After JFK’s tentative efforts toward a modus vivendi were cut short by his assassination, Lyndon Johnson “was not inclined even to probe” a new Cuba policy, according to a lead American diplomat in Havana, Wayne Smith.1 Fifty years later in Havana, I was interviewing Smith as he relaxed with Ricardo Alarcón at the Nacional, another case of “two old guys talking” about what might have been. Smith has long acknowledged that he was often wrong in the early days; he travels to the island frequently and advocates freeing the Cuban Five. Everything has changed, it seems, except for the fundamentals of US policy.
Seeking perhaps to lessen Cuba’s isolation, Fidel floated the possibility of rapprochement again through Lisa Howard and in a long interview with the New York Times’ Richard Eder in July 1964. Fidel sent a message that he wanted a channel of communication to avert crises. In response, UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson interpreted the message as conveying “that all our crises could be avoided if there was some way to communicate.”2 In the Eder interview, Fidel went further, offering to halt assistance to Latin American guerrilla revolutionaries in exchange for the United States cutting support for the Cuban exile operations. He also agreed to release political prisoners and begin talks on fair compensation for American properties seized by the revolution.3 His entreaties failed to prevent the Organization of American States from terminating commercial and diplomatic relations by a 15-4 vote.4 The Cubans seemed to be undertaking the initiative with formal Soviet encouragement. Fidel offered to discontinue “material” aid to Latin American countries if they promised peaceful relations with Havana, and indicated that his political repression could be relaxed if the covert American policies of subversion ceased permanently. In retrospect, according to the administration’s leading Cuba expert at the time, Wayne Smith, Fidel’s offer should have been taken up.5 But the State Department immediately rejected the idea, and when asked why the US government traded with the Soviet Union but not with Cuba, Dean Rusk said the Soviets were a “permanent fixture” and the Castro government only temporary.6 The essence of US policy was revealed in Johnson’s April 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic to overthrow a democratically elected government amidst declared fears of “another Cuba.”7 In that same year, the United States curtailed the sale of food and medicine unless licensed by the Commerce Department, which rarely happened. Johnson also began prosecuting Americans who violate the Cuba travel ban, over the strong objections of attorney general Bobby Kennedy.8 In 1968, a progressive State Department policy planning-paper favoring “positive containment,” “the controlled relaxation of US pressures,” and a modus vivendi went nowhere.9
One reason for the government’s reluctance to engage constructively with Cuba was that the CIA and Special Forces were seeking to track and kill Che Guevara, not accommodate his “two, three, many Vietnams” agenda. Not by accident, two Cuban American exiles—Félix Rodríguez and Gustavo Villoldo—were taking part at the operations level in Bolivia.10 Rodríguez, a cadre in the CIA’s Brigade 2506 against Fidel and Che, was present at the shooting of Che and later claimed that the assassination was ordered by the Bolivian military after conferring with Washington.
Even in death and defeat, Che’s strategy of “two, three, many Vietnams” served its purpose. Besieged by Vietnam in 1967, the CIA was ordered to escalate and reprioritize its covert operations toward Indochina. This meant that “it would have to close its largest and most expensive outpost in the world—the CIA station in Miami,” LeoGrande and Kornbluh write.11 Though it would drag on another five years, “the heyday of CIA-sponsored exile operations against Cuba was over.”12
THE CARTER YEARS
When the next Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, took office in 1977, he declared normalization to be the US policy goal; but after a promising start, his effort was shut down as “impossible” by his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski.13 When Carter left office, the politically powerful right-wing Cuba lobby positioned itself to play a domineering role in US politics under Ronald Reagan and thereafter. When Bill Clinton campaigned for president in 1992, he endorsed the so-called Torricelli law (Cuban Democracy Act) aimed at regime change in Cuba, and then, when the Cubans shot down a Miami-based exile plane that had repeatedly violated the airspace around Havana and even dropped leaflets calling for the overthrow of the government, Clinton signed the Helms-Burton Act, which toughened sanctions and effectively ceded to Congress his executive powers over the embargo and diplomatic relations. His liberalized people-to-people travel initiatives did not change the fact that once again a liberal Democrat maintained, and even hardened, the blockade.
Each of these Democratic presidencies were followed by far more hostile Republican ones: Richard Nixon after Johnson, Ronald Reagan after Carter, the second George Bush after Clinton. Whenever a Democrat was returned to the presidency, any liberal promise of normalization evaporated in the face of a recurrent Cold War anticommunism. Even after the Soviet Union’s collapse, and with it the end of the rationale that the Cubans were a Soviet pawn in the hemisphere, the embargo went on.
A few standard explanations have been offered for the Democratic default: US policy seemed to be based on waiting for Fidel to die, as the Cuban leader once told a Carter adviser, the late Robert Pastor. Following the death of its leader, it was assumed Cuba would follow the fallen Eastern European socialist countries back into the US sphere of influence.
It was claimed by Carter advisers that Fidel was to blame, in one of two ways: either he was a megalomaniac or a tool of Soviet expansionism. Invading Latin America or dispatching Cuban troops to Africa were more important to Fidel that normalizing relations with the United States, they concluded.
Some said the Cuban leadership privately wanted the embargo and nonrecognition to continue because those policies provided an “external enemy” to justify the Cuban regime’s tight controls on its domestic population. On its face, this was a bizarre argument: that the embargo the United States maintained in order to strangle Cuba actually was strengthening the Cuban regime. If this was so, of course, the United States could have dropped the policy at any time.
Not recognizing a Havana regime that suppressed free speech, held rigged elections and was controlled by a Communist might look like good domestic politics. The Cuba lobby had enough money and votes to decisively sway Florida politics and the Electoral College. So one after another, Democratic presidents ended up taking the easy route.
These arguments in retrospect range between laughable and obsolete. Cuba, unlike Eastern Europe, survived the dissolution of the Soviet bloc. In any case, even during the Cold War, the United States maintained diplomatic and economic relations with the Soviet Union and, since 1971, with China. Cuban troops departed Africa, and Cuba was praised by Nelson Mandela, an American icon, for making possible the defeat of South African apartheid. Cuba developed proper diplomatic relations with every nation in Central and Latin America. Cuba continued to survive the embargo. The UN General Assembly condemned the US embargo year after year by near-unanimous votes. The United States meanwhile recognized all sorts of ghastly undemocratic regimes. The Cuba lobby, while troublesome, gradually lost its decisive role in Florida, New Jersey, and therefore the Electoral College. A majority of Cubans in the United States, while generally opposing the Castro regime, now favor normal relations, freedom of travel, lifting the embargo, and a gradual, peaceful transition to a sovereign Cuban future.
America’s Cuba policy, to paraphrase Tom Paine, is a case where the weight of older generations hangs heavily on the rights of living ones. But how to remove the carcass? One must first reconsider the nature of the problem when every past rationale now seems to lack credibility.
My own explanation follows the “Superpower Syndrome” analysis of Harvard professor and author Robert Jay Lifton. A superpower is never really all-powerful but is cursed to think it is, which leads to two chronic corollaries: first, the inherent assumption that the world always can be bent to the superpower’s will and, second, the resilience and resources of a resisting adversary are underestimated because of an assumption of superiority. A superpower cannot respect as an equal those whom it believes to be lesser. The US government even considers its closest allies, for example, to be friendly satellites, but never really coequals. The United States seeks in every way to retain dominance over the global marketplace and military balance of forces in the world. Of course, this arrogant pretense must remain discreet; carried on “off camera,” as the neoconservative Robert Kaplan once urged.14
The United States is no longer a sole superpower, but is impelled for psychological, cultural, and political reasons to insist that we are Number One, especially in “our own backyard,” to quote current secretary of state John Kerry. Presidents representing superpower status are unable to admit failure or to retreat. Backtracking from a failed policy must never be admitted, or must be covered up by techniques of “saving face.” Reputation is everything.
Cuba has always been a challenge to the Superpower Syndrome. America’s nonrecognition of Cuba was among the longest in our diplomatic history, exceeded only by North Korea. When we speak of normalization, does it mean the traditional “normalcy” of superpower dominance, in which Cuba becomes a satellite, or does it mean respect, acceptance, and recognition of Cuba’s right to its own independent identity? Must a “solution” to the Cuban problem appear to be a superpower triumph, masked as a victory for Cuba’s dissidents, and a defeat for the Cuban Revolution and its leadership? And if the superpower is delusional, how would a solution ever come? Barack Obama’s answer in December 2014 was framed as abandoning a failed, counterproductive policy for one more favorable to the American goal of promoting democracy. It was a strategic retreat back toward discarded doctrines of peaceful coexistence.
Ricardo Alarcón would have been the logical choice to be Cuba’s ambassador in the United States under normal diplomatic relations. In that role he would have lent greater balance to the mainstream discourse on Cuba and the region. Fidel himself would have been interviewed more frequently in the American media instead of being virtually blacklisted from legitimate dialogue. Crisis management would have been far easier too. Instead, as we shall see, Ricardo was often forced into secrecy, hidden in the backseats of cars or holding clandestine meetings in foreign hotels, to negotiate bilateral agreements on issues like immigration reforms or the return of Elián González to Cuba.
Ricardo seemed to be of several minds in our many conversations on these issues. Once, in reflecting on America’s stubborn support of South Africa until the very end, he observed:
RICARDO: The United States is an arrogant imperial power. You cannot deal rationally with someone like that. They are being educated step by step.
On the unexpected 2013 release of René González, one of the Cuban Five, to complete his probation at home in Cuba, Ricardo criticized the US prosecutors on the case as a whole, but welcomed the return home of González after thirteen years in American prisons:
RICARDO: At least it was a rational step, an intelligent step. You come from such a terrible country that every time there is a positive step we have to take note.
Toward President Obama, Ricardo’s feeling was definitely ambivalent. While denouncing Obama for tightening US financial sanctions, and while describing his partial lift of the travel ban as only a return to the Clinton travel policy, Ricardo also had positive things to say, including:
RICARDO: According to tradition, presidents take bold initiatives at the end of their second term. So according to this theory a solution has to be found now, before another president takes over . . . Obama had very good advisers in his campaign. When he spoke at that theater in Miami, outside there were only a half-dozen old guards with banners saying things like “Obama Communist.” Obama has an advantage. He was discovering the Caribbean, as we say.15 He is the first president since Carter to take a different approach to the Miami connection; he recognizes that the Cuban American community isn’t the same now as it was in the sixties.
That was in 2013. Ricardo still harbored doubts about normalization even after the Castro era.
RICARDO: I don’t even think his [Fidel’s] passing will create an immediate process toward normalization. The reasons and forces behind the current policy are stronger than that. The Right still will have their catastrophic [regime change] scenario. And it’s a fundamental assumption of the Americans that they have a right to establish conditions first, a God-given right. It’s a deep-rooted idea that Cuba belongs to them. Remember [under Spain’s rule] only Cuba developed a political movement seeking annexation to the United States. Before the independence movement there were Creole landowners who preferred incorporation into America rather than losing slavery, which would have been the consequence of our War of Independence. The first armed struggles against Spain were seeking Cuba’s statehood. It was very important in intellectual circles in Havana, and Martí was still fighting it at the end of the century. The Revolution of 1868 16 was the breaking point with its goals of absolute independence, the elimination of slavery, and a republic based on “perfect equality.” It led to our longest war and a terrible defeat. The United States was deeply involved. There still is the assumption that they have something to say about the future of Cuba.
I hope I live long enough to see some Chinese statement insisting that the United States should stop drinking coffee as a condition of diplomatic relations.
One of the outcomes of long years fighting in the trenches, I have come to realize, can be entrenched thinking on all sides. From the Cuban perspective, they have seen treachery and false promises repeatedly since 1492. With their very survival at stake, how prepared should they be to take the risks of new approaches, including compromises, to resolving the conflict? Why should Cuba not believe that any overtures from the United States are aimed at lowering their guard? Ricardo was not alone in doubting normalization under Obama. In late 2013, Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party, published an interview with Ramón Sánchez-Parodi Montoto, who took part in the secret talks with the Carter administration that led to the Interest Sections being established. After an initial period of hope, Obama “has never been, in any way, searching for a normalization of relations. His policy is a light version of the same policy of George Bush Jr.”17 Asked if normalization was near, he said, “With Obama this is not going to happen. It might happen in a future presidential term . . . It is a mistake to think it will be with the Democrats.”
Now that normalization is underway, although far from complete, it is useful to revisit the past mistakes of the well-meaning liberal Democrats in hopes of not perpetuating them in Obama’s next two years.
JIMMY CARTER AND COLD WAR LIBERALISM,
1977–81
Jimmy Carter rose from the Southern sixties to eradicate the wild excesses of the Nixon years. His ascent to the White House was propelled by the spirit of the civil rights and the anti-Vietnam War movements that had expanded into the popular mainstream in the early seventies as the more radical movement vanguards became exhausted, splintered, and isolated. Rev. Andrew Young, the chief lieutenant to Dr. King, became a Georgia congressman and, to my pleasant surprise, America’s representative to the United Nations under Carter. Sam Brown, leader of the Vietnam Moratorium, became a US national security adviser. Hundreds of less-known sixties veterans took offices in state capitals and in Washington.
The same internal divisions remained, however, between the traditional oligarchs in the CIA and Pentagon and the fresh faces being welcomed into the Carter administration. The Cold War remained a basic political dividing line. Carter’s civil rights liberalism was balanced against the anticommunist, anti-Soviet imperatives of the Cold War.
Once, in the Oval Office, I brazenly asked the president what he felt about vast and secretive multinational corporations having more power than the elected president of the United States—himself. The cameras were clicking as Carter answered without hesitation, “I learned that my first year in office.”
One of the key questions raised by this book is whether two de facto states coexist in uneasy tension in America, one more open and accountable, driven from below by progressive Democratic constituencies and democratically chosen officials; and quite another one, a secretive and permanent national security state tending to carry out reflexive policies of its own. At times these divisions are blurred or nonexistent, as when the liberal JFK embraced the Green Berets and accepted the CIA’s plan for the Bay of Pigs. (He would later be heard to mutter that he wanted to “splinter” and destroy the CIA.)18 At other times, the gulf becomes a danger to the minimum requirements of democracy, as in the CIA’s secret 1954 overthrow of the democratically elected President Arbenz’s government in Guatemala, which caused decades of suffering and became a misleading model for the Bay of Pigs. Often portrayed as a clash between “doves” and “hawks,” the underlying collision is often over the role of secret operations implemented without the knowledge or oversight of voters or the US Congress, or coverage in the mainstream media. While the rationale given for state secrecy is often a demonized enemy with dangerous weapons, there always is another story than the official one, usually having to do with private corporate interests in markets and natural resources. JFK’s CIA director Allen Dulles was a carryover from Eisenhower; he had also represented the United Fruit company’s Caribbean interests.19 From the outset, US hostility to the Cuban Revolution was influenced by the loss of the Mob’s casino interests; according to the columnist Jack Anderson, the CIA even contacted mobster Johnny Roselli to aid in one of the numerous attempts against Fidel from 1961 to 1963.20
The liberal Democrats were ascendant after the Watergate scandal which, among other illegalities, featured anti-Castro Cuban exiles as part of the “plumbers unit” operating out of the White House. As the divide grew between the Nixon White House and the Democrats, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee actually voted in 1974 in favor of diplomatic relations and ending the embargo of Cuba.21 In July 1975, when Secretary of State Kissinger was exploring normalization, the United States voted in the Organization of American States to allow its member states to lift their diplomatic and economic sanctions against Cuba, though Washington itself chose not to implement the new OAS policy. Then in December 1975, the entire Senate passed an amendment banning US assistance to the FNLA and UNITA factions who were fighting the Cubans in Angola.22 Early in 1975, Kissinger said in a speech that there was no point in “perpetual antagonism” between Cuba and the United States. Secret talks were held in places like a cafeteria at the LaGuardia airport.23 As my friend the late Saul Landau told me:
SAUL LANDAU: I was hired by [Frank] Mankiewicz [a former top aide to the Kennedys] to take a note from Kissinger to Fidel. I had asked Mankiewicz to ask Kissinger to send the note, which he did, saying let’s open a dialogue. So meetings were held for a year in a little hotel near La Guardia. It led finally to the Interest Sections being set up.24
This liberalizing trend flowed into the era of Jimmy Carter, who became the first president to declare a policy of normal relations. Carter’s secretary of state Cyrus Vance officially endorsed normalization in his 1977 Senate confirmation hearings.25 He made a point of saying that a Cuban troop withdrawal from Angola was not a precondition for talks to begin. By March, Carter refused to renew the official travel ban as well as the prohibition on Americans using their dollars on the island.26 He also suspended US surveillance flights over Cuba. Talks made progress on maritime boundaries and fishing rights. Interest Sections, then considered to be interim steps toward full-fledged embassies, were established in Havana and Washington. Encouraging statements were made from the Cuban side; for example, defense minister, now president, Raúl Castro told two US senators that “the war has ended and now we are reconstructing the bridge brick by brick, ninety miles from Key West to Varadero. It takes a long time, but at the end of the bridge, we can shake hands without winners or losers.”27
UN ambassador Andrew Young ventured much farther than any US official before him. I was present when he told a Tulane University audience in April 1977, “I am not afraid of communism. It’s never been a threat to me as it is to some folks. And I don’t think we should be so worried about Cubans in Africa. The threat to me has always been racism. We’ve got to get beyond the capitalism versus communism, Cold War type of debate and make the issue one of oppression, wherever it exists, in whatever system.”28 Andy was quoted as saying that Cuban troops in Angola could even bring “a certain stability and order to southern Africa.”29
I had known Andy and his associate, Coretta Scott King, since I first migrated to Atlanta and the sit-in movement. Carter, a white born-again Southerner, had been elected president with massive support from the newly empowered African American community. The year 1976 saw Ralph Nader welcomed at a Carter softball game in Plains, Georgia, as the umpire. I was running for US Senate in the California Democratic primary, where I lost but received 1.3 million votes. Carter was about to issue an amnesty for American war resisters, including those in Canada. Ranking members of the Nixon administration were on their way to jail.
For that short moment—call it the Carter Spring—the radicalism of the sixties appeared to be becoming the common sense of the future. I was naive. Cold War thinking would never end within the labyrinth of the national security state. It would simply find a way to regain its footing. The Cold War state being built on the fear of communism, no US ambassador to the UN could be allowed to say otherwise. Especially not an uppity newcomer like Andy Young.
Ricardo was more skeptical of change, based on his own experience, but nonetheless was pleased with Carter’s new team.
RICARDO: The new US administration was a diverse and colorful group. My American colleagues were my friends. Andy Young and I had a very good personal relationship before and during. I would tell him that he was the imperialist ambassador and I was representing his victim, a fact that had to be clear. We were friends, however.
I said one day that if I have to argue with you I will be harsher than I am with others. So one day he made a pretty strong speech against Cuba over Africa and Angola, and I was pretty tough in my reply. And so Coretta King called me. She asked, “Did you get my invitation to the party? No? It must have been a mistake! Please come at seven tonight.”
So I went to the American mission that night for a moment of relaxation. I was convinced that the last-minute invite had to do with the speech. Coretta said to me, “Andy read what you said. He’s a good guy, but he has to follow instructions.” Etcetera. Then Andy came over. “Listen, Ricardo,” he said, “before you say anything. I read what you said, and I agree with you. I just want you to read the draft I got from the State Department.” It was a far harsher statement than Andy had made.
On June 4, 2013, I flew from Miami to Havana on a plane also carrying Wayne Smith, the former head of Carter’s Interest Section in the seventies, the man who most likely would have been America’s first ambassador to Cuba. Now nearing eighty, and a long-time advocate of normalization, Smith was on one of the seemingly endless trips he has taken to Cuba since 1957, when he was a graduate student and budding foreign service officer.30 As an example of his longevity, and the intractable nature of the Cuba issue, he mentioned that the elevator we rode in the Hotel Nacional was the same one he used on his first visit fifty-six years before.
I told Smith what I was writing about, and when I asked if he could point to the most important reason that the promising normalization process was terminated in 1977, he immediately blurted out a single-word expletive, “Brzezinski.”
At the earlier described background briefing on November 16, 1977, for a select circle of journalists, Brzezinski not only said normalization was “impossible” but claimed that a new CIA “study” reported a frightening buildup over the summer of Cuban troops in Angola and Ethiopia as well as a spread of Cuban troops to thirteen African countries.31
As later generations perhaps have learned, such classified studies often are used as instruments of public perception management. In 1950, the architects of the Cold War forecast a Kremlin conspiracy to take over the world militarily. JFK hyped a Soviet missile advantage in his 1960 campaign against Richard Nixon. The same tactic of threat escalation was employed to ignite US involvement in the Iraq War; according to an infamous British document, the Bush intelligence team fixed the facts to fit their policy preference.32
In an identical way, Brzezinski was quashing Carter’s plan to normalize relations with Cuba. Smith, in his account, told the White House that the CIA’s threat estimate about Cubans in Angola wasn’t true.33 There was no “dramatic buildup” in Angola, “not a buildup but a revision in our own bookkeeping,” said Smith.34 The larger implication that Cuba was serving as Moscow’s tool for taking over Africa was ludicrous. According to historian Richard Gott, Cuba began sending combat troops to Ethiopia in the autumn of 1977 and weapons in January 1978.35 Gott concludes that “Cuba’s intervention was as decisive in Ethiopia as it had been in Angola and it broke the back of the Somali advance into the Ogaden [the territory over which they had been fighting].”36 Fidel certainly can be criticized for an irrational belief that there was a road from nomadism to socialism in Ethiopia. Valid questions can be raised about whether the deployment of Cuban troops to Ethiopia, geographically very different from their ancestral African homelands, was worth the cost in Cuban lives and resources. But the Cuban role in Africa could hardly be described as illegitimate when compared to the assumed natural rights of American, Portuguese, French, and other Western troops in propping up the status quo.
Brzezinski’s “granite” resistance to any thaw with Cuba was demonstrated again in 1978–1979 when he refused to support the first major dialogue between Castro and the Committee of 75, a delegation of Cuban exiles from Miami, a process of dialogue that resulted in significant prisoner releases and increases in family visits to the island.37
Wayne Smith was far from being a Fidelista. His valuable book, Closest of Enemies, describes US policy more as a series of botched opportunities than anything deeper, and it blames Fidel for placing his global revolutionary ambitions ahead of making up with the United States at key moments. Smith’s implication is that it was both necessary and right for the United States to contain Cuba’s revolutionary impulses in Latin America and Africa. Fifty years later, however, we are still living with the consequences of those judgments. In a touching scene in 2013, I witnessed Ricardo and Wayne Smith shaking hands and enjoying friendly banter on the spacious outdoor patio of the Hotel Nacional, “two old guys” who might have been the ambassadors in Havana and Washington, now simply might-have-beens, reflecting on days gone by over cigars and mojitos.
When I interviewed him in 2013, the late Robert “Bob” Pastor, Carter’s former lead official on Cuba and Latin America, was still defending the Carter administration’s failure to normalize in 1977 as the only outcome possible. Unlike Wayne Smith, Pastor says that Carter’s entire national security team, not simply Brzezinski, turned cold on the normalization process at the end of 1977. The reason, he said, was Cuba’s intervention in Africa, particularly in Ethiopia. He seemed eager to underscore his longstanding views.
ROBERT PASTOR: Nobody worked harder on these issues than Wayne Smith. But his answer is too simplistic. Carter leaped over a hurdle left in place by Kissinger who said we wouldn’t normalize until the Cubans left Angola. Carter was the first to say the purpose was to normalize, and that a discussion of reducing their troops [in Africa] was necessary. Later Carter said any expansion of the troops would make it impossible to normalize. That was the difference between us and Castro, in that he questioned why he shouldn’t demand that NATO troops be withdrawn. We decided the opposite, that it was more important to stop Soviet-Cuban interests in Africa with the Cubans being under a Soviet general.38 Castro thought it was more important to pursue his foreign policy.
Pastor was a heavyweight in Latin America policy circles from his days as staff director of the 1976 Linowitz Commission, which first recommended to Carter the improvement of relations with Cuba.39 Since the Carter years Pastor tirelessly advocated for more progressive policies toward Cuba and the region as a whole. He traveled with ex-president Carter twice to Cuba. Yet he continued to justify the suspension of diplomatic progress in 1977 as inevitable and appropriate. I could sense uncertainty in his choice of words, however.
PASTOR: I negotiated with Ricardo [Alarcón] ten times under Carter and fifteen times since then. I have great respect for him.
Did we think it would take this long? Back then, I thought sixteen years was too long! It’s quite upsetting. Carter himself wishes he did . . . [Pastor corrects himself] Carter today looks back and regrets we couldn’t go forward but it was politically infeasible at the moment with thousands of Cubans in Ethiopia fighting under a Soviet general. Andy Young thought I was too tough.
Pastor described the Carter administration as unified around the Brzezinski position, starting with the president himself. In a 2012 journal article, however, Pastor said there was “a divisive debate within the Carter administration.”40 I asked Pastor again what would have happened if Carter had followed the views of Andrew Young.
PASTOR: Well, Carter didn’t get SALT II anyway,41 and he lost the November election. It’s tragic we haven’t been able to walk back, and never have had a normal relationship, but instead fifty years of US domination and fifty years of Cuban defiance. Reagan and Bush never lifted the Interest Sections agreement or the Panama Canal Treaty. But Reagan’s victory meant he would have broken diplomatic relations [if Carter had achieved them].
President Carter himself, in an interview with LeoGrande and Kornbluh, regretted his not establishing normal relations: “I think in retrospect, knowing what I know since leaving the White House, I should have gone ahead and been more flexible in dealing with Cuba and established full diplomatic relations.”42
Who could be sure that Reagan would have broken the formal ties if Carter had succeeded in creating them? It may seem probable in hindsight, although the fact that the Interest Sections remained in place is evidence that diplomatic gains are complicated to reverse. At the least, pressure from many in Congress and from the United Nations would have made Reagan squander political capital to rip up diplomatic relations with Cuba.
I also asked Pastor whether he would have opted for a different approach had he known that forty years later the impasse still would remain. Besides the half-sentence already spoken—“Carter himself wishes he did . . .”—there wasn’t much else Pastor could say. In his 2012 article, however, Pastor blamed Fidel for what was essentially a timing problem. In the beginning of the Carter era, the president had moved quickly on Panama, SALT, China, and energy initiatives, but “Castro lost his place in the queue.”43 That US mentality, which assumed Castro was a supplicant awaiting approval, was another example of the misunderstanding of Cuban national pride that doomed the relationship.
Cold War thinking torpedoed the most promising initiative toward normalization in decades, a policy goal that was replaced by regime change. Even in 2012, Pastor wrote that while he didn’t think the label “Soviet proxy” was accurate, he “understood that it had the advantage of putting Cuba in an awkward position where it had either to acknowledge its alliance with the Soviet Union or defend its independence.”44 In retrospect, adding an embarrassing touch to an ultra-sensitive negotiation would seem counterproductive. In addition, Pastor’s 2012 essay reflected one-sided thinking inappropriate for diplomacy. He described the 1962 missile crisis as JFK’s worst nightmare, which no doubt it was, without acknowledging its roots in Cuba’s security nightmares after the Bay of Pigs and multiple US assassination attempts against Fidel. And Pastor readily acknowledges that the United States under Nixon began a formal détente with China without demanding democracy or regime change as a precondition. Ricardo was unusually caustic on this point—
RICARDO: They said it was impossible to oppose the China lobby for years. But China was a very big market. The United States finally made the step. It coincided with the Cultural Revolution in China and the Gang of Four. Suddenly China things became very fashionable. The Gang of Four, who were Mao’s widow and three other guys in the party leadership who launched the Cultural Revolution, put Deng Xiaoping and other reformists in jail and committed a number of “excesses” in the name of revolutionary purity. This was precisely when Washington finally recognized China.
There are other lessons from the Carter years worth remembering. The CIA attempted to subvert the arms limitation summit with the Soviet Union by leaking a false claim about a secret Soviet “combat brigade” in Cuba.45 The tactic worked, helping derail the arms talks and forcing Carter to resume extensive aerial surveillance of Cuba. Pastor said in hindsight that the “secret brigade” was no secret, it had been on the island since the missile crisis, and the United States had stopped monitoring it ten years before. It was all “an artificial crisis generated by a leaked news report,” he wrote—and would happen again.
On a more positive note, with intriguing implications for today, Carter and Castro secretly orchestrated a major prisoner exchange, though claiming that the two events were independent of each other. In 1978, in an apparent effort to restart the dying normalization process, Fidel released about 3,900 political prisoners, plus all US prisoners and dual nationals the following year. Separately, in September 1979, Carter commuted the life sentences of four Puerto Rican nationalists three of whom had shot up the US Congress in 1954 and one of whom had tried to kill president Harry Truman in 1952.46 Even these extraordinary developments, however, could not rehabilitate the normalization process. According to Pastor, the sequence of releases was an attempt to get normalization back on track by the Cubans trying to appeal to Carter’s priority of human rights, consistent with Andrew Young’s domestic and international views. But normalization was beyond reach; the Reagan era and the right-wing Cuba lobby were rising on the horizon.
Nearly all histories of the period underplay the vital role that American public opinion and congressional urgings can play in changing US foreign policy. Watergate drove the Carter election and the sharp rethinking of the US role abroad. US Senate hearings on the CIA assassination programs, including those aimed at Fidel, gained national attention in 1975, and led to the creation of the first congressional oversight committees. A 1976 Senate amendment forbade direct covert aid to mercenaries or paramilitary groups in Angola.47 Later, on December 19, 1975, the Senate voted 54-22 against funding the CIA’s covert operations, with the House following on January 27, 1977, with a huge 323-99 vote.48 President Gerald Ford accused Congress of having “lost its guts.”49 Kissinger blamed Congress for “losing” Angola, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ambassador to the UN, warned that the USSR was taking over “the strategic South Atlantic,” with Brazil the next domino to fall.50 Given Watergate and Vietnam, there was little congressional support for the Congo’s Mobutu (on the CIA payroll),51 Holden Roberto (paid by China),52 or Jonas Savimbi (Portugal’s former client53 being backed by South Africa).54 Cuba was a convenient administration scapegoat for America’s own collusion in racist and colonial African dictatorships. The key factor in shaping public and congressional opposition was the fear of another Vietnam with explosive consequences at home. Che’s strategy of “two, three, many Vietnams”—straining the resources of empire across many fronts—had come to pass. That the rising international revolt against empire might turn into disorder on the home front was to be prevented at all costs. National security experts like Harvard’s Samuel Huntington warned of an “excess of democracy,”55 referring to the rise of the Left after Vietnam and Watergate. The corporate lawyer Lewis F. Powell wrote a widely circulated strategy memo to elite insiders calling for an organized effort to stem progressive change, demonizing Ralph Nader in particular;56 Powell was nominated to the US Supreme Court by Richard Nixon two months later.
Windows open, windows close. The post-Watergate rethinking was brief. 1979 was a good year for the anticommunist lobbies. Domestic paranoia was inflamed by the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua. These threats were met by the new Miami Cuba lobby, the Vatican’s assault on liberation theology in Latin America, and the election of president Ronald Reagan. The Sandinista victory and a rebel offensive in El Salvador stirred talk of a “Cuban octopus” strangling Central America.57 The Cuba lobby was a creature sponsored by the American Right as an alternative to the earlier exile generation’s failed military missions and assassination plots. The Vatican’s dismantling of liberation theology was coordinated with Reagan’s national security team after meetings in Santa Fe, New Mexico that year, where the participants concurred on the need to deter “radical” movements thought to be inspired by Cuba.58
Not until 1992 would the Democrats have another chance, and they would not come close in ’92 to the positions and promise of the early Jimmy Carter years.