CHAPTER 6:
“CASTRO MUST GO”

In the words of Assistant Secretary of State for Interamerican Affairs Rubottom, the “honeymoon phase” of U.S. policy in Cuba came to an end in mid-1959. With the passage of Cuba’s Agrarian Reform Act, a new consensus toward the Cuban revolution began to take shape in Washington. The Eisenhower Administration’s attitude hardened as policymakers considered the implications of the nationalization of properties of large U.S. land owners in Cuba.239

In May 1959, the Agrarian Reform Act mandated the creation of the Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria (INRA) (National Institute of Agricultural Reform) to implement land reform. In a few months, INRA would expropriate land holdings of 1,000 acres or more, and distribute land to landless guajiros (peasant farmers) in 67-acre plots or state farming cooperatives. The Cuban revolution, like the Cuban Liberation Army in the 1890s, wanted to break the domination of the Cuban economy by sugar plantations by breaking up large plots of land.

U.S. owners of large cattle ranches and sugar plantations were on the brink of losing their properties to INRA. About half of the $900 million in U.S. direct investments in Cuba was in agriculture.240

The Eisenhower Administration vigorously protested Cuba’s Agrarian Reform Act. The administration rejected INRA’s formula for the compensation of landowners, which offered twenty-year bonds for the land value paying 4 1/2 percent interest annually. Compensation was calculated on the land valuation declared for tax purposes, which property owners had purposely undervalued.

Washington demanded full and “prompt” compensation for land nationalized under the Agrarian Reform Act. The Cuban compensation plan was rejected as insufficient, although the plan was not out of line with other land reform programs in the post-World War II era.241

In effect, however, the Agrarian Reform Act was a Cuban declaration of independence from the U.S. neocolonial order that had been imposed on the island since 1898. Cuba would not be free to chart an independent course until the grip of large U.S. property owners on the Cuban economy was broken. But to break up the large cattle ranches and sugar plantations and redistribute the land would also risk U.S. intervention in Cuba.

Castro expected the United States would retaliate. As we have seen, the United States urged Batista to overthrow President Ramón Grau San Martín’s Provisional Revolutionary Government when his more modest reforms breached the bounds of Cuba’s limited sovereignty and infringed on U.S. economic interests. But Castro rejected half-measures. As he declared in Santiago de Cuba, “This time the revolution will not be thwarted.”242

President Eisenhower and his foreign-policy aides worried about the political impact of the Cuban revolution in the rest of Latin America. Would Cuba be the match that ignited a region characterized by deep poverty and injustice, ruled by repressive military juntas or autocratic oligarchic regimes? Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Allen Dulles thought so.

“Castro considers himself the man on horseback, destined not only to liberate Cuba but to liberate all the other dictatorships in Latin America, including Puerto Rico,” Dulles wrote in an intelligence briefing of the National Security Council (NSC) on February 12, 1959. He said that Cuba was the “most worrisome” problem facing the United States in the Western Hemisphere.

In early 1959, Havana became a magnet for revolutionaries from Latin America.243 On January 27, 1959 Che Guevara appeared to suggest Cuba was a model for revolution when he encouraged Latin American revolutionaries to learn from the Cuban experience: “The example of our revolution and the lessons it implies for Latin America has demonstrated that a small group of men supported by the people and without the fear of dying were it necessary, can overcome a disciplined regular army and defeat it.”

U.S. intelligence reported that Cuba was providing aid, arms, and training for exiles from around the Caribbean in early 1959. According to Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE) 80/1-59, “[T]he Castro regime became the prime mover behind a rash of unsuccessful invasion attempts against Panama, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and provided support for rebel incursions into Nicaragua.”

Within a few months, however, Havana withdrew its support for Latin American exile groups. In April 1959, Guevara declared on Cuban television, “We are exporters of the revolutionary idea, but we do not try to be exporters of revolution.” He asserted, “The revolution will be fought by the people in the place where the [repressive] government presides, with the people who must suffer that government.”

SNIE 80/1-59 reflected the Eisenhower Administration’s skepticism about Havana’s apparent change of heart. “Castro’s early policy of supporting and even sponsoring movements aimed at overthrowing other authoritarian or oligarchic regimes in the Caribbean suffered setbacks, and it now operates only on a spasmodic basis,” the SNIE stated. “The possibility remains that Castro may at any time revive and even step up-up his earlier policy of actively encouraging revolutionary invasions against Caribbean dictatorships.”

The Eisenhower Administration would treat Cuba as a security threat in Latin America whether it actively encouraged revolution elsewhere or not. The administration’s Cold War mindset would cause it to misread the revolutionary nationalist political process unfolding in Cuba.244

In a Department of State meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in June 1959, Assistant Secretary Rubottom asserted, “Since the [July 26th Movement’s] landing in Cuba [in December 1956] the Department has tried unsuccessfully to pin a definite label on Castro to take stronger action against him.” He said the administration would have acted differently, if it had believed that the July 26th Movement was “Communist inspired.”245

Anticommunism was the cornerstone of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ Cold War diplomacy. His policy in Latin America was a regional component of a global policy designed to isolate and contain the Soviet Union. According to Dulles, international communism, not indigenous radical movements, was the source of political instability in Latin America. Dulles, who had little experience in the region, dismissed the Latin American left as illegitimate, charging it was controlled by the Soviet Union.246

In Cuba, however, radical Cuban nationalists, not a communist party tied to Moscow, led the revolution. U.S. intelligence had been unable to find links between the July 26th Movement and the Partido Socialista Popular (PSP) before the revolution, because the two groups did not work together. In fact, they were at odds with each other over political strategy. The July 26th Movement was committed to building a revolution through direct confrontation with the Batista dictatorship. The Cuban communist party followed a “peaceful road” strategy of organizing anti-Batista “united fronts” and supporting strikes by Cuban trade unions.

Carlos Franqui, editor of the July 26th Movement newspaper Revolución and a former member of the Cuban communist party, spoke from experience when he described the political differences between the Fidelistas and the PSP in the 1950s. “The Communists do not believe in insurrection,” Franqui wrote. “They criticize sabotage and guerrilla tactics. They say we are playing the game of regime terrorists. They say the 26th Movement is putschist, adventurist, and petit bourgeois. They cling to their hypothetical mobilization of the ‘masses’ and their classic ‘unity, unity.’”247

Interestingly, both Che Guevara and the U.S. intelligence community described Castro and his July 26th Movement barbudos as radical Cuban nationalists—not communists—when the revolution triumphed in January 1959. “Fidel isn’t a Communist,” Guevara told an Argentine journalist in the Sierra Maestra a year earlier. “Politically Fidel and his movement can be said to be ‘revolutionary nationalists.’” In December 1959, Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE) 80/1-59 had concluded that the politics of the Cuban revolution were “radical nationalist.”

But a relationship between Castro and the PSP did begin to develop after the July 26th Movement guerrillas turned back the Cuban army’s May 1958 offensive. In July 1958, the PSP’s Carlos Rafael Rodríguez traveled secretly to the Sierra Maestra to meet with Castro. When he arrived, he found Castro searching for solutions to the immense problems his small army would face upon assuming power. One of Castro’s biggest worries was whether the July 26th Movement guerrillas, mostly poorly educated guajiros, would have the skills necessary to manage the new government. Training and educating Cuban soldiers was an essential part of that transformation, a task Castro believed the PSP could help him achieve. Castro insisted that the PSP accept him as the leader of the Cuban revolution, and Rodríguez agreed.248 And in early 1959, Communists began to appear as instructors in the Cuban army, according to the agreement worked out between Castro and Rodríguez.249

The U.S. intelligence community reported the presence of Cuban Communists in the revolutionary regime. But SNIE 80/1-59 noted that PSP political influence was limited: “[W]e do not believe that during this period the Communists will be able to force Fidel Castro to adopt policies to which he is opposed.” Furthermore, SNIE 80/1-59 acknowledged that the Soviet Union paid little propaganda attention to Cuba throughout 1959.250 The Kremlin, based on the PSP’s assessment, was skeptical of the revolutionary credentials of the Fidelistas.

By mid-1959, however, it no longer mattered to the Eisenhower Administration whether Castro was a radical Cuban nationalist or a Communist. The Administration had concluded that the Cuban revolution was a threat to U.S. interests in Cuba and elsewhere, and decided to overthrow it. In June 1959, the Department of State and the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided that the time had come “to take definitive action.” Assistant Secretary of State Rubottom told the NSC that Foggy Bottom had begun working with the CIA “to accelerate the development of an opposition in Cuba which would bring about a change in the Cuban Government, resulting in a new government favorable to U.S. interests.”251

On October 26, 1959, Fidel Castro stepped onto the balcony of the Palacio Presidencial with a rifle in one hand and a cigar in the other. The huge crowd applauded wildly for ten minutes before he could say a word. “We are gathered here, because when a nation sees its territory being attacked during peace time from foreign bases, the only thing the nation can do is to mobilize itself in defense of the revolution,” Castro thundered, jabbing his fingers toward the sky. He was referring to the campaign of air attacks initiated by Batistianos and the Mafia gamblers from the Biltmore Terrace Hotel in Miami Beach in October 1959. “The world must know that Cubans will die fighting against any internal or foreign enemies.”

“Why are we being attacked?” Castro asked. “Both the aggression from foreign territory and domestic treason have one explanation… We have promulgated revolutionary laws that damage national and foreign interests… That is why they attack us. That is why they call us communists. That is why they conjure up all possible pretexts to justify attacking our country.” He called U.S. officials “accomplices” of the mercenaries paid “to sow terror among our people.” Relations between the United States and Cuba went from bad to worse.

On October 27, U.S. Ambassador Philip Bonsal delivered a strongly worded statement to President Osvaldo Dorticós. Bonsal blamed Castro for the rapid deterioration of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba.252 In Washington, President Eisenhower dismissed Castro’s charge of U.S. “complicity” with “terror” flights over Cuba in a news conference on October 28. “Here is a country that you would believe, on the basis of our history, would be one of our real friends,” Eisenhower said. “The whole history of our… intervention in 1898, our making and helping set up Cuban independence… it is a puzzling matter to figure out just exactly why the Cubans would now be so unhappy when after all, their principal market [for sugar exports] is right here.”253

Meanwhile, there was “a period of clarification” of U.S. policy in Cuba in late October, according to Assistant Secretary Rubottom. The Eisenhower Administration brushed the dust off the plan worked out by the CIA and the Department of State to topple the Cuban revolution in June, which had been put on hold.

Rubottom recalled, “On October 31, in agreement with the CIA, the Department had recommended to the President approval of a program… [which] authorized us to support elements in Cuba opposed to the Cuban Government, while making Castro’s downfall seem to be the result of his own mistakes.” On November 5, 1959, President Eisenhower approved the secret CIA–Department of State plan to topple the Cuban revolution.254

Secretary of State Herter wrote that the decision to overthrow the Cuban revolution was so highly sensitive it was “prepared and forwarded to the President outside of NSC channels.” He stated, “In view of the special sensitivity of Latin America to United States ‘intervention,’ I would propose that the existence and substance of this current policy statement be held on a very strict need-to-know basis.”255

An in-house CIA history traced the origins of the Eisenhower Administration’s decision to overthrow the Cuban revolution to “pressures” from U.S. economic interests in Cuba. CIA historian Jack Pfeiffer wrote, “As Castro’s threats became more serious, and as increasing pressures were put on legitimate economic interests of the United States government in Cuba, pressures within the United States government led to a decision that Castro must go.” The United States would revert to the interventionist powers it exercised under the Platt Amendment in the past.256

In October 1959, William Pawley, a businessman with close ties to the CIA, began a series of meetings with Cubans plotting against the revolution. The CIA installed a covert device in Pawley’s office in Miami to record his meetings. According to an October 20, 1959, CIA memorandum, Pawley met with a representative of wealthy anti-Castro Cubans who were planning to “sabotage… the coming sugar harvest.”

Pawley had met with Batista in December 1958 in an unsuccessful effort to persuade him to resign, as we have seen. An October 7, 1959 CIA memorandum noted Pawley’s past “cooperation with this Agency,” pointing out he was a friend of Allen Dulles and Western Hemisphere Division Chief J. C. King.

Pawley, whose goal was to organize a unified Cuban armed force to topple the Cuban revolution, kept the Administration informed about his meetings with Cuban dissidents. After a meeting with Cubans in Washington, he met with Dulles and Vice President Richard Nixon.257 Meanwhile, the United States recruited Cuban opposition figures, associated with the Partido Revolucionario Cubano-Auténtico, for covert political action operations. A memorandum on a joint Department of State–Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting stated, “Certain operational plans were put into effect… in support of those [Cuban opposition figures] who might one day take over.”

The CIA provided secret support for the Montecristi group, which was backed by wealthy anti-Batista businessmen and professionals including Justo Carrillo, who had been president of the Agricultural and Industrial Bank of Cuba under Prío and held a similar post in the Cuban revolution. Carrillo was allied with Colonel Ramón Barquín, who had been jailed by Batista for leading an unsuccessful revolt in the Cuban army in 1956. Major Enrique Borbonnet, imprisoned with Barquín on the Isle of Pines, was also associated with the Montecristis.258

The CIA backed Carrillo and Barquín in a covert operation to block Castro’s rise to power in late 1958. That operation failed, and the United States began to broaden its search for Cubans with whom to work to overthrow the Cuban revolution.

In late 1959, CIA and U.S. Embassy officers met clandestinely with Cuban opposition figures and political dissidents, including members of Castro’s Cabinet. The assessment of the Cuban opposition was not encouraging. Under normal circumstances, the United States might have turned to Carlos Prío, a democratically elected president, who had been forced out of office by Batista in 1952. But Prío personified gangsterismo. The CIA evaluation was blunt: “Carlos Prío would be a great man if he had morals. His weakness of character leads him to a tolerance which does not cease even before gangsterism. His economic ambition causes him to cultivate all forms of robbery and petty thievery.”259

Washington was also aware of reports linking Prío and his brother Senator Francisco “Paco” Prío to cocaine trafficking when Carlos was prime minister and later president of Cuba in the 1940s, as we have seen. In the meantime, the Eisenhower Administration paid special attention to Manuel Antonio Varona, who assumed leadership of the Auténtico Party in Cuba after President Prío went into exile in 1952. A CIA cable to Agency headquarters reported that Prío funneled regular payments to Varona from an Auténtico fund Prío took with him into exile in the United States.

Varona was already a CIA asset. He was also a skilled practitioner of the politics of gangsterismo. According to a June 1960 CIA memorandum, a factor in Varona’s favor was that he was “a proven anti-communist.” He shut down two Cuban communist party publications—Hoy and América Deportiva—when he was acting Minister of Labor for eight days in 1950.260

Meanwhile, the U.S. Embassy favored another possible counter-revolutionary ally: the “National Bank Group,” including Finance Minister Rufo López-Fresquet, Justo Carrillo, and Felipe Pazos, the highly regarded president of the National Bank of Cuba. But they failed to develop as a countervailing political bloc within the Cuban revolution. Bonsal noted in a November 1959 telegram to Secretary of State Herter, “Contrary to our earlier hopes—moderating forces (National Bank Group especially) have for present at least lost out in contest for influence over Castro.”261 When Cuban opposition figures did challenge Castro in October 1959, however, they failed to inspire popular support, exposing the weakness of the counterrevolution.

On October 19, 1959, Comandante Huber Matos submitted his letter of resignation to Fidel Castro. Matos, commander of the Cuban army in Camaguey, had joined forces with large landowners in the province to oppose the implementation of the Agrarian Reform Act. In his letter of resignation, Matos stressed the “Communist problem.” He also objected to the recent appointment of Raúl Castro as minister of the revolutionary armed forces and the presence of leftists like Guevara and Antonio Núñez Jiménez at the National Institute of Agricultural Reform (INRA). When Matos informed the officers under his command of his resignation, fourteen of them said they, too, would resign.

Castro was alerted to what was afoot, and together with a security force arrived in Camaguey and took Matos and forty of his officers into custody on October 20. Tried in December 1959, with both Fidel and Raúl Castro on the prosecution team, Matos was convicted of taking part in counterrevolutionary activities and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Twenty-one of his officers were also sentenced to jail terms ranging from two to seven years.262

Finance Minister Rufo López-Fresquet, who later defected to the United States, confided to the U.S. Embassy that Matos’s “chief fault was an excess of ambition which led him to steal a march on other conspirators by single-handedly attempting to precipitate a showdown with the Communist elements, without using good judgment with regard to timing.”263 Cuban army officers in Camaguey alleged that he met with Pedro Díaz Lanz and other officials secretly plotting against the revolution.264 Matos got to know Pedro Díaz Lanz when he accompanied him on an arms flight to the Sierra Maestra for the July 26th Movement in April 1958.265

In testimony to the Rockefeller Commission, Frank Fiorini confirmed that Matos did, indeed, meet with the Díaz Lanz group in the Cuban air force and discussed “Communist infiltration into the military forces.” Fiorini said he reported this to Colonel Nichols, who “was very interested.”266

Cuban prosecutors introduced evidence that Matos had met with former Minister of Agriculture Humberto Sori Marin, U.S. Embassy First Secretary Edward C. Wilson, and Manuel Artime in September 1959. Sori Marin, author of an earlier more moderate July 26th Movement agrarian plan written in the Sierra Maestra in 1958, had resigned after the agrarian reform law took effect in May 1959.267 Four of the disaffected Cuban officials with whom Matos met in 1959—Manuel Artime, Pedro Díaz Lanz, Manuel Ray, and Humberto Sori Marin—later became operational assets of the CIA.268

Just a few days after Matos’s resignation, Manuel Artime joined the fray with his October 22 “open letter” to Castro, which accused him of giving in to “international communism.” Artime had been plotting against the revolution since he started to work for Minister of Agriculture Humberto Sori Marin in March 1959. Artime, who had studied to become a psychiatrist, was a latecomer to the Cuban revolution. He joined the July 26th Movement in December 1958 a few days before Batista and his inner circle fled into exile.269 The son of a wealthy sugar farmer, he had been laying the political groundwork for the founding of the Movimiento de Recuperación Revolucionario (MRR) (Movement of Revolutionary Recovery), an armed counterrevolutionary group inside Cuba, backed by large landowners and members of the Agrupación Católica Universitaria (ACU) (Catholic University Group). He had procured weapons for planned MRR uprisings in Oriente province. A CIA evaluation predicted, “He will be a leading figure after the overthrow of the Castro regime and for many years.”

But Artime did not remain in Cuba to confront Castro. He was exfiltrated by the CIA to the United States, where he was expected to play a leading role in the Cuban counterrevolution. Artime’s flight into exile marked the leading edge of a mass migration of Cuban counterrevolutionaries to the United States.

The first wave of Cubans to go into exile were the Batistianos and wealthy conservative Cuban elite in 1959. They were followed by the Auténticos and middle-class professionals in 1960. Between 1960 and 1962, 195,000 Cubans left the island. Many thought their exile would be brief, believing the United States would remove Castro from power, as it replaced President Ramón Grau San Martín’s Provisional Revolutionary Government in 1934.

In 1960, the CIA shifted its focus from providing support for the counterrevolution in Cuba to organizing a network of Cuban exile action groups in the United States. Before the end of the year, Cuban exile action groups would begin launching hit-and-run commando raids on targets in Cuba from bases in the United States.

But this tactic created a political backlash in Cuba against the counterrevolution. Castro channeled Cubans’ anger at the raids into popular support for the revolution. He denounced the exile paramilitary groups as illegitimate instruments of the Batistianos and the United States, which had historically opposed Cuban independence and pursued their own narrow interests. The Cuban revolution closed ranks. Manuel Ray was removed as minister of public works. Guevara replaced Felipe Pazos as president of the Cuban National Bank. Osvaldo Dorticós replaced Manuel Urrutia as Cuba’s president. Dorticós, an attorney from a prominent family in Cienfuegos, had ties to the Cuban communist party in the past.

In 1960, political space narrowed further as Cuban exile commando attacks in Cuba escalated. Newspapers critical of the revolution were shut down, including the Diario de la Marina, El Mundo, and Prensa Latina. The revolution took over the CMQ television station.270

Ambassador Bonsal found himself without allies in the Cuban political establishment. Bonsal wrote, “When I arrived in Havana in February 1959, I shared a widespread belief that the Cuban establishment, including the politicians who had opposed Batista… had a major role to play.” Bonsal added, “This establishment would, I thought, confine the new government and the leaders from the Sierra Maestra, including Castro, within the democratic patterns of behavior.” Bonsal concluded, however, “[T]he establishment not only did not provide leadership, it proved lacking even in that capacity for self-defense essential to survival.”

With the collapse of the Cuban political establishment, the United States lost its neocolonial leverage. As historian Jules Benjamin puts it: “Quite simply, there was no longer anyone with whom the diplomats could hope to influence. The policy of employing internal allies to protect U.S. interests, designed laboriously in the Good Neighbor years, found itself bankrupt.”271 In the absence of an effective opposition on the island, the assassination of Fidel Castro was an appealing option to Cuban counterrevolutionaries and the CIA.

When Look magazine editor William Attwood arrived in Cuba to interview Castro in July 1959, he was struck by how openly Castro’s assassination was discussed. “Assassination was in the air,” Attwood recalled. “I was told quite flatly by Julio Lobo… that Castro would not live out the year, there was a contract on him.” Attwood attended a party, with CIA officers in attendance, where guests talked “quite openly about assassinating Castro.” Lobo, one of the richest men in Cuba, owned a dozen large sugar mills.272

In late 1959, as the Eisenhower Administration pressed ahead with its covert plan to topple the Cuban revolution, the CIA considered the assassination of Fidel Castro. Colonel John Caldwell King, chief of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division, believed that the Cuban revolution posed a threat to U.S. business interests in Latin America. He wrote in a December 11, 1959 memorandum to DCI Allen Dulles, “None of those close to Fidel, such as his brother Raúl or his companion Che Guevara, have the same mesmeric appeal to the masses. Many informed people believe that the disappearance of Fidel would greatly accelerate the fall of the present government.”

“A dictatorship of the far left is now established [in Cuba],” King noted. “It is not only unfriendly to the United States in oral criticism, but has taken action against American properties, both industrial and agricultural, which if permitted to stand will encourage similar actions against U.S. holdings in other Latin American countries.” Both Dulles and CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell indicated their support for the assassination plan by signing the memorandum.273

According to CIA General Counsel Lawrence Houston, the Agency took preliminary steps to assassinate Fidel Castro. “I have heard of the delivery of a sniper’s rifle to the embassy in Havana [in late 1959], which may have been intended for some sort of assassination attempt,” Houston testified to Senator Frank Church’s Senate Select Committee.274

In testimony to the Church Committee, Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty disclosed that the CIA flew two Cuban exiles, armed with high-powered rifles with telescopic sights, to Cuba on a mission to kill Castro in late 1959 or early 1960. Prouty recalled he was given orders by the CIA “to set up an airplane to take two men into Cuba, and they were going to assassinate Castro” from a building along a street on which Castro traveled on the way to his office in Havana.275 Prouty said the two assassins were arrested on their way to Havana by Cuban authorities.

In early 1960, President Eisenhower and his aides developed a more comprehensive covert plan to overthrow the Cuban revolution.