October 28, 1960
Havana, Cuba
Being a dictator is hard, stressful work. Fidel Castro’s bluster and bombast played well at home, but it seemed the rest of the world just wanted him dead.
The Americans were after him. His people in Miami had filled him in on the latest: An invasion force was coming. Cuban exiles would land somewhere on the island, set up a beachhead, and move inland.
Similar rumors had circulated ever since Castro seized power from Batista. But the earlier threats were just rumors, the dreams of homesick exiles killing time in South Florida bars. Hundreds of ruling-class Cubans had grabbed their assets and hightailed it to Florida as soon as the shooting started. They settled in there and stewed, reminiscing about the good old days of casinos and kickbacks.
This time the chatter was different. This time there were details: More than a thousand exiles had gone to Guatemala, where they were being trained by the U.S. military. The group had parachutes, bomber support, and high-grade weapons.
Castro and his Soviet counterparts scrambled to locate the exile army so they could monitor its movements. If the Cubans could find out where the exiles were landing, they could pin them on the beach and destroy them with heavy artillery.
And that would show Eisenhower, Nixon, Kennedy, and every anti-Castro U.S. clown that Castro was not another Batista—a cowardly dictator who’d flee Cuba rather than fight for his nation.
Castro watched American TV. He’d noticed how the presidential election rhetoric had ratcheted up. Kennedy had become an anti-Cuba hard-liner now, who said he’d help Cuban insurgents overthrow Castro’s government. Nixon was less bombastic, but no different from Kennedy.
And Castro knew that even if the insurgent army came to nothing, the United States was not going to leave Cuba and Castro in peace. The Americans would do anything to oust him. He had a big target on his back.
Castro had no reason to keep America’s secrets. He announced to the nation that an army of Cuban expatriates was preparing for a large-scale invasion of the country—an attack sponsored by the United States.
U.S. warplanes were concentrated in Guatemala to help insurgents invade Cuba, he said. To meet the threat, Cuba was activating thousands of civilian militiamen and equipping them with arms shipped in from behind the Iron Curtain.
Everyone knew the plan. This had to be an embarrassment to Eisenhower. Maybe now the Americans would back off, Castro thought.
But U.S. reporters were skeptical about a possible invasion. John Pennekamp of the Miami Herald wrote, “There is no indication that mercenaries or soldiers of fortune have yet appeared in the anti-Castro forces…. That the United States has no aggressive inclination toward Cuba has been apparent from the start.”
Reports of an invasion force being trained in Guatemala were false, said García Gálvez, Guatemala’s ambassador to the United States.
Others believed that Castro might stage a fake invasion in hopes of smoking out the anti-government underground.
He’d done that a year earlier, when William Morgan, an American who’d fought in the Cuban revolution, made believe he’d help Dominican Republic strongman Rafael Trujillo overthrow Castro. The ruse worked. When Dominican troops landed at a rural Cuban airport, Castro’s men were waiting. In the aftermath, Castro rounded up everyone involved.
But Castro could no longer depend on Morgan.
After successfully rooting out the Dominicans, Morgan had tried to raise his own army to seize power from Castro. He was disillusioned that the Cuban leader had turned to the Soviet Union. He believed Cuba should be a democracy, not a dictatorship or a Soviet satellite. He was tucked away now after being convicted of treason, and was awaiting execution by firing squad.
Castro turned his ire on America. He’d created consternation by seizing American-owned factories and businesses, and now there were concerns he would drive the U.S. Navy out of its base at Guantánamo Bay, on the eastern end of the island.
The base was emblematic of the long, complicated history between the United States and Cuba.
Cuba was a colony of Spain from the moment Christopher Columbus came ashore. Cubans had periodically fought for independence. And after the Spanish-American War in 1898, it became a separate nation—and the United States signed a treaty with the new Cuban government to set up a naval base at Guantánamo Bay. The land would technically remain Cuban territory, but America would have complete political control over the area.
Now Castro was threatening to take back Guantánamo. The United States declared it would defend the base.
Castro enjoyed creating chaos and consternation. He criticized Kennedy and Nixon for making Cuba the core of their election campaigns. He assured both candidates that their invasions and policies would fail.
In reality, provoked by Soviet influence in Cuba, America could invoke the Monroe Doctrine—a policy that warned European powers to keep out of Western Hemisphere affairs—as an excuse to invade Cuba.
The wild card, however, was the Soviet Union. What would Soviet premier Khrushchev do if America flexed its muscles and moved on Castro? It could lead to a showdown between the two nuclear superpowers—one that could threaten the world.
Castro didn’t want to think about that. He just wanted America to stop meddling in his nation’s business.
And at that moment, meddling in Cuba was a politically charged American issue. Nixon pushed Eisenhower and the CIA. When would the insurgent army move? Nixon saw them as his ace in the hole.
Training guerrilla fighters takes time. That was understood. But the CIA and military had been working with the men for nearly ten months. Some of the insurgents already had experience in the Cuban military. It shouldn’t be taking this long, Nixon thought.
The vice president knew nothing of Sam Giancana’s poison-pill plot, and the mobster was in no hurry to carry out the CIA mission. Giancana knew Kennedy had a better chance of winning if they waited until after the election to hit Castro. And they still hadn’t found anyone who could get close enough to Castro to do the job.
Meanwhile, Kennedy kept hammering away at Nixon’s record. He said Nixon and the current administration were warned repeatedly by U.S. officials that communists were now in charge in Cuba, but instead of taking action, they did nothing.
In a statement Kennedy made the week before, he harked back to Nixon’s 1955 visit to Cuba and Batista, its corrupt dictator then. Nixon’s “only reaction was to praise ‘the competence and stability’ of the Batista dictatorship which was, even then, threatened by Communist activities,” Kennedy said. The vice president had not called for any change in policy.
“Mr. Nixon saw nothing wrong in Cuba—he made no recommendations for action. He did not warn America that danger was growing and, as a result, the Communists took over Cuba with virtually no opposition from the United States,” he said.
Again, Kennedy pushed for supporting “anti-Castro forces in exile, and in Cuba itself, who offer eventual hope of overthrowing Castro.”
But with only eleven days to go before the election, would it happen?