let alone pro-Communist—enemy of the United States.12 For this reason, Washington simultaneously persuaded Batista to resign and helped to organize a military coup aimed at establishing a provisional government and bypassing Castro’s rebel forces. The latter part of this plan turned out to be completely unrealistic and was quickly nipped in the bud by the decisive actions of Castro’s 26th of July Movement. The most important of these actions was a general strike carried out in the first week of January 1959 that was in part celebration and in part a precautionary move on the part of the revolutionary leadership.
In the end, the struggle against Batista had a denouement that neither the United States nor the rebels had anticipated: the complete collapse of the dictatorship, the Cuban armed forces, and consequently the key structures of the Cuban state. It left the United States surprised and concerned. Less than twenty-four hours before Batista left Cuba, Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America R. Roy Rubottom Jr. told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “It has been hard to believe that the Castros alone, that the 26th of July Movement could take over, because they have not had enough broad support in Cuba to do this job by themselves. . . . I would not be happy with Castro solely in command. I cannot quite visualize that at this stage.”13
Because its preferred solution to the terminal crisis of the Batista regime proved an utter failure, the United States confronted a new constellation of social and political forces inside Cuba. Within the next two years, the island republic witnessed a profound process of revolutionary change that sent relations between the United States and Cuba into a severe crisis and led to a break between the two countries at the beginning of 1961 and subsequently to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April of that year.
During this critical period, the institutions in charge of the day-to-day implementation of U.S. foreign policy, such as the State Department and the U.S. embassy in Havana, did not necessarily play the most important roles in making the decisions that shaped this policy. Rather, other parts of the executive branch, especially the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Department of the Treasury, and, of course, the president, played the decisive roles. Moreover, these policies were formulated within a political and social context substantially influenced by the views and interests of U.S. business circles and the political climate fostered by the U.S. press and Congress.
In the earliest days of the Cuban Revolution, the U.S. executive branch adopted a stance that could be described as worried vigilance, expressing neither outright sympathy for nor outright hostility to the new Cuban government but rather exerting subtle but steady pressures while maintaining cautious diplomatic-style correctness. Washington expressed a warmer attitude toward the members of the liberal wing of the first revolutionary cabinet (e.g., Felipe Pazos, president of the National Bank of Cuba) precisely because they were, from the U.S. point of view, tested and proven elements that would at least do no damage to fundamental U.S. interests. Philip Bonsal, a career diplomat, replaced conservative pro-Batista U.S. Ambassador Earl E. T. Smith. Bonsal was a sober and moderate figure who had just served as ambassador to Bolivia, in itself an important fact since Bolivia’s 1952 revolution represented the most significant social revolution in Latin America since the Mexican Revolution earlier in the century. Thus, Washington probably saw in Bonsal a specialist experienced in helping to influence and control governments rooted in revolutionary upheaval.
The broad principles of U.S. policy toward the Cuban Revolution can be easily discerned and were hardly novel in the Latin American context. First came the defense and protection of the political and juridical conditions necessary for the functioning of private property and capitalism, particularly insofar as U.S. investments in Cuba were concerned. Second came the related but not identical Cold War aim of opposition to Communism, domestic or foreign. Located close to the United States, Cuba is part of Latin America, which was considered the safest and most untouchable U.S. sphere of interest (meaning that it was not thought to be in play in relation to the Soviet Union).
Some differences regarding U.S. Cuban policy continued to exist within government circles, especially during the first five months of 1959. Relatively friendliest, or least hostile, toward the Cuban government was Ambassador Bonsal (whose views will be closely examined later in this chapter). The State Department showed a greater willingness to pressure the Cuban government than did Bonsal but was still relatively circumspect and conscious of public relations, particularly the protection of the U.S. image in Cuba and Latin America. To take an important example, the State Department repeatedly expressed its concern within the inner circles of the Eisenhower administration about the clandestine, hostile flights over Cuba (which increasingly included sabotage) originating in Florida. In a confidential memo sent to the Secretary of State on October 23, 1959, Undersecretary Rubottom expressed this concern, arguing that the flights were highly prejudicial to U.S. relations with Cuba and would give Castro “the one issue which could be sure to rally the Cuban people around him and win the sympathy of other Latin Americans, thus undermining the efforts of all those desiring to bring about in Cuba a more moderate policy and one of increased friendship with the United States.”14 Rubottom’s detailed recommendations to end the flights were then endorsed by the secretary of state, Christian A. Herter. On December 30, 1959, Rubottom went further, proposing to Herter that former Batista officials accused of atrocities and engaged in activities against the Cuban government be removed from Florida.15 The Department of State continued to object to these illegal flights several months later, when U.S. policy toward Cuba had entered a much more aggressive and interventionist phase. Thus, on February 24, 1960, a confidential memo from Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lester D. Mallory to Acting Secretary of State C. Douglas Dillon virtually repeated the rationale of the October 23, 1959, memo and made a new set of recommendations to stop them; Dillon approved these new recommendations.16
Some of these highly placed functionaries in the State Department, so concerned with their own public relations functions within the overall foreign policy division of labor, apparently failed to understand where U.S. policy was headed in this area. This phenomenon points to the qualitatively diminished weight of normal diplomatic considerations in a critical situation where far weightier interests were at stake. Thus, while Ambassador Bonsal and some State Department officials wrung their hands about air raids originating in the United States, something else was happening in more politically powerful Washington circles. At a December 16, 1959, National Security Council meeting at which Dillon was present, Rubottom was criticized for his views on Cuba, and the attorney general remarked that his department could either be tough or lenient with respect to anti-Castro elements operating in Florida. He added that he needed policy guidance before specific instructions could be given to Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in the Miami area. According to the attorney general, between thirty and forty agents in that area were spending all their time on Cuban affairs, but they were having difficulties because of uncertainty about to whether anti-Castro activities should be permitted. Allen W. Dulles of the CIA commented that the answer depended on what the anti-Castro forces were planning, since the United States could not let the Batista-type elements do whatever they wanted.17 About a month later, at the January 14, 1960, National Security Council session (that is, before the February 24 Mallory memorandum), with Rubottom in attendance, Eisenhower’s assistant for national security, Gordon Gray, asked if U.S. policy included attempting to stop anti-Castro elements from preparing actions against Cuba from U.S. territory. President Eisenhower tellingly responded that “it was perhaps better not to discuss this subject. The anti-Castro agents who should be left alone were being indicated.”18 U.S. laws, including the Neutrality Act, apparently were disregarded when important imperial interests were at stake.
Other elements within governmental circles were much less circumspect and restrained than the State Department. Admiral Arleigh Burke of the Joint Chiefs of Staff always took the hardest line on Cuba. In July 1958, Burke had proposed using U.S. troops to rescue the American hostages held by Raúl Castro.19 Dulles was unwilling to grant respect to Cuba’s leaders, arguing on February 12, 1959, that “the new Cuban officials had to be treated more or less like children. They had to be led rather than rebuffed. If they were rebuffed, like children, they were capable of doing almost anything.”20 Vice President Richard Nixon declared to his fellow members of the National Security Council in December 1959 that “we needed to find a few dramatic things to do with respect to the Cuban situation in order to indicate that we would not allow ourselves to be kicked around completely.”21 However, it is not true that Nixon began advocating the overthrow of Castro immediately after meeting the Cuban leader in April 1959, as Nixon claimed in his 1979 book, Six Crises,22 where he criticized Kennedy’s 1960 electoral campaign and misrepresented his own relatively moderate views at the time the interview with Fidel Castro took place.23 Rather, Nixon took a few months before coming to regard Fidel Castro as a danger. By midsummer 1959, the vice president had begun to urge President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Christian Herter to adopt a more belligerent attitude toward the Cuban government and to consider ways to undermine it.24
The U.S. Congress played a very minor role in terms of U.S. government decisions concerning Cuba, as witnessed by the surrender of legislative authority over the Cuban sugar quota to the president. Nevertheless, Congress, animated for the most part by an ideology hostile to revolution and of course to Communism, was quite important in helping to turn public opinion against the Cuban leadership. Before January 1, 1959, only a handful of representatives and senators, the most vocal of which were Charles Porter and Wayne Morse of Oregon and Adam Clayton Powell of New York, had expressed any concern about let alone opposition to the misdeeds of the Batista dictatorship or any sympathy for the opposition. And even this small amount of congressional sympathy for the Cuban revolutionaries diminished further after Batista’s overthrow. In fact, Morse quickly turned against the new Cuban government after the executions of Batistianos (discussed later in this chapter) early in 1959.25 After traveling to Cuba in March 1959, Powell met with two State Department officials in charge of the Office of Caribbean and Mexican Affairs and gave them a very negative report on the situation that included a number of exaggerations and wild charges, among them the claim that the Communists had taken control of the 26th of July Movement newspaper Revolución (at the time and for months thereafter one of the principal press organs openly polemicizing against the Communists!). The State Department officer who drafted the report of the interview commented that Powell had been most cordial and disarmingly frank and had admitted “that he had been misled and previously misjudged several aspects of the current Cuban scene. One can speculate that he is about to change horses—among other things.”26
When scores of Batistiano officials were executed in January 1959, U.S. Representative Wayne L. Hays called for a proscription on tourist travel to Cuba and if necessary a trade embargo. Representative Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn proposed that the issue of the executions be taken to the United Nations. Representative Victor Anfuso of New York stated that Castro was no better than Batista and that the new Cuban leader should study a map of the Western Hemisphere so he could learn the facts of life affecting the Cuban economy. Anfuso threatened to move to drastically curtail the Cuban sugar quota.27
Fidel Castro and Congress enjoyed a brief honeymoon during the Cuban leader’s April 1959 visit to the United States. Castro appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and denied any connection with Communism, thereby earning what turned out to be temporary praise and friendship from such legislators as Alabama Senator John Sparkman and Congressman James G. Fulton of Pennsylvania. Florida’s George Smathers was more cautious, praising Castro as a “good man” but expressing doubts about others in his government.28
But hostilities resumed soon thereafter, in the wake of the Cuban government’s May 1959 agrarian reform law (discussed in more detail later in this chapter). At this point the most important congressional action of the early phase of U.S.-Castro relations took place in July 1959 when the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, chaired by Mississippi Senator James Eastland, openly attacked the Cuban government, taking U.S. official criticism to a new level. The subcommittee held closed as well as public hearings featuring testimony by Major Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz, the former chief of the Cuban air force, who had arrived in Miami on July 1 on a small boat. Díaz Lanz’s testimony was full of charges about Communist infiltration of the Cuban armed forces and about Castro’s support of expeditions to overthrow other Latin American governments. These hearings had an important effect on Cuban public opinion and benefited the Castro government by cementing the developing mass anti-imperialist consciousness. They also placed the nascent opposition into a clearly defensive posture, forcing it to distance itself from and even criticize the actions of the congressional committee.29 By the fall of 1960, even the most liberal members of the House and Senate appeared to agree that Castro endangered American security. According to historian Richard E. Welch Jr., the liberals were ambivalent about how to meet that danger, in part because they did not want to appear to be left-wing pacifists unconcerned with the demands of national security.30
During the early months of 1959, Washington’s overall policy assumed that pressure could still reform the Cuban government and push it toward friendlier policies concerning U.S. interests, although American policy makers were not completely united in this orientation. While Washington worried about Cuban leaders’ growing anti-imperialism, the fact remained that the new government’s radical early 1959 measures (e.g., drastic reductions in rents) had had very little effect on U.S. interests on the island. The important exception was the Cuban government’s takeover of U.S.-owned public utilities, but this economic sector had been the expected target of any reform government in Cuba and did not by itself signify a broad offensive against U.S. and other foreign investments. In fact, in early 1959, Ambassador Bonsal even offered technical assistance to the Cuban Ministry of Communications on how to run the telephone company after the government had “intervened.”31
U.S. policy became much more hostile—based on the conclusion that the Cuban government could not be reformed and thus had to be replaced—shortly after Havana adopted the agrarian reform law in May 1959. Although radical, the law was not Communist because it emphasized land redistribution. While it referred rather vaguely to the creation of some form of cooperatives, it did not even remotely hint that collectivization in the form of state farms would later become Cuba’s predominant form of agricultural organization. Nevertheless, the agrarian reform law limited individual ownership to a maximum of 995 acres, and compensation for expropriated property was to be based on the assessed land valuation for tax purposes, which obviously underestimated the true market value. Payments were to be made with twenty-year government bonds bearing 4.5 percent annual interest.
While many important U.S. capital investments in Cuba remained unaffected by the announced agrarian reform, the law nevertheless marked the beginning of a new stage in relations between Cuba and the United States. On June 11, Washington officially responded to the agrarian reform law with a diplomatic note aptly described by U.S. historian William Appleman Williams as “proper, cold, blunt and more than a bit intimidating.”32 This note contained a number of criticisms of the law as well as some subtle threats. However, the greatest emphasis was placed on the demand for appropriate cash compensation. Subsequently, the phrase “prompt, adequate and effective compensation for American properties expropriated in accordance with the accepted principles of international law”33 became a mantra in U.S. claims against the Cuban government. In any case, the agrarian reform clearly indicated that the Castro government had turned a page as far as Washington was concerned. Harry R. Turkel, director of the State Department’s Office of Inter-American Regional Economic Affairs, succinctly summarized the U.S. view: “I interpret our policy during the first six months of the Castro regime as being one of giving him a chance to succeed and in the meantime working to strengthen the moderates around him in the hope that the extreme leftists would be discredited or shoved aside. With the signature of the Agrarian Reform Law, it seems clear that our original hope was a vain one; Castro’s government is not the kind worth saving.”34
Although the first CIA front organization (the Double Check Corporation) was set up in Miami in May 1959,35 not until the fall of 1959 did military activities began to play a central role in U.S. Cuban policy. From June on, the U.S. government had focused its efforts first on trying to foment and develop an internal opposition inside Cuba rather than merely pressuring Havana, as had been the case earlier in the year, and second on shaping an economic strategy centering on a possible reduction or total elimination of Cuba’s share of the U.S. sugar import quota.36 In Washington, D.C., on June 1, 1959, less than a month after the approval of the agrarian reform law, eleven highly placed officials with such executive government agencies as the White House staff, the Departments of State and Agriculture, and the Council on Foreign Economic Policy held a meeting at which Department of Agriculture representatives, clearly guided by domestic concerns and ignoring imperial priorities, argued that the administration should recommend an extension of the Sugar Act without a change in the existing quotas, notwithstanding recent developments in Cuba. The only change they recommended was granting authority to the president to adjust quotas in case of a sugar shortage, which U.S. critics of the Cuban agrarian reform law predicted would arise as a result of economic disorder and chaos provoked by the measure. Rubottom and Thomas Mann, representing the State Department at this meeting, argued against the agriculture officials. Rubottom maintained that if the Sugar Act were to be extended without change, Castro would interpret the action as a vindication of his prediction that the United States would never reduce Cuba’s quota in retaliation for expropriation of American properties. Rubottom wanted to keep the question of the sugar quota open to use it as leverage in obtaining amendments to that law, and he urged that the president receive authority to change the sugar quota for any reason, not just if a shortage of sugar production occurred in Cuba. At the same time, Rubottom did not want Congress to take up the issue of the sugar quotas because he feared that doing so would lead to premature and unwarranted reductions and weaken moderate Cuban forces that supported U.S. efforts to obtain changes in the agrarian reform law. Mann declared that he could not support a bill that would assure Cuba 70 percent of all U.S. sugar imports for several years while $800 million in U.S. investments was being threatened.37
By the fall of 1959, relations between the U.S. and Cuban governments clearly had deteriorated considerably. By November, even Bonsal had given up all hope of influencing or winning over Castro’s government. The removal of most liberal ministers from the Cuban cabinet eliminated the one remaining source of optimism for U.S. moderates who had pressed for a change from within the Cuban government. In addition, the forced resignation of anti-Communist President Manuel Urrutia in July 1959 and the less obvious but perhaps most important development—the inability of Ambassador Bonsal and Washington to coax Fidel Castro into negotiating with the United States—contributed to the growing conviction of even the most cautious elements in the U.S. government that the Castro regime had to be removed. The center of gravity of U.S. policy making had now moved to the position that some form of military intervention constituted the only remaining option. As this shift took place, the president, the CIA, and the National Security Council became ever more involved in the direct management of Cuba policy, thereby reducing the State Department’s weight and influence. Although a clear hardening toward Havana had taken place in the executive branch, Congress continued to stake out even more extreme positions. Senator Eastland took advantage of his subpoena power as head of the Internal Security Subcommittee to bring a number of right-wing Cuban refugees to testify: they leveled wild charges against the Cuban government. In contrast to these witnesses, the CIA’s deputy director general, C. P. Cabell, sounded almost like a liberal when he testified before Eastland’s subcommittee that although Communist influence had grown a great deal since Castro had come to power, he did not believe that the new Cuban leader had been a Communist while he was a guerrilla chief fighting Batista or that he was even now a member of the Cuban Communist Party.38
By the end of 1959, the U.S. government was beginning to develop a program to get rid of the Castro government through the use of force. That fall, the United States successfully lobbied the reluctant British government not to provide military aircraft to Cuba.39 In December, the State Department suggested that anti-Castro propaganda become the purview of the CIA, and small-scale lower-level operations in Cuba received official sanction from the CIA director’s office. The U.S. government prepared detailed plans to train Cuban exiles for infiltration into Cuba to sabotage sugar mills and other economic targets.40 On December 10, the Defense Department asked Gerard C. Smith, assistant secretary of state for policy planning, to prepare a policy paper on Cuba on the grounds that the military would sooner or later be called on to help.41 On December 29, 1959, Livingston T. Merchant, undersecretary of state for political affairs, proposed to General Nathan B. Twining, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that representatives of the two entities hold weekly meetings to discuss Cuba and other problems in the Caribbean.42
On January 18, 1960, the CIA set up a special task force composed mainly of veterans of the 1954 intervention against the Arbenz government in Guatemala. This task force prepared a wide-ranging attack on the Castro regime.43 Still, President Eisenhower’s mid-February assessment of the existing CIA programs considered them to be too narrow. Eisenhower wondered “why we weren’t trying to identify assets for this and other things as well across the board, including even possibly things that might be drastic.”44 Eisenhower might have been influenced by the fact that Soviet leader Anastas Mikoyan had visited Cuba on February 4—13, leading to the conclusion of a new trade agreement between the Soviet Union and Cuba. Finally, on March 16, 1960, a systematic plan of covert action against the Castro regime was put into place and presented to Eisenhower for approval. Although substantial parts of this plan have not been declassified, they clearly included the U.S. creation of a unified Cuban opposition leadership located outside of that country, a shortwave radio station to be located on Swan Island, the carrying out of sabotage and intelligence activities inside Cuba, and the creation and training of an exile paramilitary force, which would take an estimated six to eight months to be ready for action. This was the origin of the invasion force that the United States landed at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961.45 The CIA also initiated a separate project to assassinate Castro and other top Cuban leaders.46
By early 1960, the various wings of the U.S. government were beginning to close ranks in their efforts to overthrow Castro. In a fundamental sense, the die was cast by February 1960, when the Eisenhower administration systematized its various initiatives to get rid of the Castro leadership. A few last-minute attempts to bring about an understanding between the two countries, such as the late January mediation attempted by Julio Amoedo, the Argentinean ambassador to Havana, went nowhere. After the United States began moving in the direction of overthrowing Castro by force, it clearly did not want any mediation efforts to get in the way, although for obvious reasons Washington did not put forward this position for public consumption. The United States also launched a campaign of economic warfare against the Cuban regime. For example, a $100 million loan to the Cuban government by a consortium of Dutch, French, and West German banks was countermanded under considerable pressure from Washington in March.47
Cuba established formal diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in May 1960, the same month that witnessed substantially increased strains between the United States and the Soviet Union as a result of the Soviets downing an American U-2 plane flying over Russian territory. A planned summit meeting between Eisenhower and Khrushchev was canceled as a consequence of this new friction. At the end of the month, the Cuban government notified U.S. oil companies in Cuba that they would have to refine the Soviet oil Cuba was importing. These companies initially were willing to obey the government’s orders under protest, but they received instructions from U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Robert B. Anderson not to comply. Anderson also persuaded the British to go along with U.S. policies, and as a result neither the U.S. companies nor the British/Dutch–owned Shell refineries agreed to process the Russian oil. Anderson and the Treasury Department acted without clearing the government’s decision with the State Department,48 an indicator of the marginality of professional diplomacy in these types of situations. On June 29, the Cuban government seized the U.S.- and British-owned refineries and had relatively little difficulty overcoming the technical problems in refining Russian oil, contrary to the dire predictions made by U.S. and British management teams.
A swift round of measures and countermeasures followed the seizure of the oil refineries. On July 6, President Eisenhower suspended Cuban sugar shipments for the remainder of the year, hypocritically claiming that he had done so because the United States could not count on Havana’s ability to fulfill the remainder of the 1960 sugar quota. In fact, as Ambassador Bonsal noted later, the suspension of the sugar quota constituted part of the U.S. government’s strategy to overthrow Castro, not, in reality, even a reprisal for the Cuban government’s seizure of the oil refineries.49 On July 9, Soviet Premier Khrushchev made the speech in which he, “metaphorically speaking,” offered to defend Cuba from any U.S. attack with nuclear weapons if doing so proved necessary. During July, Washington continued to lobby and pressure a number of capitalist countries, particularly in Europe, to eliminate or sharply reduce their economic activities in Cuba.50 In August, the Cuban government carried out the large-scale expropriation of the rest of the U.S.-owned properties in Cuba; the large-scale expropriation of Cuban capitalists followed in October.
By the fall of 1960, the United States had considerably tightened the economic pressures on the Cuban government: U.S. citizens were told not to travel to Cuba, and countries receiving U.S. aid were advised not to buy Cuban sugar with the money. On October 19, in the middle of a presidential campaign in which John F. Kennedy and Nixon were competing to be tougher on Castro’s government, Washington announced what constituted nothing less than a full economic blockade of the island. The Eisenhower administration, acting under the authority of the Export Control Act, prohibited all U.S. exports to Cuba except medical supplies and nonsubsidized food products, exceptions that were soon eliminated.51 On January 3, 1961, shortly before Kennedy’s inauguration as president, the United States terminated diplomatic relations with Cuba.
The long-expected invasion was just now a matter of time. On April 15, three bombers piloted by U.S.-trained and -equipped Cuban refugees took off from Nicaragua in an attempt to destroy the small Cuban air force. The raid caused little damage but alerted the Cuban government to the coming invasion. A day later, speaking at the funeral for those killed in the air raid, Fidel Castro declared that the Cuban Revolution was a socialist revolution. The invasion force arrived at Girón Beach in the Bay of Pigs at on April 17; by the afternoon of April 19, the invaders had been defeated.52
U.S. policy toward Cuba in the period 1959–61 also reveals the roles played by the state and business interests in the development and implementation of foreign policy, helping to illuminate the options available to the revolutionary government in dealing with its northern neighbor. By itself, U.S. business could not develop a unified political front or a common strategic and tactical orientation toward Cuba’s revolutionary government. The federal government in Washington had to organize business interests and translate the defense of those interests into a coherent political language and the development of sophisticated strategy and tactics. In addition, the government had to do so while keeping in mind general capitalist interests and the pursuit of geopolitical goals in the Caribbean and the Western Hemisphere. In that sense, the executive of the U.S. state was truly functioning, as Marx put it, as the committee for managing the common affairs of the U.S. capitalist class.
The executive branch, particularly the National Security Council, played the central role in the events discussed in this chapter. In that body, the president hammered out the key policies concerning Cuba in collaboration with the intelligence agencies and several other executive departments such as Treasury and State. But while certain differences existed within Washington concerning Cuba, the government’s policies were more coherent and more systematic than those of corporate America.
Although events in Cuba interested the U.S. business class as a whole, the U.S. corporations with investments in Cuba were by far the most active in voicing their concerns and complaints to members of Congress, the White House, and especially the State Department. In that sense, they constituted an important source of pressure on the government and particularly on the executive branch, which was in charge of U.S. foreign policy. However, corporations did not play a decisive role in the shaping of U.S. policy toward Cuba in part because they could not put forward a unified and coherent strategy toward the Cuban government.
The most active and vocal U.S. capitalists with business interests in Cuba included Robert J. Kleberg, president of the King Ranch cattle empire headquartered in Texas, and Lawrence Crosby, chairman of the U.S.-Cuban Sugar Council, which represented U.S. sugar capital on the island. After the agrarian reform law was approved, Kleberg became very aggressive and in the summer of 1959 proposed to the president and the State Department a far more confrontational approach to the Cuban leaders than Secretary Herter or President Eisenhower, who followed Herter’s advice, was willing to undertake at that moment. Crosby, a more representative businessman in frequent contact with the U.S. embassy in Havana and the State Department in the U.S. capital, usually followed Washington’s policies.53
Although Kleberg, Crosby, and other U.S. capitalists with investments in Cuba closely followed events in the island and actively lobbied the U.S. government to protect their interests there, no equivalent movement arose among individuals and organizations representing broader sectors of U.S. capital. One exception was the U.S. Inter-American Council, a business organization representing U.S. investors in Latin America that unanimously adopted a confrontational resolution against the Cuban government at its June 2, 1959, meeting in Chicago. The resolution was communicated to Secretary Herter on July 1, and Rubottom acknowledged receipt of the council’s letter on July 29, telling the group that its suggestions and point of view were under detailed study. He promised a full reply “shortly.” On October 2, Rubottom sent a formal letter to the council that included a number of generalities about the department’s concern for foreign investors and related matters and then merely restated existing legislation suspending U.S. government assistance to foreign governments that did not treat U.S. interests properly.54
The relative absence of broad business-class intervention in this situation leads to the conclusion that Cuba had limited importance to U.S. business despite its substantial investments there. This issue remains relevant forty-five years later. American corporations are not as interested in the possibility of investing in Cuba as they are, for example, in China. Important sectors of U.S. capital—particularly midwestern agricultural and food-processing businesses—would like to see an end to the economic blockade of Cuba and would love to invest and trade there even more than they already do. Nevertheless, they have not yet been able and/ or willing to summon the political clout to defeat the Cuban American right-wing lobby based in South Florida, the principal power source still defending the blockade.
One important tendency among U.S. corporations in Cuba was to respond on the basis of a narrow, short-term vision instead of considering the long-term interests of U.S. business as a whole. This approach was evident in the different ways in which the government, represented by Treasury Secretary Anderson, and oil executives responded to Cuba’s demand that U.S.-owned refineries in Cuba process oil from the Soviet Union. The same held true for Harold S. Geneen, the president of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, who as late as December 14, 1959, told Assistant Secretary of State Rubottom that he did not want to speak publicly because he still had Cuban properties that had not been seized by the Cuban government. Geneen consequently adopted a moderate line on the U.S.-Cuban conflict, arguing that he did not favor redistributing the Cuban sugar quota to other countries because such a move would do nothing for Cuba in the long term. Instead, Geneen supported the notion of maintaining the Cuban sugar quota while taxing Cuban sugar imports to compensate those who had lost property in that country.55 Similarly, although for different reasons, U.S. industrial consumers of Cuban sugar in the United States, including bottlers, bakers, and confectioners, did not support a rapid, dramatic change in sugar legislation in late November 1959 because “the industrial users consider Cuba the most secure source of sugar for the U.S. over the long run, and do not wish to see market stability sacrificed to obtain negotiating leverage on current problems with the Cuban government.”56
Alongside this narrow, short-range view, U.S. businessmen were also swayed by a certain impressionism and volatility that was not as evident in government circles. Thus, on December 2, 1958, the group of businessmen acting as consultants to U.S. Ambassador to Cuba Earl E. T. Smith took a hard anti-Castro line and proposed that the United States “promote and give full and actual support including arms to a military civilian junta” to prevent Castro from coming to power.57 Yet on January 6, 1959, just a few days after Batista’s overthrow, many of the same people met with Daniel M. Braddock, the second-ranking official at the U.S. embassy (Smith was in the United States). On this occasion, the businessmen were almost enthusiastic about the new Cuban leadership and urged that the United States provide official recognition to the new Cuban government as soon as possible. In fact, group members were more insistent about recognition than were some embassy staff members. As Braddock reported to the State Department, Eugene A. Gilmore, the embassy’s counselor for economic affairs, believed that it would be prudent to await further indications of the new government’s attitude toward U.S. trade and investment but was nevertheless convinced of the need for immediate recognition after hearing the U.S. businessmen. According to Braddock’s dispatch, these men were,
unanimously of the view that present government was much better than they had hoped for, and that it has broad base of popular support (one previously strong Batista supporter said this was most popular government he had seen in Cuba in his sojourn of more than 30 years). They felt that 26th of July had shown intelligence and discipline in handling situation to date, and that Castro was unquestionably boss in Cuba. [The] group felt that early recognition would assist in strengthening 26th against more radical elements in revolutionary movement, and would possibly assist in curbing possible growth of Communist strength.58
Although in this case the businessmen were undoubtedly correct in their assessment of the serious political dangers involved in any further delay of U.S. recognition, it was nevertheless characteristic of the difference between businessmen and the representatives of the U.S. government that Gilmore, the diplomat specializing in economic issues, was more inclined to think in longer, systemic terms.
After the very short lived business enthusiasm for Castro gave way to outright hostility, occasions arose when U.S. investors in Cuba worried about whether the U.S. government might sacrifice their local Cuban-based interests on behalf of policies that would protect the capitalist system as a whole. Thus, in mid-December 1959, as the U.S. government was moving toward an open and full clash with the Cuban government, Crosby and Kleberg were determined that the upcoming sugar legislation should include some provision covering the rights of U.S. investors in Cuba. These investors also worried that high State Department officials might want to take advantage of the existing situation to advance other objectives of U.S. foreign policy, such as spreading the sugar quota among a larger number of countries and bringing the United States into closer compliance with international trade agreements such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Crosby in particular believed that the interests of U.S. investors in Cuba should constitute the paramount factor in the new sugar legislation.59
As the conflict between Cuba and the United States deepened, U.S. businessmen in Cuba started to acquire a consciousness of their long-term common interests. This tendency began to crystallize after the agrarian reform law was approved in May 1959 and was accompanied by a marked decline of general U.S. business confidence in the Cuban economy, as indicated by the fall in the demand for Cuban securities.60 C. Douglas Dillon, at the time undersecretary of state for economic affairs, wrote to Ambassador Bonsal on May 22, 1959, that the law had caused great consternation in government and sugar circles. Crosby called on Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Thomas C. Mann in Washington and declared the law confiscatory and disastrous to the Cuban sugar industry. Because Bonsal had had extensive conversations in Havana with various representatives of U.S.-owned sugar mills, he was asked to come to Washington for a meeting to discuss the situation with Crosby and others as well as to discuss the question of sugar legislation.61
These class-conscious tendencies became more pronounced when relations between the U.S. government and Cuba deteriorated considerably. On September 24, 1959, Bonsal met in Washington with several important State Department functionaries and ten influential sugar industry executives active in Cuba. The meeting revealed a class-conscious position in the form of a domino theory of the impact of Cuban events on other Latin American and economically underdeveloped countries. Thus, Sam H. Baggett, vice president of the United Fruit Company, maintained that agrarian reform in Cuba would have far-reaching effects if it were to become a pattern for other countries in Latin America. Baggett added that if the low valuation of property and payment in IOUs spread, it would force United Fruit out of business. Mann of the State Department referred to growing nationalism worldwide and declared that the United States could not refrain from using such means as it had to protect its interests; otherwise, the United States would have to brace itself for attacks of this nature from every quarter. Finally, B. Rionda Braga, president of the Francisco Sugar Company, argued that if Castro succeeded unchallenged, there would be no respect for contracts throughout the region. W. Huntington Howell, first vice president of the West Indies Sugar Company, agreed with Braga and stated that the situation was desperate: the company was being nibbled to pieces by the Cuban government. John A. Nichols, president of the Cuban American Sugar Company, declared that the agrarian reform formed only a part of the gloomy picture and cited what he described as arbitrary wage increases, decrees lowering utility rates, new tax laws, and general arbitrary treatment. Yet a narrower sectoral approach had not totally disappeared. Lawrence Crosby indicated that the U.S. sugar industry wanted the cane lands to be exempt from the agrarian reform law, although expropriating other lands presented no real problem since U.S. capital was much less involved in nonsugar agricultural pursuits. Crosby was implicitly willing to compromise with the Cuban government if the interests of U.S. sugar capitalists could somehow be protected.62
It also became clear at the September 24 meeting that the sugar capitalists were already engaged in an economic boycott. This was the obvious meaning of the prediction made by Philip Rosenberg, president of the Vertientes-Camagüey Sugar Company, that Cuba would have an ample crop in 1960 but a considerably smaller crop in 1961—probably 20 percent less in the case of his company. The reason was simple: his company had stopped fertilization and new planting. He claimed that he did not want to financially support a hostile government and did not want to sit and wait for the executioner’s sword to drop. Thus, while Washington was forecasting a sugar shortfall in Cuba on the basis of supposed governmental chaos, the North American sugar owners were making sure this shortfall would occur even before the government actually took over the companies’ holdings. On June 29, 1959, Crosby had told the State Department that he seriously doubted reports that the mill owners were not giving advances to colonos for fertilizers, cleaning cane fields, and irrigation. Crosby added that his company was planning to continue such advances, “except perhaps for new cane plantings, which will not produce until 1963.”63
The government bureaucrats who attended the September 24 meeting continued to show greater concern for political appearances than the less politically sophisticated businessmen. When William F. Oliver, president of the American Sugar Refining Company, said that he felt that sufficient sugar could be obtained from various sources other than Cuba should Congress decide to punish Havana through a reduction of the sugar quota, Rubottom and Mann quickly corrected him and pointed out that the United States had not used or desired to use the term “punish” with regard to Cuba.64
By mid-1960 the differences of opinion, tactics, and timing that had existed among U.S. businessmen in Cuba and between these businessmen and the U.S. government had disappeared. These forces pulled together along the lines supported and initiated by the president and the National Security Council, the only entities institutionally capable of hammering out a joint strategy and plan of action with careful attention to tactics and timing. On June 30 high State and Commerce Department officials; representatives of sugar, oil, and banking interests active in Cuba; and members of the Business Advisory Council’s Committee of Consultants on Latin America attended a meeting in Washington. The Committee of Consultants presented a report on how to deal with Cuba, and none of those in attendance raised any substantive objections. Remarkably, the committee had come up with pretty much the same type of recommendations that Eisenhower and the National Security Council had been elaborating during the previous months, including the suggestions that Washington join with other countries in exposing Cuban government’s Communist orientation; that a strong note should be presented to Havana demanding just, adequate, and effective compensation for expropriated U.S. properties; that radio broadcasting to Cuba should be encouraged; that the Cuban situation should be brought before the Organization of American States in consultation with other Latin American countries; that the premium price that the United States paid for Cuban sugar should be eliminated and the president should receive discretionary authority to alter the sugar quotas; that exchange and trade controls should be imposed to eliminate Cuba’s dollar income; that aid and encouragement should be given to the Cuban opposition to overthrow the Castro regime; and that a white paper should be published to show how Cuba threatened peace in the hemisphere.65
At a minimum, this discussion suggests that had the Cuban government chosen the strategy of making deals with individual U.S. firms or even business sectors such as the oil refineries, this approach probably would not have succeeded. The Cuban government would have needed to convince the U.S. government that in making such deals the revolutionary leaders were willing to recognize the sacrosanct principle of “prompt, adequate, and effective compensation” for seized U.S. properties as well as to give up any plans to break with the United States and ally with the Communist world.
We have been examining the roles played by the legislative and the executive branches of the federal government as well as powerful business interests in the development and implementation of U.S. Cuban policy. However, achieving a better understanding of the dynamics of empire requires attending to certain features of the metropolis itself—in particular, how the political climate that provides popular acquiescence if not support to the interests of the dominant business class and its political allies in Washington differs from that of nonimperial societies. One of the most striking features of U.S. political culture is its inability to understand—let alone sympathize with—social revolution. This was especially true of the period that preceded the antiwar and social movements of the 1960s. While the civil rights movement had already come into existence by 1960, it had not yet become a national phenomenon, as it had by 1963, and it had not yet fully developed a radical wing (a process that began in 1960 with the sit-in movement and the activities of Robert Williams and his Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).
Castro enjoyed broad sympathy in the United States while he was fighting in the Sierra Maestra against the Batista dictatorship, and his struggle was widely understood in liberal-democratic and often romantic terms. For a number of reasons, the radicalization of the revolution after Castro came to power sharply reduced U.S. popular support for the Cuban leader. Nevertheless, a small but active minority supported the Cuban revolutionary leadership and played a significant role in the rebirth of a left-wing movement in the United States. This became evident in the protests against the U.S.-sponsored April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.66 On the one hand, these protests were small and politically ineffective in comparison with the gigantic demonstrations against the war in Vietnam that took place later in the decade or with the anti-imperialist movement at the end of the nineteenth century. The Treaty of Paris—hostile to the interests of the rebels in Cuba and the Philippines—was almost defeated in the U.S. Senate in February 1899, and anti-imperialists managed to stir up a major public discussion in the United States.67 On the other hand, the movement in support of the Cuban revolutionaries of the late 1950s and early 1960s constituted a significant departure from the virtual absence of public dissent when the CIA launched its 1954 proxy intervention in Guatemala.68 Nevertheless, in 1962 William Appleman Williams viewed American political culture as fundamentally hostile to revolution: “It has been so long since we had a revolution that we are very much out of touch with that rudimentary feature of political and social reality. This is true even if one views the Civil War, at least in some respects, as a revolution. One hundred years—let alone two centuries—is a long time between revolutions. No other major country in the world has been tucked away in a cocoon for anything approaching that length of time.”69
The problem was not that the American public had no legitimate reasons for concern about the fate of democracy and civil liberties in Fidel Castro’s Cuba but that these legitimate concerns were subordinated to what was at best a tepid, nonmilitant, business-as-usual liberalism that did not question the U.S. empire in any fundamental way. U.S. Cold War liberalism had virtually no legitimacy in the eyes of the one public that counted the most in this context: the great majority of the Cuban people, who were being radicalized and won over by the Castro leadership.
When in the early days of the revolution Congress held outrageous hearings, such as the ones featuring former Cuban air force major Díaz Lanz in June 1959, Ambassador Bonsal and the State Department insisted that they had no control over such right-wing grandstanding because of the separation of powers. However, the average Cuban did not have to be a sophisticated political analyst to realize that such congressional hearings were quite important in helping to create a climate of public opinion justifying U.S. intervention in or reprisals against Cuba.
Bonsal and the State Department also insisted that because the United States had freedom of the press, they were not responsible for whatever unfavorable coverage American newspapers and magazines might provide about Cuba. In fact, the press was even more important than Congress in generating a climate hostile to Cuba. This was especially true of the prominent Luce publications, headed by Time, which became nearly obsessed with uncovering any damning fact they could find or invent about Cuba.70 A number of U.S. journalists, some of them quite influential, such as Herbert Matthews of the New York Times and Jules Dubois of the Chicago Tribune, had strongly supported Castro before the triumph of the revolution, although Dubois came to oppose the revolutionary leader during his first year in power.71 Furthermore, as Richard E. Welch Jr. has argued, in January 1959 most of the U.S. media offered cautious approval of the Cuban Revolution. This attitude, according to Welch, was based on a belated recognition of the cruelties and corruption of the Batista dictatorship, the novelty of the bearded Castro as a Latin American political figure, and the Fidelista assurances that they would bring U.S.-style political democracy as well as social justice to Cuba.72 But that is precisely the point: the U.S. press could muster a degree of sympathy for the Cuban revolutionaries only to the extent that their politics could be understood in terms of the U.S. political system, in which New Deal liberalism constituted the outer limits, on the left, of both the possible and the desirable.
An early test of the ability of the press and public opinion in the United States, including much of liberal opinion, to understand the Cuban Revolution—or any revolution, for that matter—came soon after Batista’s overthrow. Starting in January, several hundred Batistiano members of the police and army were executed under widely varying conditions of legal due process.73 A great hue and cry broke out in the American press and Congress. As Tad Szulc and Karl E. Meyer have described the reaction, “Members of Congress and editorial writers, many of whom had evinced a remarkable stoic detachment about atrocities committed by the Batista dictatorship, were suddenly aroused by the execution of Batista henchmen by revolutionary firing squads.”74 In fact, these executions met with overwhelming approval among Cubans of almost all political inclinations (a reaction that perhaps resembled that aroused by the lynching of secret policemen in 1956 in Hungary). Actually, these punishments constituted an advance on the application of revolutionary justice at other times in Cuban history—for example, during the 1933 revolution. The executions, organized by the new government, prevented informal lynchings. At the very least, torturers and assassins were properly identified, and no innocent bystanders fell prey to the revolutionary settling of accounts. The arrogance and paternalism of the U.S. press and Congress met with wholesale rejection by the great majority of Cubans, who were at the very least suspicious of Americans’ sudden interest in the fate of human rights in their country. As Szulc and Meyer have pointed out, two years later, when a coup d’état in South Korea brought strongly anti-Communist military officers into power, shootings and jailings occurred, yet no one rose in Congress to propose any punishment for South Korea and little talk of “bloodbaths” arose.75
Moreover, while the U.S. press and public opinion were denouncing the Cuban Revolution, it was receiving broad sympathy and solidarity from the rest of Latin America, particularly from those countries that had recently suffered under dictatorial rule. One important example was Venezuela, where the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship had been overthrown exactly one year earlier. Sympathy for Cuba was by no means limited to the political Left but included a much wider public with democratic concerns. In addition, at this early point the Soviet Union and the international Communist movement had barely taken notice of events in Cuba.
This contrast between the United States and Latin America was important in yet another sense. For most Cubans and other Latin Americans, the United States lacked the credibility, the political credentials, to criticize the revolution. The repudiation of U.S. criticisms was not incompatible with an admiration for the U.S. standard of living and other accomplishments of U.S. culture (sports, movies, and so forth). Rather, this repudiation concerned U.S. business and foreign policies. In Cuba, significant elements of the middle and upper classes no doubt were profoundly pro–United States in the political and every other sense, and for them, their northern neighbor could do no wrong. But such was not the case for the vast majority of Cubans.
World War II, to a certain degree, enhanced the U.S. image as the perceived enemy of dictatorship and fascism, but its record of interventions at the time of the 1933 revolution against the Machado dictatorship and during the earlier independence struggle against Spain at the end of the nineteenth century had not been forgotten. On balance, the role of the United States in Cuban history was still seen in a negative light. Washington’s support for the military coup against the democratically elected government in Guatemala in 195476 and its general support for Latin American military dictatorships in the name of anti-Communism further undermined U.S. moral and political credibility, as of course did U.S. complicity in arming and supplying the Batista regime.77 It stands to reason that under these circumstances, the United States would encounter much resentment when it began making demands and setting itself up as the judge and jury of acceptable political behavior.
We now return to the question posed at the beginning of this chapter: was a different U.S. policy ever possible? Could the Cuban Revolution have taken a form that would have been acceptable to the United States? The comparative method is helpful in answering this question. I will look at the views and role played by Ambassador Philip Bonsal, the most moderate78 of the U.S. officials dealing directly with Cuba, and then I will examine the prior example of the 1952 revolution in Bolivia, the only social revolution in Latin America during the Cold War that the United States accepted and supported. How does Bonsal, when compared to more conservative U.S. officials, show the limits of U.S. policy makers’ willingness to accommodate revolutionary change? What differences between Bolivia and Cuba help to explain such significantly different treatments by the United States?
A close examination of Bonsal’s thinking and actions may indicate the limits of what the United States could have tolerated in Cuba in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Bonsal was a career diplomat appointed to represent the United States in Cuba in February 1959, shortly after Batista’s overthrow. Significantly, he had just served as the U.S. ambassador to Bolivia. Bonsal projected a positive image. He was respectful and polite and appeared to treat the Cuban leaders and people as equals. He certainly lacked the proconsular style of the reactionaries who had preceded him while Batista was in power, ambassadors Arthur Gardner and Earl E. T. Smith. At least until the fall of 1959, Bonsal followed a policy of exerting pressure phrased by diplomatically correct means and attempting to co-opt the revolution as much as possible. He tried to open negotiations with the Cuban government, including the necessary concessions involved in any such practice. Implicit in this view was the idea that whatever concessions went to the Cuban government would more than pay for themselves by the institutionalized limitations on the revolutionary process. These negotiations never took place, however. Bonsal was also strongly oriented toward the relatively weak liberal wing of the revolutionary government, which included such figures as Felipe Pazos and Rufo López Fresquet. But the U.S. ambassador also hoped for a break between Fidel Castro and the pro-Soviet and pro–Partido Socialista Popular (old Cuban Communist Party) wing of the 26th of July Movement represented by Raúl Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara.79 Others ranging from independent non-Communist leftists and the 26th of July labor leadership at one end of the Cuban political spectrum to liberals and the upper and middle classes on the other also hoped for this split.
Bonsal’s attempts to deal with Fidel Castro were frustrated by Castro’s great reluctance to meet with the U.S. ambassador and by the Cuban leader’s refusal to turn the other cheek to U.S. criticisms, let alone interference. The newly victorious Cuban leader was far more likely to make anti-imperialist pronouncements than he had been while serving as the head of the broadly based anti-Batista coalition, which tried to avoid conflicts with the United States. As Bonsal became increasingly disillusioned with Castro, particularly after May 1959, the ambassador’s policy increasingly became one of maintaining strong pressure on the Cuban government while arguing within U.S. government circles against precipitate U.S. action. Bonsal sought to buy time to allow for the development of an internal Cuban opposition, which he hoped would at a minimum significantly curb the actions of the Castro leadership. The ambassador had counted on significant Cuban middle sectors and what he saw as their “democratic preferences, the devotion to the so-called middle-class social and economic values,” as well as on the individualism and conservatism of the dominant elements in Cuban society. Years later, Bonsal came to see the failure of this perspective as one of his most important errors of judgment.80
This approach of buying time shaped and informed Bonsal’s moderate politics even before he had totally given up on Fidel Castro. Thus on May 6, 1959, Bonsal reported to the State Department that he had received news from varied sources, including some well connected with the government of Cuba, that Castro was increasingly disturbed about Communist activities and that tensions were developing between him and his brother, Raúl, regarding a number of issues. The ambassador also reported that more and more Cubans, both in and out of government, were taking outspoken stands against Communism. Bonsal complained that exaggerated stories from the United States regarding the influence and strength of Communism within the Cuban government, such as Stuart Novins’s May 3 CBS broadcast, were not helpful in the highly nationalistic atmosphere prevailing in Cuba. Significantly, Bonsal concluded, it would be “much better that initiative for correction come from within Cuba and I am hopeful it will.”81
On March 26, 1959, the National Security Council seriously considered the rather extreme action of denying a visa to Fidel Castro for his April visit to the United States at the invitation of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.82 Bonsal, however, sent a telegram to the State Department on April 14, 1959, insisting—in what was to become his perennial warning—that if Castro were to fail, that failure must not be attributed to the actions of the U.S. government. Furthermore, Bonsal optimistically (and paternalistically) predicted that if Castro remained in power,
we will have many opportunities of discreetly influencing choices of courses of actions and of bringing him to a closer understanding of political and economic conditions to which he is subjected. I respectfully submit that some slight progress has already been made and am convinced that Castro can recognize and be guided by facts, although his temperament and sensitivity to criticism will probably lead to further unfortunate utterances. . . . Condemnation of Castro for these utterances alone will be taken as U.S. opposition to Cuban revolution which still has very considerable support and was justified on many counts.83
Even in late September 1959, when relations between the United States and Cuba had already begun to seriously deteriorate, Bonsal wrote a memorandum to Rubottom strongly objecting to cuts in the U.S. quota for Cuban sugar, which “would prove disastrous not only to our relations with Cuba but also to our relations with other Latin American countries. In effect, we would be permanently diminishing the resources of the entire Cuban people and would open a wound which would be a long time in healing.”84
A decade after Bonsal left Cuba as the last U.S. ambassador to that country, he reflected on other concessions that his country could have made and for which he had hoped early in his stay in Cuba. He had privately wanted a change in the status of the Guantánamo Naval Base that would allow Cuban participation in its operation, similar to the rights enjoyed by North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies on the U.S. bases in their countries. He would also have liked to see a modification of the tariff arrangements between Cuba and the United States that would have allowed the island greater industrialization and agricultural diversification. According to Bonsal, the sale of sugar to the United States should have been placed on a contractual basis between the two countries, as opposed to the current practice of Congress periodically and unilaterally determining how much Cuban sugar could be allowed into the United States. Bonsal also allowed for the possibility or even desirability of transferring from foreign to national ownership some U.S. properties in Cuba. He specifically mentioned the extensive cane lands held by the United Fruit Company and the U.S.-owned public utilities, with a negotiation through “quiet diplomacy” of adequate and prompt compensation that would be “equitable” and would not interrupt “the flow into Cuba of private capital for many much-needed purposes.”85
Bonsal’s willingness to allow for Cuban reforms clearly assumed that the island would remain not only a capitalist country but also a member of the Western political alliance; in the specific case of Latin America, this meant a continued adherence to “the Rio Treaty [against Communist penetration of the Americas], the Charter of the Organization of American States, and the other agreements that defined the rights and duties of the inter-American community.”86 This precluded not only an allegiance to the Communist bloc but also any neutralist or independent stance in international affairs.
Bonsal also approved of the critical arms embargo that Washington maintained against Havana, which included successful pressures on the British and some other European governments not to sell weapons to the Cuban government when Fidel Castro attempted to replace obsolete American weapons with West European military hardware. The arms embargo had originally been declared in March 1958, when the Batista regime entered into a political crisis from which it never recovered. Despite the embargo, the United States permitted certain “exceptional” shipments of military supplies, and the U.S. military mission remained in Cuba to advise the Batista regime until being asked to leave by the newly established revolutionary government in January 1959.87 The United States continued its arms embargo after Castro came to power, arguing that the weapons might be used against its Caribbean neighbors, particularly the Dominican Republic, ruled by longtime dictator Rafael Trujillo. Although Castro’s Cuban government had supported military incursions against the Dominican dictator, Trujillo had also attempted to intervene in Cuba. Most important, at this time Trujillo’s military and in particular his air force was superior to Cuba’s. Still, according to Bonsal, “there had been no reason to change United States [arms] policy after the fall of Batista, once it had become clear that Castro’s policies toward his neighbors were inimical to peace in the area.”88 As for the successful U.S. effort to prevent Britain from selling planes to Cuba, Bonsal rejected the Cuban argument that the planes were essential to the defense of the island.89
Bonsal’s moderation was even less in evidence when it came to fundamental capitalist principles. He was always unambiguous in his insistence that any expropriation of U.S. properties must be compensated by the Cuban government. After Bonsal had an encouraging meeting with Cuban Foreign Minister Raúl Roa, however, the U.S. ambassador wrote to the State Department on July 31, 1959, recommending a compromise, in the context of possible “unpublicized” negotiations with the Cuban government, between the U.S. demand for immediate cash payment and the Cuban proposal of twenty-year bonds based on municipal tax registrations.90 Significantly, Acting Secretary of State Dillon responded the next day by authorizing Bonsal to enter into negotiations with the Cuban government but said nothing about the proposed compromise.91 Thus, while the U.S. ambassador to Havana was willing to make concessions to the Cuban government, the capitalist contractual principle of compensation was untouchable as far as he was concerned.
Along similar lines and notwithstanding his later claim that he had favored revising tariff agreements to support agricultural diversification in Cuba, Bonsal officially complained to the Cuban government about restrictions on the importation of wheat, flour, and rice in spite of a severe lack of dollar reserves in the Cuban treasury. In this context, Bonsal invoked “certain rights which the United States enjoyed under international agreements.”92 The Batista regime had looted the treasury and left Cuba in a financial mess. Consequently, the country was confronting a situation where foreign-exchange reserves had reached a dangerously low point and the balance of payments was precarious, and a budget deficit existed. Conversations between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Cuban government had led nowhere. A memo from the State Department’s Bureau of Inter-American Affairs at the time of Castro’s visit to the United States in April 1959 addressed the issue of balance-of-payments loans with the business-as-usual recommendation that these loans should be granted only after Cuba had made commitments to the IMF on the basis of its technical and professional advice. The State Department stated that it would be willing to study economic development loans “on a case by case basis taking into account the availability of private capital for these projects.”93 The Cuban government’s strategy for dealing with the difficult financial situation relied heavily on steep excise taxes to curtail certain imports as well as on the introduction of foreign-exchange controls on capital and other transactions by local business-people. Not surprisingly, the IMF disapproved of such measures limiting free trade and wanted instead to address the issues of budget and credit prospects. Argentina’s recent experience with a similar IMF-approved loan had been accompanied by lowered wages, price increases, and social-welfare budget cuts, measures that were totally incompatible with a popular revolution committed to raising the standard of living of Cuba’s laboring classes. In addition, a Treasury Department background briefing paper prepared for Castro’s April visit insisted that the satisfaction of any Cuban request for economic aid be made contingent on acceptance of an IMF stabilization loan or concrete assurances regarding the future role of foreign capital in the nationalist development program.94 Bonsal did not register any “moderate” objections to any of these policies; only later, in 1971, did he suggest, while professing naïveté, that the conversations between the IMF and the Cuban government were inconclusive “in spite of the goodwill shown by all concerned at the Washington end.”95
In the end, even though Bonsal had given up any hope of influencing or winning over Castro’s government by November 1959, the Eisenhower administration completely bypassed the ambassador, failing even to consult him when adopting harsh economic, political, and military measures against Cuba in 1960.96 He made a last-minute proposal to prevent a ban on Cuban sugar imports by establishing a joint claims commission, including arbitration, to which the Cuban government would make available on an annual basis a negotiated sum of money for the payment of adjudicated claims; the United States would establish a negotiated sugar quota from which, in part at least, the Cuban government could obtain the necessary resources to pay for the settlement of U.S. claims. However, Bonsal recognized that his proposal had “in the Washington mood of those days . . . only the faintest chance of being considered at all.”97 Until he finally returned to Washington, Bonsal continued to insist that the United States should not place itself in the position of being blamed for things going wrong in Cuba because of the effects this situation would have in both Cuba and the rest of Latin America. He also did not give up on the strategy of buying time. Bonsal specifically argued, in fact, that harsh U.S. measures would have been more appropriate in an atmosphere of declining rather than rising revolutionary fervor.98
In sum, Bonsal had the outlook of an intelligent and above all patient reformist conservative. He was willing to support and tolerate some reforms but nevertheless was conservative because his overall goal was preserving the U.S. empire in Latin America, although he sought to do so in a more enlightened manner than his superiors in Washington and the corporate world were willing to contemplate. Again, one is struck by the constitutional inability of both Bonsal and the system he intelligently represented even to understand the nature of radical change.
In 1952, less than seven years before the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, a social revolution began in Bolivia. Led by the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR, Nationalist Revolutionary Movement) and by the Mine Workers Federation, the organization of the Bolivian tin miners allied with the MNR, a bloody but successful uprising took place both in the cities and in mining areas. The largest mines were nationalized; universal suffrage was established, thereby enfranchising the illiterate Indian population; a substantial agrarian reform law was approved; and the old professional army was downgraded. Nothing like this had happened in Latin America since the Mexican Revolution.99
Unlike Cuba, which was among the top four Latin American countries in terms of economic development during the 1950s, landlocked Bolivia was one of the two poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere (the other was Haiti). The United States had a major presence in Cuba, particularly in regard to investments in sugar and other industries, as well as a major U.S. naval base in Guantánamo and substantial political influence in the affairs of the island republic. In contrast, the U.S. involvement in faraway Bolivia was relatively minor by any of these criteria. U.S. capital investment played only a small role in tin mining and was virtually absent among the landowners expropriated under the land reform.
In Bolivia, the ruling MNR had also led the revolution. In Cuba, in contrast, the ruling Communist Party was established only through a merger of the 26th of July Movement, the old pro-Moscow Communists, and the Directorio Revolucionario (Revolutionary Directorate) in the mid-1960s, after the major revolutionary changes had already been carried out. In 1952, the Bolivian Communists split into two small parties, neither of which had much influence, unlike the prerevolutionary Cuban Communist Party.
The MNR was a middle-class nationalist movement. Historically, it had advocated only fairly moderate reforms while calling for support from workers and peasants.100 The MNR considered the masses too underdeveloped to struggle and took a consciously conspiratorial and elitist orientation. This led the party to support a 1943 coup that provided it with its first brief experience in helping to run the nation. However, after this government was ousted by a 1946 coup, the MNR turned to the rising revolutionary labor movement. To cement this alliance, the party committed itself for the first time to a program including universal suffrage, agrarian reform, and nationalization of the mines.101
The Bolivian labor movement, rooted in the militant miners’ union, was explicitly socialist and had a revolutionary orientation significantly influenced by Trotskyism. Many union leaders had joined the MNR in the late 1940s, forming a left wing, led by Juan Lechín, head of the miners.102 But the MNR remained dominated by its reformist middle-class leadership. Once in power, many of these elements became the right wing of the party under the leadership of Hernán Siles Zuazo, who served as president of Bolivia from 1956 to 1960. Unlike the MNR’s Left, the Right did not want to draw the peasantry into revolutionary activities. The rightists feared peasant uprisings, perhaps because many of the rightist leaders were small and medium-sized landlords and because their Spanish-oriented culture caused them to fear the Indian peasant masses. However, in the late fall of 1952 and early winter of 1953, a second revolutionary wave of widespread peasant protest led to the adoption of an agrarian reform law that completely transformed the country.103 After the revolutionary regime sanctioned land distribution, the MNR’s rightists found support among many of the peasant caciques who emerged during the postrevolutionary period. President Hernán Siles Zuazo, a leading rightist, used peasant militias to break unauthorized strikes and generally encouraged a growing split between the organized labor movement and the peasantry. Finally, the center constituted the party’s smallest and weakest group. That faction was led by Víctor Paz Estenssoro, president from 1952 until 1956 and again from 1960 until his overthrow by a military coup in 1964. Pragmatic nationalists unlike the rightists, the centrists had a vision of a developed and modernized Bolivia and sought the rapid creation of a modern, developed nation-state. They were flexible, even to the point of making at least temporary accommodations to the labor Left if necessary.104
The Cuban revolutionaries nationalized most of the economy within the first two years of taking power and made short shrift of the issue of compensation. Most of the leaders of the Bolivian MNR, however, insisted on compensation despite the opposition of the labor movement and the MNR Left, which generally though not always consistently or at the most critical moments supported the principle of nationalization without indemnification. This position was a prerequisite for the political support and subsequent economic aid that Bolivia received from the U.S. government,105 which always insisted on the legal principle of compensation for expropriated property despite the fact that relatively little U.S. investment was at stake in Bolivia.
Bolivia’s revolutionary government initially declared a state monopoly on the export and sale of all minerals, including tin, the country’s principal product, and moved to protect small private mine operators. After several months, the need to weaken the tin barons led to the October 1952 nationalization of the big three companies owned by the Patiño, Aramayo, and Hochschild families. A state corporation, the Corporación Minera de Bolivia (Comibol), was established to administer these nationalized mines.106
The law nationalizing the mines clearly represented a compromise intended to mollify the various factions of the MNR as well as the United States. It did not affect small and medium-sized mining companies, including those owned by foreigners such as the U.S.-based Grace and Company, and it established that the owners of the nationalized companies would be indemnified. In general, the nationalization had only a relatively minor impact on U.S. interests. About 20 percent of the shareholders in the Patiño family’s tin company were U.S. citizens, although the share of U.S. investments in tin mining amounted to just 10 percent of the total nationalized capital.107
When the Bolivian Revolution erupted in April 1952, the U.S. course of action was far from obvious. The MNR leaders were the same people Washington had forced out of the Villaroel administration in the mid-1940s as Nazi sympathizers. The MNR’s ideological influences during the 1930s had included fascism. Then, after World War II, MNR leaders came to be suspected of Communist links, a suspicion encouraged by the Marxist elements of their program and by support from Bolivian Communists in the 1951 elections. The MNR’s proposal to nationalize the tin mines did not exactly endear the party to U.S. officials under the prevailing McCarthyite climate. However, aside from its demand for nationalization and its leftist rhetoric, the MNR program was rather vague and did not contain a specific plan of governmental action, probably because of the party’s political heterogeneity.108
Washington’s immediate reaction to the 1952 revolution was to withhold recognition. Implied in this hostile gesture was a serious threat that the United States would not negotiate tin purchases with the Bolivian revolutionary government. This clearly provided Washington with a great deal of bargaining power. Faced with similar hostile acts, Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government, which had received recognition soon after taking power, frequently and from the beginning responded with loud protests and mass demonstrations denouncing U.S. imperialist policies. The MNR, however, kept a low profile and dedicated itself to calming U.S. fears. The Bolivian party insisted that its administration would be peaceful and would respect international agreements and private property. It pledged that the nationalization of the mines would not be rushed and insisted that the new Bolivian government wanted to reach an agreement with the mine owners. In early May 1952, provisional president Siles Zuazo asserted that the MNR opposed Communism and was independent of Moscow, Washington, and Perón’s Argentina.109 Finally, the United States formally recognized the revolutionary regime on June 2, 1952, a little less than two months after the April revolution. By then, Washington had been reassured that compensation would be paid for expropriated mining properties.110
In addition to diplomatic recognition, the United States provided an aid program to Bolivia after Milton Eisenhower, the president’s brother, visited the country in mid-1953. Eisenhower was impressed by the MNR leaders and became convinced that they were not Communists. U.S. aid was multifaceted and even included an unusual element: budget support to help cover substantial governmental deficits. An important byproduct of this aid program was the development of close personal and political ties between U.S. diplomats and technicians and their Bolivian counterparts as well as the MNR leadership.111 These links would be greatly strengthened when John F. Kennedy assumed office in early 1961: Bolivian President Víctor Paz Estenssoro became a favorite of the Kennedy White House. Here was a democratically elected president whose moderate but generally progressive policies could be held up as an example of Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress in its Latin American propaganda struggle against the Cuban Revolution.
By the early 1960s, however, the Bolivian Revolution was well on its way to becoming domesticated and subject to U.S. control. An important step in this process was the stabilization plan that Bolivia was forced to adopt in 1957 to bring to an end a hyperinflation crisis. To assist in implementing this plan, the United States sent a June 1956 financial mission headed by George Jackson Eder, a lawyer formerly with the Commerce Department and International Telephone and Telegraph. Eder, a stalwart defender of the free market and an opponent of Keynesian economics, worked closely with President Siles Zuazo. Leftist leaders, headed by Juan Lechín, the leader of the tin miners, and Nuflo Chávez, the vice president, opposed the stabilization program on the grounds that it would not promote economic development, would benefit private interests at the expense of public welfare, and would extract more sacrifices from the poor than from the rich. But Eder threatened to cut off U.S. aid if the plan was not thoroughly implemented. This threat was subsequently used several times to force Bolivia to comply with U.S. wishes. For example, Washington threatened to suspend aid if Lechín, who served as Paz’s vice president from 1960 to 1964, became the MNR presidential candidate in 1964, as had been the general understanding among MNR leaders at the time of the 1960 elections. By this time, the Bolivian military had regained sufficient strength to demand and win the replacement of the civilian who was to be Paz’s running mate by General René Barrientos.112 Similarly, after Lyndon Johnson suspended an economic agreement with Bolivia, Paz was forced to sever diplomatic relations with Cuba to have the agreement reinstated.113 Although the stabilization program eventually checked inflation, it did so at the cost of significantly limiting Bolivia’s national independence and shifting the country in the direction of a free-market capitalist model.114 In short, Eder’s program substantially influenced the Bolivian revolutionary process in a conservative direction.
Another major step on Bolivia’s road to becoming more conservative was the restructuring of the tin industry. The Triangular Plan, jointly funded by the U.S. and West German governments and by the Inter-American Bank, was implemented shortly after Paz became Bolivia’s president in 1960. To take care of the heavy debts incurred by Comibol, the plan’s financial sponsors granted loans with generous interest and repayment terms. In exchange, however, Comibol had to dismiss more than a fifth of its labor force and close an unspecified number of mines. Enterprises that restructured received new investments or subsidies.115 The closeness between the Kennedy and Paz administrations resulted in a great expansion of U.S. aid to Bolivia, which rose by more than 600 percent between 1960 and 1964. Paz felt increasingly confident and pressed ahead with the Triangular Plan, a decision that resulted in conflict in the mines, including strikes, lockouts, and the jailing of labor leaders. Paz had earlier rejected, under U.S. pressure, a Soviet offer to give credits to Bolivia for the construction of a badly needed tin smelter as well as for a variety of transportation, public works, and economic projects.116 The conflicts provoked by the Triangular Plan reached a high point in 1963. On August 3, Paz decreed the abolition of control obrero (workers’ control) in the nationalized tin mines. On August 23, he implemented an agreement with Washington whereby Bolivia would receive increased economic aid in exchange for purchasing practically all manufactured products from the United States.117
A very important feature of the Bolivian Revolution, marking it as one of the few authentic social revolutions in twentieth-century Latin America, was the role played by the miners’ and peasants’ militias. These groups were far more autonomous than the Cuban militias created in late 1959. Contrary to the myths propagated by supporters of the Castro regime abroad, the Cuban militias were created and always remained under the firm control and management of the representatives of the central state.
The left wing of the MNR and other revolutionary forces, such as the Trotskyists, a small but significant current with considerable influence among the tin miners, wanted to eliminate the traditional army. The rightists opposed any move in that direction. Under a compromise, the officer corps was thoroughly purged by a military tribunal, not a revolutionary court, and the army was greatly reduced in size. An estimated 80 percent of the armed forces were demobilized within a matter of days, and the proportion of the central government budget allocated to the military declined from 23.0 percent in 1952 to 6.7 percent in 1957. The old military academy was closed. Shortly thereafter, a new air force academy was inaugurated, and the military academy was reopened with a new name and approach, including the recruitment of officers from humble social backgrounds—lower-class mestizos and educated Indians. For several years, the reorganized military was forced to maintain a very low political profile, leading some observers to think that the army had been entirely eliminated from Bolivian social and political life.118
This situation did not last very long. As the MNR became more conservative, the militias’ role declined and the traditional army’s power grew, although not without a great deal of friction and conflict. The clash between President Siles and the leaders of the miners’ and peasants’ movements over the economic stabilization program led the government to begin rebuilding the armed forces. The militias declined, counting no more than sixteen thousand men in 1963, a sharp drop from their 1956 peak between fifty thousand and seventy thousand. Military appropriations rose to more than double their lowest point, reaching 13.9 percent of the budget in 1964.119
Washington played an important role in remilitarizing Bolivian society, exerting extensive pressure on the government to rebuild and strengthen the traditional armed forces.120 In 1956, the two countries renewed agreements permitting the stationing of U.S. military officers in the capital city, La Paz, and the U.S. economic mission began to provide technical advice to Bolivian law enforcement agencies. By early 1964, twenty of twenty-three senior Bolivian army officers had either attended the School of the Americas in Panama or had visited the United States. Many of these officers would occupy major government positions in the military regimes that succeeded the 1964 overthrow of the MNR government.121
In sum, the contrasts between the Bolivian and Cuban revolutions and the U.S. responses to them are clear and important. First and most obvious, the Bolivian Revolution lacked a figure comparable to Fidel Castro, an apparently unchallengeable leader who could by virtue of personal authority, prestige, and power prevail over the conflicting ideological currents within and outside the revolutionary camp. By withholding an early and clear commitment to a specific political organization and program, Fidel Castro retained a freedom of action that immensely enhanced his ability to dispose of his social and political enemies one at a time, thereby preventing the formation of an early and strong opposition coalition. Such a situation clearly did not exist in Bolivia.
In addition, the thirty-two-year-old Castro and the other young revolutionary leaders, all inexperienced in governmental matters, had the support of the experienced leadership cadre of the pro-Moscow Cuban Communists in the crucial early years of revolutionary consolidation, even though the power of these older leaders declined in the following years. The influence exercised by the Communists and their friends in the pro-Soviet wing of the 26th of July Movement was, of course, anathema to Washington. By the same token, the weakness of the Bolivian Communists reassured Washington and facilitated U.S. recognition of and aid to that country.
The right wing in the Bolivian revolutionary camp was much stronger than its equivalent in the early revolutionary government of Cuba, both in terms of relative size and, more important, in terms of organized power. The right wing of the Cuban revolutionary government in 1959 was weak most of all because it was fundamentally subordinate to Castro and was thus in no position to bargain independently for its views on social and economic policies or to recruit openly among the population at large. Ironically, the potential middle-class constituency for the Cuban government’s right wing was far larger than the middle-class supporters of the MNR Right. In contrast, the MNR Right was a major player in the policy bargaining that took place within the Bolivian revolutionary coalition. As a result, the right wing seriously limited the radicalism of the revolutionary process and, probably more critical, became an important U.S. ally. It is thus no wonder that Ambassador Bonsal, with his ample experience in Bolivia, tried to implement the same orientation toward the right wing of the Cuban government; however, as we saw earlier, he did so without success.