CHAPTER TWO

Insurrection, Revolution, Invasion

A proper sociology, Mills explains in The Sociological Imagination, must consider three coordinate points: biography, history, and society. Particularly important in apprehending the structural changes being brought about by the Cuban Revolution—that is to say, in addressing the question, Where is Cuban society going?—is understanding the historical transformation of its social institutions. For Mills, anticipating revolutionary trends—and countertrends—however rapidly they may be occurring, requires knowledge of the transition from one historical period to another.1 In other words, a true understanding of the future of Revolutionary Cuba and of the Cuban revolutionaries demands full and adroit use of a historical analysis of three events in Cuban twentieth-century history: insurrection, revolution, and invasion.2

Insurrection

It was a long line of ruthless and corrupt dictators, dating back to the early twentieth century, which ultimately instigated the insurrection that exploded into violent revolution. This brief account of that complex and turbulent political history begins with one of the worst of these tyrants, the bloody dictator Gerardo “The Butcher” Machado, who came to power in 1924. Led by politically conscious students at the University of Havana who formed the Directorio Estudiante Universitario (DEU), the Cuban people were finally able to overthrow Machado’s repressive regime in the summer of 1933. Later that year, an unscrupulously ambitious thirty-two-year-old sergeant, Fulgencio Batista, seized control of the army and took over Cuba. A one-time physician, Ramón Grau, was elected president, but Batista, ruling behind the scenes as the strong man, imposed censorship on all media and jailed and tortured his opponents. In 1940, after helping the Communists gain control of the Cuban Confederation of Workers (CTC), Batista stole the election and became president of the Republic.

After pressure by the U.S. State Department to hold honest elections, Grau again took office in 1944 and governed until 1948. Though Grau had run as a reform candidate, he was as corrupt as Machado and Batista had been. One of Grau’s cabinet members, Carlos Prío, who in his youth had been a member of the DEU and had participated in the overthrow of Machado, became president in 1948. Four years later, Batista entered the presidential race, and running for Congress with the recently formed Ortodoxo (or Liberal Democratic) Party was the young lawyer, Fidel Castro, who called for responsible government and an end to corruption. The elections were scheduled for early summer, but were never held because Batista had launched a coup d’état against Prío, taking over the armed forces as he had in 1933, and again assumed power in Cuba. Soon thereafter, Batista’s government was formally recognized by U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Fidel Castro filed a legal brief before the Court of Constitutional Guarantees in Havana in which he demanded that Batista’s seizure of power be declared unconstitutional and that, for all his various crimes, Batista be sentenced to a term of no less than 100 years in prison. The court ruled that the revolution was the source of law, and therefore Batista, being in office as a result of the revolution, could not be regarded as the illegitimate president of the country.

Given this outcome, Castro determined that he would launch a military operation against the dictatorship and rid Cuba of Batista. He organized a poorly trained and poorly armed group of about 160 men and two women to carry out what was basically a suicide mission. This was to be an assault on the Moncada army barracks, on the outskirts of Santiago de Cuba, where hundreds of soldiers who were supporting the dictatorship were quartered. Jean-Paul Sartre fittingly articulated the desperate circumstances that confronted Castro and his insurgents at the time: “You need an intolerable evil before a people will launch an assault against barracks, before they will battle with bare hands against armed men.”3

The object was to seize the garrison and radio station, broadcast an appeal to the people to support the rebel forces against the dictator, and establish a revolutionary government, with Santiago as its capital.

On July 26, 1953, Castro ordered a squad to take the Palace of Justice, a three-story building housing the offices of the adjutant general, which was located adjacent to the barracks. Another group, led by Abel Santamaría, and that included his sister, Haydée Santamaría, was to occupy the Civil Hospital located in front of the main entrance of the fortress, in the event there were casualties. Fidel Castro, with several men, would launch the main attack on the Moncada Barracks. But things went quickly awry. A sentry alerted the fort, and rifle and machine-gun fire met the attackers, who were poorly armed and greatly outnumbered. Realizing they had failed their objective, Castro ordered an immediate withdrawal. Some of the revolutionaries dispersed into the city, where they received refuge and help by some of the residents of Santiago. One of those who helped them escape was Mills’s interviewee, Elvira Escobar, about which he writes in the Cuban revolutionary’s voice: “She wasn’t really in [the insurrection], then, but she and some other women helped those boys get out of the city. She just got filled up with sentiment for what she called ‘those poor lost boys.’ But we told her they weren’t lost and they weren’t boys. They were revolutionaries and they were men and they were going to win. They had already won—they had torn the mask off Batista in the raid.… It was the turning point.”4

More than half of the men and the two women who participated in the assault were taken prisoner, including Fidel Castro.

Total rebel casualties at Moncada came to sixty-one dead, while Army losses totaled eighteen. The large majority of the insurrectionists killed were victims of the Army’s inhumanity and cruelty—they were tortured and massacred after the fighting had ended. Batista then ordered that for each soldier who fell in the attack, ten prisoners were to be killed in reprisal. An indiscriminate slaughter took place over three days, and many of those who were summarily executed were innocent youths of the city. Indeed, every person under thirty was suspected of being a rebel or sympathizer.

Though the Moncada attack was a military failure for the rebels, it nonetheless served to arouse the spirit of resistance to the Batista tyranny among the people of Oriente. The assault of July 26, 1953, gave birth, and a name, to an insurrectionary organization—the 26th of July Movement—that was to wage and eventually win a civil war.

One hundred and twenty-two defendants, including townspeople who had aided the rebels, were brought to trial. Castro was charged with conspiracy to raise an insurrection and incite rebellion against the constitutional powers of the state. Acting as his own lawyer, he addressed the court in his defense. The essence of his argument was that, with Batista’s military coup of 1952, the powers of the state had been usurped, and therefore the charges made against Castro failed to fit legal specifications. His oral defense, which was an indictment of the Batista regime, was to become the revolutionary manifesto of the insurrection. Fidel Castro ended with the words that would become immortalized throughout the island and beyond: “Condemn me. It doesn’t matter. History will absolve me.”

Along with the other Moncada fighters, the Moncadistas, the judges convicted and sentenced the defendants. Castro was condemned to fifteen years’ confinement in the military penitentiary, the Presidio Modelo, on the Isle of Pines. The young revolutionary had become a hero to the people who had lost faith in the old-line politicians like Grau and Prío. His views were sought by those who saw in him some hope for regeneration in the country.

On February 24, 1955, Batista went to the polls, unopposed, and was inaugurated for another four-year term. But public pressure was building up for him to grant a general amnesty to all political prisoners, and in May Castro was released from prison, along with his brother Raúl and all other Moncadistas still alive and who had not already been freed.

Early in July Castro departed for Mexico to gather arms and men to invade his homeland and depose Batista. In Mexico he announced the formal organization of the 26th of July Movement as an independent revolutionary organization and began training an expeditionary force in the tactics of guerrilla warfare. He and his men purchased a sixty-foot wooden yacht, the Granma, which had been designed to accommodate only about a dozen passengers, but which, in fact, carried eighty-two expeditionaries, including weapons, ammunition, and provisions. The landing of the Granma in Cuba was timed to coincide with an uprising in Santiago, conducted by rebel sympathizers led by Frank País, but the Granma had been delayed by rough waters, mechanical problems, and other mishaps. The Santiago fighters, who attacked government and military installations on schedule, were alone in their battle, and the revolt was violently crushed.

After seven days of sailing, the overloaded vessel made landfall on December 2, 1956, in a mangrove swamp near the village of Belic on the remote southern shore of Oriente. It had been sighted while still far offshore and aircraft began to indiscriminately strafe the area where the expeditionary force had disembarked. Batista’s propaganda machine falsely reported that all the invaders aboard the Granma, including Fidel Castro, had been killed.

As they made their way inland, the rebels were involved in several skirmishes with Batista’s army. In the end only eleven of the original eighty-two who sailed from Mexico survived, which included Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro, Ché Guevara, and Camilo Cienfuegos. Ragged, hungry, and exhausted, they ascended the steep, jagged slopes of the mountains to begin the military campaign in the dense subtropical forest of the Sierra Maestra.

Aware of the need to publicize the activities of the guerrilla movement, Castro invited Herbert Matthews of the New York Times to interview him. On February 17, 1957, Matthews traveled deep into the Sierra Maestra and spent several hours with the barbudos, the bearded guerrilla fighters, and their leader. A week later he published the first of three front-page articles to appear in the Times. This was definitive proof that Castro had not been killed, as government communiqués had claimed. The following month CBS sent Robert Taber and Wendell Hoffman to interview and film the rebel commander, who spoke to the television cameras in English, making an appeal for the United States to stop shipping arms to Batista. A hunted fugitive with a price on his head, Castro confidently told Taber, “We have struck the spark of the Revolution.… The last battle will be fought in the capital.” The product of that effort was the prime-time news special Rebels of the Sierra Maestra: The Story of Cuba’s Jungle Fighters, which was broadcast on a Sunday evening in May 1957. The film had the effect, as Van Gosse puts it, of bringing “directly into stateside living rooms the guerillas, Fidel himself, and most important, the three [U.S. Navy] servicemen’s sons from the base at Guantánamo who had joined the tiny Ejercito Rebelde.”5 Indeed, other spirited North American volunteers would soon take up arms on the side of the rebels and against the tyranny of Fulgencio Batista.6

The publicity attracted more recruits, many of them campesinos, to join the fighting forces in large numbers. The Rebel Army took part in several decisive battles against Batista’s soldiers—first at La Plata, at the foothills of Pico Turquino, and later at El Uvero, El Jigüe, Santa Clara, Yaguajay—all resulting in victories for them. This was because the rebels were implementing the classic pattern of guerrilla warfare for which the Cuban Army was completely unprepared. Castro’s strategy was to make quick hit-and-run forays against arms depots or on small detachments of troops on the move.

The accelerated pace of the guerrilla campaign in the mountains was matched, and indeed preceded, by the efforts of the underground resistance in the towns and cities. On July 30, 1957, the Santiago police ambushed and shot down the leading urban guerilla at the time, the twenty-three-year-old Frank País. Castro learned of the killing and ordered that País be buried with full honors as a colonel of the Rebel Army, a rank higher than Castro’s. At País’s funeral there was a long procession to the cemetery as thousands of protesters, including a group of middle-class women who carried signs saying STOP KILLING OUR SONS, filled the streets of Santiago. These protests started a general strike that spread throughout the country and signaled the beginning of an organized civil resistance on a broad scale.

The leader of the 26th of July underground in Havana, Armando Hart, organized acts of agitation, sabotage, and other subversive operations against the dictatorship. He was arrested three times in less than two years, once having made a sensational escape from a courtroom. Hart’s last arrest occurred as he was returning from consultations with Castro in the Sierra. He was sent to the penitentiary in the Isle of Pines, where he remained until Batista’s defeat.

Other underground rebels were involved in terrorist activities designed to maintain a constant state of alarm. Highway bridges, public buildings, and the homes and businesses of Batistianos, Batista officials and supporters, were blown up or burned. Rebel activities were answered by the government with tenfold reprisals. It was not unusual to find the bodies of boys and men hanging from trees or lampposts. The jails were filled with sympathizers of the 26th of July Movement.

Castro’s rebels, the Fidelistas, regularly came down from the Sierra Maestra to attack transport and electric-power facilities, disrupt highway and railway traffic, and cut telephone and telegraph lines. However, instead of seeking to neutralize the insurrection through moderate means, the Batista regime exacerbated it by meeting sabotage with a murderous repression that was, in the end, self-defeating, because it drove thousands of Cubans into the legions of rebel sympathizers.

In May 1958 Batista launched an all-out campaign to crush the Rebel Army once and for all. This was a major offensive of over 10,000 soldiers against approximately 300 rebels in the Sierra Maestra. After three months the result was a disastrous defeat for the dictator, with about 10 percent of his forces lost—through death, wounding, capture, or desertion. In a desperate attempt to hold on to power, he turned to his fellow tyrants, Somoza of Nicaragua and Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, to supply him with arms and ammunition against the insurrectional forces.

U.S. Embassy personnel were forbidden by Ambassador Earl E. T. Smith from communicating in any way with members of the 26th of July Movement. Personnel from the U.S. Military Mission, which included the Army, Navy, and Air Force, continued training Batista’s troops, one side of the civil war. In August 1958, the coordinator of the Cuban Revolutionary Civilian Front, José Miró Cardona, wrote to President Eisenhower requesting that the U.S. military missions be withdrawn from Cuba, arguing that their involvement constituted a form of intervention in the country’s internal affairs during an ongoing civil war. The U.S. State Department replied that the military mission would not be withdrawn under any circumstances. This compelled the journalist Jules Dubois, who had personally experienced many of these events, to inform his U.S. readers: “The generation that was fighting Batista was going to rule Cuba and we were festering sores in their hearts, building up resentments in their minds and fanning the enmity of their relatives and the entire Cuban people by insisting on the continued training of an army by our mission—an army headed for inevitable defeat.”7

That defeat finally came on New Year’s Eve, 1958. By that time, five of the six provinces were aflame, with rebels overrunning cities and towns, sugar mills, and cattle ranches. The Fidelistas would be in the Cuban capital within hours. At exactly midnight, Batista, dressed in his tuxedo, announced that he would resign and leave the island permanently. He summoned his closest cronies, those whose torture and execution of political prisoners and innocent civilians he had rewarded with promotions and gifts. At one thirty in the morning Batista took a Cadillac to the military airport and forty minutes later boarded a DC-4 airliner. Along with his wife and about 180 of his henchmen, Batista fled to the Dominican Republic, reputedly taking seven suitcases filled with 300 to 400 million dollars. The guerrilleros had defeated a standing army of 30,000 men that the United States had trained and equipped with the finest modern weapons—tanks, guns, warplanes, and bombs—used to kill 20,000 Cubans during seven years of bloody dictatorship.

The dictator had fled in disgrace; the twenty-five-month insurrection was now over. Year One of the Revolution, dubbed the “Year of Liberation,” had begun.

Revolution

Fidel Castro was having coffee at a sugar plantation in Oriente when at nine o’clock the following morning, January 1, he heard the news of Batista’s flight. He immediately took to the airwaves of Radio Rebelde and broadcast to the nation the following proclamation that he would repeat, later that day, from the balcony of City Hall in Santiago de Cuba:

Instructions of the General headquarters to all commanders of the Rebel Army and to the people:

Whatever news from the capital may be, our troops should not cease fire at any time.

Our forces should continue their operations against the enemy on all battlefronts.…

Apparently, there has been a coup d’état in the capital. The conditions in which the coup was produced are not known by the Rebel Army.…

The dictatorship has collapsed as a consequence of the crushing defeats suffered in the last weeks, but that does not mean to say that the Revolution has already triumphed.

Revolution yes! Military coup, no!

It was crucial to Castro that the Cuban people understand that this was not a “palace revolution” in which, to quote Gerth and Mills, “usurpers—often from within the ruling stratum—displace the ruler … without changing the master symbols.”8 The Cuban Revolution had to be a complete and absolute triumph in order to prevent any possibility of a civilian or military junta. As the influential journalist Walter Lippmann accurately put it: “What is going on in Cuba today is no mere palace revolution at the top, in which one oligarchy has ousted another. This is a social revolution involving the masses of the Cuban people, and its aim is not to install a new set of rulers but to work out a new social order.”9

Lippmann was correct in his depiction of the Rebel victory producing a social revolution, but it was always also a radical one—aimed at altering the basic structure of Cuban society. It was, moreover, what Gerth and Mills had previously identified as a total revolution, characterized by a sudden and violent transformation of all institutional orders (kinship, religious, political, military, and economic) that brought about a change of values as well as a restructuring of a system of domination and authority. And it was, specifically, very much a political and economic revolution, again, according to Gerth and Mills, given that changes in the legal order of private property rights were instigated in the political order, which in turn created qualitatively new institutions—most notably, in the case of Cuba, the agrarian cooperative—that came to predominance in the economic order.10 Indeed, so critical was the collectivization of agricultural production to revolutionary transformation that Huberman and Sweezy regarded it as “Cuba’s most distinctive contribution to the storehouse of institutional inventions from which future revolutions can draw their inspiration and examples.”11

But a revolution, as Huberman and Sweezy point out, “is a process, not an event. It unfolds through many stages and phases. It never stands still.”12 And neither did Fidel Castro, the Revolution’s master symbol, stand still as, on January 2, he began his triumphal march, on the Central Highway from Santiago to Havana, with 1,500 of his rebel troops in a victory caravan that consisted of Sherman tanks, armored cars, buses, army trucks, and jeeps. It seemed that everyone on this 1,000-kilometer trek across the island wanted to see the rebel leader—to hear him speak in person, to touch him, to shake his hand, or to kiss him.

Three days later Castro was in Camagüey, in central Cuba, where he issued orders to his commanders to begin summary courts-martial and try war criminals, officers, noncommissioned officers, privates, policemen, and civilians for having killed unarmed civilians or torturing and killing members of the rebel forces.

On January 8, Castro and his cavalcade finally reached the Cuban capital, where they made their triumphal entry and were welcomed by nearly 1 million enthusiastic habaneros carrying placards, waving the flags of Cuba and the 26th of July Movement, and shouting Viva Fidel! The crowds cheered and showered the rebels and their young charismatic leader with confetti and serpentines. Ruby Hart Phillips, who witnessed many of these events on that historic day, describes Fidel Castro and the Cuban people, their present and impending experiences, as follows: “He stood there before them, proof that the power of the Cuban army had been broken by the people themselves. He stood there before them, unentangled and uncompromised, free of all the factious political parties. The revolution was won. Now Fidel Castro was ready to begin the program of reforms which was designed to change the political, economic, and social structure of the Republic.”13

The reforms came in quick succession. Only one month into the Revolution, the U.S. military missions were withdrawn at the request of the Cuban government. Castro felt that U.S. officers who trained Batista’s army, which he had defeated, could not teach him anything about warfare in his country.

There were also far-reaching educational reforms in a country where the illiteracy rate was conservatively estimated at 37.5 percent. In rural areas, up to one-third of the country’s schoolage children never attended school at all. Thousands of previously unemployed teachers volunteered to serve in improvised schools, without pay. There was also further expansion, with the building of new schools and the training of new teachers. Various educational experiments were taking place; a case in point was the Camilo Cienfuegos School City that was being built in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra that Mills visited on the way to La Plata. The campus was, in effect, an immense boarding school where peasant children could get a complete education, from first grade through high school. It was also to be an agricultural and manufacturing center in which the students themselves would produce enough to make the city economically self-sustainable.

Other social transformations implemented that first year, also quite progressive and extensive, were in the area of housing. Cuba, a country with 6 million inhabitants, had a perpetual shortage of decent housing. In 1958, two-thirds of the rural habitations still consisted of the scattered bohíos, those huts of palm and wood, with earth floors, found in conditions of open sewers, squalor, and filth. Over half of the rural dwellings lacked all lavatory arrangements; only 15 percent of town houses and 1 percent of country houses had baths. The Revolutionary government instituted a housing program and began wide-scale construction of homes for families throughout the island. These were largely cinder-block units built in attractive, hygenic environments, each equipped with all the modern conveniences: indoor plumbing, sinks, refrigerators. By the end of 1959, some 10,000 such units had been completed. The goal for 1960—when Mills observed the houses being built in the town of Media Luna—was to assemble 20,000 units, at a cost of about $2,000 each, by year’s end.

In Havana, rents had long been excessively high. And so, as part of the 1960 Urban Reform Law, the cost of home and apartment rentals was reduced by up to 50 percent (which was considered just by the tenants but unreasonable by owners of the properties) in order to eliminate the rent gouging that had taken as much as one-third of the income of urban workers. Private owners were required to sell sites at low uniform prices to anyone willing to start construction. This measure made it so that half of urban tenants became homeowners.

But by far the most sweeping—and overtly radical—socioeconomic transformation undertaken by the Revolutionary government was instigated by the passage, on May 17, 1959, of the Agrarian Reform Law. Indeed, 1960 was known as the “Year of Agrarian Reform,” and Mills came to the island in the middle of that massive agricultural campaign. His friend and traveling companion, Comandante René Vallejo, had been chief of the Agrarian Reform in Manzanillo and then served as provincial delegate, first in Camagüey, and later, at the time that Mills met him, in Oriente.

At the time of the Revolution the economic situation in rural Cuba was as follows. Seventy-five percent of the agricultural land was owned by 8 percent of the property holders. One hundred and forty thousand peasants either owned, rented, or squatted on less than 33 acres of land each, barely enough to be self-sustaining. In addition, there were about 300,000 rural workers and cane-cutters living in conditions of abject misery in marginal lands, swamps, and the trackless mountains. With agrarian reform, the Castro regime distributed government-owned land, expropriated farm lands over 1,000 acres, and banned land ownership by foreigners. Land holdings expropriated by the Cuban political regime were distributed among 700,000 landless peasants, with priority given to any tenants, sharecroppers, or squatters who might be living on the expropriated property in question.

But the reform law involved more than just the equitable distribution of land ownership through the “intervention”14 and the expropriation of large landed estates that had previously belonged to Batista henchmen and latifundistas.15 It was, in fact, intended to produce diversified farming, develop industry, and eliminate the dependence on the one-crop system of agriculture. It was to make the economy more efficient and improve the standard of living for the Cuban people through collective cultivation. This led to what became the basic Cuban agricultural enterprise in the reform: the cooperative farm—of which there were 881 in existence in August 1960 when Mills was on the island. Even though the new regime issued twenty-year government bonds bearing 4.5 percent interest annually in payment for the expropriated property, opponents of the agrarian reform nonetheless denounced it as confiscatory, illegal, and communistic. When the outlines of the agrarian reform program became known to the popular press in the United States, there was speculation that the U.S. government might have to intervene to save the Cuban island from communism.

Given that the agrarian reform was by far the biggest revolutionary undertaking, the Castro government created the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA), the economic agency with extensive powers to apply and enforce the Agrarian Reform Law in all sectors of the economy. INRA’s broader goal was to make the island more nearly self-sustainable and to relieve the still critical unemployment problem. Many of its key personnel, particularly its provincial officials, were rebel soldiers.

By the time Mills arrived in Cuba, INRA had appropriated over 8 million acres and had plowed and planted about 250,000 acres of previously uncultivated land, which was being devoted to growing rice, corn, peanuts, cotton, and beans—crops that Cuba had traditionally imported.

During the first year of the Revolution, while Cuba’s social structure was undergoing these major changes, its ideological dynamic was also experiencing a kind of metamorphosis. Thus, with the execution by firing squad of approximately 500 war criminals; the appointment of Osvaldo Dorticós, who had connections to the Cuban Communist Party, as president of the Republic; Comandante Huber Matos’s public concern with the growing influence of Communists in the revolutionary government and his subsequent arrest on charges of treason, Cuba was, by early 1959, being labeled by the U.S. government as a communist country—the only one in the Western Hemisphere. It was therefore inevitable that tensions between Washington and Havana would increase, and not at all surprising that Castro would get the cold shoulder treatment on his first visit to the United States as prime minster in April 1959. President Eisenhower refused to greet the Cuban leader, who made it clear to everyone that he was not in the country to beg for economic assistance. The American president instead headed to a golf course to avoid any chance of meeting the bearded revolutionary. The two heads of state were as far away from a meeting of the minds as they could possibly be. Indeed, in October, when a reporter asked Eisenhower what he supposed was aggravating Castro’s invectives against the United States, the president responded, as historian Jim Rasenberger puts it, “with bafflement, if not a touch of obtuseness,” saying, “Here is a country that you would believe, on the basis of our history, would be one of our real friends. The whole history … would seem to make it a puzzling matter to figure out just exactly why the Cubans and the Cuban government would be so unhappy.”16

By Year Two of the Revolution, diplomatic relations between the two countries were deteriorating rapidly, and U.S. suspicions of the Castro regime being communist were heightened. Matters were aggravated further when, on February 4, 1960, Anastas Mikoyan, the first deputy premier of the Kremlin and one of the most powerful members of the Soviet Presidium, arrived in Havana from Moscow. Mikoyan and Castro signed a trade agreement in which the Soviets pledged to purchase 1 million tons of sugar from Cuba, with payment to be partly in petroleum, machinery, trucks, tractors, and manufactured products—all of which Cuba desperately needed for industrializing.

But the most dramatic tragedy that befell the early Revolution happened in the spring of 1960, when a disastrous explosion occurred as the French freighter La Coubre, which was laden with small-arms munitions that had been purchased by the Cubans in Belgium, was being unloaded in Havana harbor. More than 100 longshoremen, soldiers, and rescue workers were killed, and 300 more were injured. Something, or somebody, had ignited the ship, which set off a series of blasts that had caused the waterfront carnage.

The following day at a memorial service for those who had been killed by the explosion, which Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir attended, Castro indignantly denounced the disaster as sabotage and blamed the United States for the plot. For Castro, the La Coubre terrorist attack had a twofold purpose: it was the way the CIA could ensure that the munitions were not delivered, and, more ominously, it was a harbinger for a U.S.-led invasion of his country.

Invasion

It was, in a word, counterrevolution that led to the Cuban invasion. At the time that Castro and the Moncadistas were instigating the insurrection, and long before the triumph of the Revolution, Mills (with Hans Gerth) was already involved in a sociological analysis of counterrevolution—an analysis that precisely explained the events that ended, with disastrous consequences, at the remote marshy inlet on the southern coast of Cuba known as the Bay of Pigs:

New theories are developed which dispute the legitimacy of the revolutionary regime and debunk, psychologically, theoretically, and politically, its new measures and styles of life. So after the first revolutionary shocks have been overcome, fatalism and defeatism tend to wane and give way to political plotting, inspired by the observation of incipient cracks and points of strain in the new structure. Out of informal gatherings grow nuclei of political and perhaps eventually military organizations. Their leaders play on the sentiments of the disappointed, woo the good will of foreign governments who may hesitate to grant recognition to the revolutionary regime.17

From its infelicitous inception to its tragic end, the U.S.-sponsored invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs was an astonishingly irresponsible and reckless scheme perpetrated by the CIA under two Washington administrations.

The story begins at the start of 1960, when the CIA’s official position was that Castro had to go because he was allegedly falling into the communist embrace of the Soviet Union. This meant removing the Cuban prime minister without revealing direct involvement by the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the president of the United States. And so the intelligence agency began to surreptitiously establish working arrangements with Cuban exiles and defectors who had been flooding into Florida since 1959. It began cobbling together a coalition from among numerous anti-Castro groups that included moderates who had some disagreements with the Revolution’s trajectory, but that also included Batistianos eager to return Cuba to its pre-Revolution status quo. In March, President Eisenhower gave the CIA permission to organize the Cuban exiles into an armed force.

A couple of months later, during the May Day celebrations in Havana, Castro told a crowd of 500,000 that the United States was preparing a military offensive against Cuba through Guatemala. On that day, his supporters for the first time burst out publicly in the chant of Cuba, sí, Yanqui no.

Though the Eisenhower administration loudly and indignantly denied any planned aggression against the Revolutionary regime, Castro wasn’t buying it and began mobilizing his entire military establishment to defend against an imminent attack by the United States on Cuba’s national sovereignty.

In July the first recruits of the counterrevolutionary invasion force began to arrive in a remote corner of southwestern Guatemala for training. The CIA began building an airstrip to serve as home base to the invading brigade’s air force. Thus, by the time C. Wright Mills set foot on the island in August, there were already some 400 Cuban exiles—mercenaries, as Castro was now referring to them—being trained in Guatemala.

A few days after being elected president in November, John F. Kennedy was briefed on the CIA’s plan to assemble a strike force intended to topple the Castro regime. At the same time, the Cubans went before the United Nations, formally charging that a U.S.-backed attack on Cuba was imminent, and Castro began a propaganda counteroffensive. He spoke frequently, and accurately, of the training camps in Guatemala. By that time, the invasion brigade of exiles had become the best-known “secret” in the world; Castro mobilized all army units, including a civilian militia of more than 600,000 strong, and placed them on emergency alert.

On January 4, 1961, President Eisenhower broke diplomatic relations with Cuba, and military plans for the operation began to take shape; the objective being to overthrow Fidel Castro much the same way as the CIA had succeeded, in July 1954, in engineering a coup d’état against Guatemala’s president, Jacobo Árbenz.

The strategy for regime change in Cuba was as clear-cut as it was nefarious: an exile military brigade would secure a beachhead on the island, and members of the provisional government the CIA had assembled in Florida would go ashore, declare themselves the rightful leadership of Cuba, and provide a pretext for U.S. intervention in Cuba’s “civil war.” The operation’s entire success, however, hinged on one indispensable assumption: that once a beachhead was established, large-scale defections from the Cuban militias would spontaneously materialize around the island and the Cuban people would immediately abandon Fidel Castro and join the invaders.

A time and place for the amphibious landing that was to oust Castro were selected: it was to occur on April 17 along a narrow bay—the Bay of Pigs—on the swampy coast of southern Cuba that gave out onto the Caribbean Sea.

Two days before the actual invasion, at dawn on Saturday, April 15, the CIA sent eight B-26 bombers, each heavily laden with bombs and missiles, from Nicaragua to Cuba to destroy Fidel Castro’s air force on the ground. Staged to look like an internal revolt by Castro’s own men, the bombers were made to resemble the B-26s in Cuba’s air force, right down to the FAR (Fuerza Aérea Revolucionaria) markings on their fuselages and tails. They succeeded in destroying several of Castro’s aircraft, but two of the B-26s had a different mission. They were to fly directly to Florida, where the pilots were to claim to be defectors and ask for asylum. Before they left Nicaragua, these two planes were shot up with machine guns to make it look as if they had been attacked when they escaped from Cuba. The ruse was quickly exposed in Miami by reporters who knew the difference between these B-26s and Castro’s bombers.

The Cuban delegation at the United Nations accused the United States of an act of imperialist piracy, blaming it directly for the attacks against Cuba. The planes had come from Guatemala, Foreign Minister Raúl Roa charged, and the air raids were a prelude to a large-scale offensive financed by the United States. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, vigorously denied that the United States had any role in the bombings and stated that they had been the work of Cuban defectors. He reaffirmed his government’s commitment to ensure that no U.S. citizen would participate in any actions against the Cuban nation.

Despite Stevenson’s insistence that the United States would not intervene, two days later, during the early morning hours of Monday, April 17, 1961, a fleet of six cargo ships (borrowed from the United Fruit Company) and some 1,500 Cuban counterrevolutionaries—trained by CIA officers and supplied with U.S. equipment, executing a plan that had been approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the president of the United States—landed on Playa Girón, just east to the entrance of the Bay of Pigs. They were to confront Cuba’s professional army of nearly 30,000, with another 200,000 militia supporting it.

The ill-fated brigade never had a chance, having virtually no indigenous support within the island. Despite their extensive training and their elaborate equipment, the exiles were routed by Castro’s forces within seventy-two hours. On the second day after the brigade’s landing, it was apparent in Washington and Havana that the operation was on the verge of collapse. The invaders were trapped on the beaches, and they could neither advance nor retreat without U.S. assistance, which Kennedy refused to give, fearing that it would be revealed as U.S. interference in a sovereign nation. By the evening of the third day, Castro’s forces had completely encircled the invading army of counterrevolutionaries. Of the nearly 1,500 Cubans who took part in the invasion, over 100 of them were killed and some 1,200 taken prisoner. The remainder were sent fleeing to the sea or else scrambled into the swamps, where the survivors were soon captured by Castro’s army. It was at that moment that the exiles in Miami understood that they would be in the United States a long time.

The invasion had been an unmitigated military and political disaster—a “fiasco,” to use the term that is often applied in reference to it—for the Kennedy administration. The United States had spent roughly $46 million, allowed itself to be humiliated by a small island-nation of 7 million inhabitants (compared to the U.S.’s 180 million at the time), and exposed itself as a bully in the eyes of the world. When it was over, the journalists Karl E. Meyer and Tad Szulc, neither of whom could be described as Castro supporters, wrote that the aborted invasion was more than a military defeat for the exile brigade. It “was a failure of mind, of imagination, of common sense—a failure that seems all the more grotesque now as the bright insiders in the Kennedy Administration discuss it with a certain mordant relish. It solved nothing. It won nothing.”18 But Meyer and Szulc did not blame the military, political, and intelligence miscalculations on particular individuals or agencies. Rather, evoking the characteristics that Max Weber detected in the modern bureaucracy, they attributed those blunders that led to the Bay of Pigs fiasco “to the insulated rationalism that infects a sheltered bureaucracy.” Quoting directly from H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, translators of From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, Meyer and Szulc note that: “Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret. Bureaucratic administration always tends to be an administration of ‘secret sessions’: in so far as it can, it hides its knowledge and actions from criticism. The concept of the ‘official secret’ is the specific invention by the bureaucracy, and nothing is so fanatically defended by the bureaucracy as this attitude.”19

Thus, for Meyer and Szulc, the experts in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations who hatched and supported the invasion plan—CIA director Allen W. Dulles; CIA deputy director Richard M. Bissell Jr.; presidential advisor Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.; chief of Latin American affairs Adolf A. Berle Jr.—were, in a sense, unwitting victims, infected, as they were, by a bureaucratic obscurity and swept by an organizational momentum that became irreversible.

In contrast, and despite his thorough knowledge of what Weber had said about bureaucracy’s tendency toward rationality without reason, Mills placed the onus directly on these experts, in particular on Kennedy, Schlesinger, and Berle, for which he had great animus. Thus, in the context of these previous and forthcoming events, Mills in Listen, Yankee, was no longer interested in explaining the behaviors of individuals as being caused by structural or social-psychological factors—by a “main drift,” or a “managerial demiurge,” or even a “military metaphysic”—as he had in his previous books, White Collar and The Power Elite. Now he was looking squarely, and almost exclusively, at the absurdity and irresponsibility of experts’ actions due to their own volition: they voluntarily chose to become deaf to the truth and intentionally refused to listen to the facts.