NOTES

Preface: The Day They Said Would Never Come

1. On January 8, 2015, serious rumors of Fidel’s death were circulating among close observers of Cuba. It turned out that the deceased was a Kenyan named Fidel Castro. The Cuban leader is eighty-eight years old.

2. Pilgrimage to Rincón for the feast day of San Lázaro, http://www.cubaabsolutely.com/aboutcuba/article_religion.php.

3. Wall Street Journal, December 20–21, 2014.

4. Andrew Roth, “Hawkish Russian Emissary to Visit Cuba’s Leaders,” The New York Times, December 20, 2014.

5. It will be interesting to watch the conflict play out over major league baseball, where Cuban teams and stars are competitive with the best in North America. As of 2014, twenty-two Cuban ballplayers were in the major leagues, with several excelling in their positions. But because of the embargo, Cuban players have had to migrate illegally and renounce their citizenship, and they are not allowed to send remittances home. The major league offers big salaries and insists that Cubans not play winter ball in their home country for fear of injuries. The Cubans will want to see their players star in the major league and make good money, while remaining Cuban nationals, paying taxes to Cuba, and representing Cuba internationally. It is conceivable that an MLB team will locate in Havana. See The New York Times, December 18, 2014, one day after the official announcement.

6. Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-NJ) authored 1992 legislation signed by Bill Clinton, that tightened the embargo and, in Title II, provided a funding stream for pro-dissident projects in Cuba. Pertierra is referring to an apparent denial of access to Viagra in Cuba.

7. The convicted informants are Miguel Alvarez and his wife, Mercedes Arce, serving sentences of thirty and fifteen years, respectively. Alvarez, known as “Miguelito,” was friendly with every American who visited Ricardo, and was present at every diplomatic or government meeting involving Ricardo as well. The chatter among many in Havana was that Ricardo was at fault for not detecting the informant at his side. He was forced to become a virtual recluse for nearly two years before the case was resolved.

8. From “The Great Surprise,” Ricardo’s commentary in Punto Final, December 26, 2014.

9. Jimmy Carter froze his original promise of normalization when the Cubans fought in Angola and were accused of being Soviet pawns. Bill Clinton resumed the thaw, then froze it after the 1996 incident when Cuba shot down exile planes flying out of Miami. The Helms-Burton Act, which Clinton signed, was a gesture of support toward the wealthy Cuban American lobby based in Miami.

10. The Cuban Five were René González and Fernando González, released in 2013 and 2014, respectively, and Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, and Ramón Labañino, flown home on December 17. The latter three all have families in Cuba and returned as national heroes on the same day that Alan Gross flew to Washington, D.C.

11. Head of Cuba’s agency for North American Affairs.

12. Cardinal Jaime Ortega.

13. $20 million has been regularly budgeted by the administration for “democracy programs” in Cuba—of the sort that Gross carried out.

Introduction: Two Old Guys Talking

1. C. Wright Mills, Letters and Autobiographical Writings (University of California Press, 2000), 311.

2. Ricardo Alarcón, “Waiting for C. Wright Mills,” The Nation, April 9, 2007.

3. Editorial Board, “Cuba’s Impressive Role on Ebola,” The New York Times, October 19, 2014.

Chapter 1: “A Heroic Creation”

1. Notable Quesadas include Gonzalo de Quesada y Aróstegui (1868–11915) who would go on to compile José Martí’s seminal writings and extract permission from then American governor Leonard Wood to build the National Library. Another prominent figure is president Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada (1871–1939), who in turn was the son of the nation’s first president.

2. Hugh Thomas, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (Da Capo, 1998), 838.

3. After decades of internal instability, the young Cuban republic found a period of relative stability after the revolution of 1933 and the creation of the extremely progressive constitution of 1940. Although the next decade was characterized by systemic corruption and increased inequality, the major impulse of political movements was toward reform from within instead of attempts at revolution. As time went on, radical reformist movements like the Orthodox Party, of which Fidel was a congressional candidate, gained tremendous political momentum and seemed poised to be swept into power in the coming 1952 elections. Preempting the vote, Batista took power and suspended the 1940 constitution, silencing grievances and leaving no legal avenues for change. In response to this, Fidel organized an attack on several targets, in particular the Moncada military barracks in the heart of Santiago de Cuba, the nation’s second largest city. Although his 1953 attack failed militarily, Fidel was able to turn the incident into a public relations success through the sub rosa publication of his historic speech during his trial. Convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in prison, he spent only two behind bars before being the subject of a political amnesty along with his co-conspirators in 1955, after which he swiftly fled to Mexico in self-imposed exile. There he built up an expeditionary force that returned to the island with Fidel at its head in 1956, beginning the guerrilla war that would culminate in Batista fleeing the country with the rebels hot on his heels, on New Year’s Eve 1958.

4. Chibás had made a very public and specific accusation of corruption against a public official. The official demanded proof of the accusation, which Chibás had promised to provide, citing the same sources that had informed him of the story in the first place. Finding out that there was no evidence and, perhaps, that the whole story had been an excuse to discredit those criticizing corruption, Chibás committed suicide so as to clean himself and his party of the shame.

5. The Directorio was a student organization largely composed of the most radical and politically minded members of the FEU, including student president at the time, José Antonio Echeverría.

6. Scheer and Zeitlin, along with Saul Landau, were early New Left intellectuals attracted to the revolution, spending weeks there interviewing workers and intellectuals, including Che Guevara, beginning as early as 1959. Their 1963 book, Cuba: Tragedy in our Hemisphere (Grove Press), later republished as Cuba: An American Tragedy (Penguin, 1964), remains an important work.

7. To be precise, on August 30, 1953, the PSP described the Moncada assault as “a rabble-rousing, undisciplined, desperate initiative, typical of a petty bourgeoisie without principles and compromised by gangsterism.” Néstor Kohan and Nahuel Scherma, Fidel (Seven Stories Press, 2010), 41.

8. The Moncada numbers are from Thomas, Cuba, 838.

9. Andy Gravette, Globetrotter: Cuba (New Holland Publishers, 2007), 103.

10. The Moscow-mandated Popular Front strategy prohibited the more radical strategies of the CP’s early years, breeding discontent in its ranks and causing the more radical individuals to seek other outlets when Batista took power in 1952. Worsening its reputation during this period and since is the fact that it used its relative safety from Batista’s secret police to publicly criticize and attempt to divide those who did rise up against the dictatorship. It would only compound the wounds of that time that many of these same figures in the CP would find leadership roles in the post-Batista regime.

11. Fidel speech on September 4, 1995, in Kohan and Scherma, Fidel, 31.

12. Thomas, Cuba, 605–606, 618.

13. Scheer and Zeitlin, Cuba: An American Tragedy, 121.

14. Richard Gott, Cuba: A New History (Yale, 2004), 147.

15. Mariátegui was a more complex thinker than I can do justice to. He was branded a follower of Leon Trotsky, even though he had not read such works as Permanent Revolution. The Cuban Communists would have supported Stalin’s banishment of Trotsky to Mexico and subsequent assassination. One of Mariátegui’s formulations bore a resemblance to both Trotsky and the Cuban Revolution’s model. Mariátegui rejected in his era the “class collaboration” model adopted by the Cuban Communists with Batista in the 1950s in favor of a complete revolution bypassing the “stage” of a “national democratic revolution” in which revolutionaries collaborate with the “bourgeois” and “patriotic” sectors of the business class. The Castro revolution, in bypassing that stage, echoed Mariátegui’s belief that the business sector was too compromised by international capitalism (or Yankee imperialism) to stand for genuine independence and substantial improvements for the Cuban working class. For a general treatment that contextualizes Mariátegui, consult “The Left in Latin America since c. 1920” by Alan Angell, in Vol. VI of Leslie Bethell’s monumental collaborative work The Cambridge History of Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 1994).

16. Ricardo refers to the February 1924 article by Mella, “Lenin Coronado,” in Juventud magazine.

17. The “power struggle” quote is attributed to Manuel Piñeiro in Julia E. Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground (Harvard University Press, 2004), 10. As a young revolutionary, Piñeiro helped smuggle arms left behind in the failed palace insurrection to the Sierra guerrilla front (Thomas, Cuba, 930). He became the Cuban revolutionary government’s chief of intelligence for many decades. Piñeiro, genially known as “Barbarroja” (for his red beard) died in a car accident in 1998.

18. Thomas, Cuba, 928.

19. Ibid., 930.

20. “Cuban Rebel is Visited in Hideout,” The New York Times, February 24, 1957.

21. The Mexico Pact was negotiated between Echeverría of the Directorio and Fidel’s M-26-7 in August 1956, uniting their forces in a revolutionary commitment to Batista’s overthrow, a broad reform program and a post-Batista coalition including dissident Cuban military leaders.

22. Thomas, Cuba, 930.

23. Ibid.

24. Marquitos was a drama student at the University of Havana Theater. He was in the youth branch of the Communist Party. He had been assigned to inform the party of the activities of the Directorio. He personally visited the hideout on the afternoon of April 19. On April 20, he contacted police colonel Esteban Ventura Novo, who promptly surrounded the location and proceeded to massacre Directorio members using automatic machine guns. Ramón L. Bonachea and Marta San Martin, The Cuban Insurrection, 1952–1959 (Transaction Publishers, 1974), 127–130.

25. Personal interview with Andrés Pertierra at University of Havana, 2013.

26. Thomas, Cuba, 931, 1319.

27. Ibid., 1319.

28. Ibid.

29. Bonachea and San Martín, The Cuban Insurrection, 127–130.

30. Personal interview with Andrés Pertierra.

31. Nancy Stout, One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (Monthly Review Press, 2013), 329.

32. Hugh Thomas writes that the “general attitude of the Directorio was anti-communist, democratic, middle class and basically Catholic despite what has sometimes been suggested since,” 927. The Directorio also carried out urban sabotage and later attempted to establish a guerrilla base of its own in the Sierra. Its slain leader, Echeverría, would have been one of the revolution’s foremost figures. After the revolution, the Directorio was integrated into the ORI (Organizaciones Revolucionarias Integradas), an initial attempt to merge the revolutionary factions before the transition to the PSP, or new Communist Party.

33. The Ten Years’ War (1868–1878) was the first sustained war of independence in Cuba. An irregular army of property owners, peasants, and freed slaves prosecuted a relatively successful guerrilla war for a decade against all the efforts of the Spanish military. Eventually, the war stagnated, morale ebbed, resources ran low, and the extremely capable Spanish general, Arsenio Martínez Campos, took the field. The cumulative result of these changes led to the Pact of Zanjón (1878) where most of the Cuban forces agreed to surrender.

Chapter 2: The Revolutionary War, 1956–59

1. The vessel, which barely survived the trip, stands in a place of honor in old Havana today.

2. Nancy Stout, One Day in December, 126.

3. Frank País (1934–1957) headed the urban guerrilla branch of the M-26-7 in the eastern part of the island. He led the diversionary uprising in Santiago that was to coincide with the landing of the Granma in late 1956, as well as a series of other urban operations. The Batista regime was able to track him down and murder him in cold blood on July 30, 1957.

4. Gott, Cuba: A New History, 163.

5. Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution, 231.

6. Oltuski interview with Tom Hayden, Havana.

7. The tallest skyscraper in Havana, finished in 1956.

8. Rolando Masferrer’s infamous private army, Los Tigres (The Tigers), quickly became known for their brutal methods against rebel forces and civilian sympathizers.

9. The reference to Masferrer is from an unpublished Alarcón interview with Salim Lamrani in Havana in 2006. Masferrer (1918–1975) was both a Communist Party senator and staunch supporter of Batista. His paramilitary groups provided Batista with protection and executed alleged subversives. In the United States he was apparently acquainted with Mafia bosses like “Santo” Trafficante and Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa. Masferrer even met on one occasion with president John Kennedy to discuss an invasion of Cuba. According to an FBI agent interviewed by Ann Louise Bardach for her Cuba Confidential (2002), “to some extent the gangsterismo of Havana was transported to Miami by a handful of early batistiano arrivals, guys like Rolando Masferrer. . . . They set up shop here just like they did in Havana—running protection rackets and illegal gambling, primarily bolita, which flourished until the lottery became legal.” Masferrer, who had earned enemies in all directions, was blown to pieces by a bomb in Miami, in 1975.

10. Jane Franklin, Cuba and the United States: A Chronological History (Ocean, 1997), 34. See also Cuban Revolution Reader, ed. Julio Garcia Luis (Ocean, 2008), 120–123.

Chapter 3: The Cuban Revolution and the American New Left

1. Now the American Society of News Editors.

2. Julia S. Chen, “Castro Comes to Cambridge,” The Harvard Crimson, June 1, 2009.

3. Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America, and the Making of the New Left (Verso, 1993).

4. Ibid., 90.

5. Matt Schudel, “Activist and filmmaker Saul Landau dies at 77,” The Washington Post, September 10, 2013.

6. Thomas, Cuba, 1277.

7. Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are, 140.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., 144, 146.

10. The Cubans claimed that the hotel’s management had demanded a $2,000 cash advance for their continued stay, either out of suspicion that they lacked the funds, or in an attempt to insult the delegation and ensure that they would leave of their own volition. Since the Cubans had already been the target of assassination attempts and negative attention, the latter intention can at least be understood.

11. Salim Lamrani, unpublished manuscript. Another very serious academic, Felix Roberto Masud-Piloto, also stands by this 100,000 figure in his book, From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants: Cuban Migration to the US, 1959–1995 (Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 7.

12. An apocryphal tale about his death states that when given a final chance to convert, and to thus escape eternal damnation, he asked the officiating Catholic priest if Spaniards also went to the heaven the cleric spoke of. Upon hearing the affirmative, Hatuey is said to have responded by saying that he would prefer to go to hell.

13. Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (Doubleday/Anchor, 1973), 1, 3, 49–55.

14. The North Star, April 27, 1849.

15. C.L.R. James, Appendix, “From Toussaint l’Ouverture to Fidel Castro,” The Black Jacobins (Vintage, 1963), 392–418.

16. Ibid., 391.

17. In his 1961 “Prose Contribution to the Cuban Revolution,” Ginsberg wrote: “Now the Cuban revolutionary government, as far as I can tell, is basically occupied by immediate practical problems & proud of that, heroic resistances, drama, uplift, reading & teaching language, and totally unoccupied as yet with psychic exploration . . .” Ginsberg wrote that Carlos Fraqui, a Cuban writer, “parroted the US imperialist line against marijuana” and told Ginsberg that “it should be easier for a poet to understand a revolution than for a revolution to understand poetry.” Ginsberg would continue to insist, and would eventually be joined by many in the counterculture, that the Cuban Revolution should have prioritized his values. Cuba prevented the emergence of a drug culture, but forty years after Ginsberg’s protest, began lifting restrictions on gay rights and producing films such as Strawberry and Chocolate (1993).

18. Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are, 147.

19. Scheer and Zeitlin, Cuba: An American Tragedy.

Chapter 4: C. Wright Mills, Cuba, and the New Left

1. C. Wright Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” in New Left Review, No. 5, September–October 1960.

2. Mike Forrest Keen: Stalking Sociologists: J. Edgar Hoover's FBI Surveillance of American Sociology (Transaction Publishers, 2004), 174–176.

3. Régis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution? (Grove, 1967).

4. C. Wright Mills, Letters and Autobiographical Writings, 12.

5. Ibid., 319.

6. Ibid., 324.

7. “Oriente,” meaning “east,” refers to the then-province of Oriente, which is now made up by the provinces of Granma, Bayamo, Holguín, Las Tunas, and Guantanamo.

8. C. Wright Mills, Letters and Autobiographical Writings, 324.

9. “Mills’s Return,” Alarcón lecture, Workshop at XXVII International Conference of Latin American Studies Association (LASA), Montreal, September 7, 2007.

10. C. Wright Mills, Listen, Yankee (Ballantine Books paperback, 1961), 43.

11. Ibid., 39.

12. Ibid., 44.

13. Ibid., 113.

14. Ibid., 46.

15. Ibid., 98–99.

16. Ibid., 107.

17. Ibid., 100.

18. Ibid., 104.

19. Tom Hayden, “Port Huron Statement,” Inspiring Participatory Democracy: Student Movements from Port Huron to Today (Paradigm, 2012), 152.

20. Ibid..

21. Ibid., 153.

22. Ibid., 154.

23. Ibid., 166.

24. Mills, Listen, Yankee, 179.

25. Ibid., 182.

26. Ibid., 179 .

27. Ibid., 106.

28. Ibid., 100.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., 179.

31. Ibid., 166.

Chapter 5: From the Missile Crisis to Counterinsurgency

1. Gott, Cuba: A New History, 58.

2. Letter from José Martí to Manuel Mercado, May 18, 1895, Encampment of Dos Ríos. At the time, Martí was embedded with independence forces as they marched through Oriente. He was still in the process of composing the letter when the unit he was moving with was caught in a Spanish ambush. Martí died in the battle.

3. The Platt amendment refers to an imposed addendum to the Cuban constitution (1901) that had been proposed by congressman Orville Platt. It allowed the United States to intervene in Cuban affairs whenever Washington saw fit. This effectively nullified Cuban national sovereignty. Cuban representatives who had met in Havana to decide on the details of the new constitution were coerced into including the insulting amendment with the threat of continued US occupation if they refused.

4. Carlos Manuel de Cespedes (1819–1874) was elected president of Cuba during the first independence war. He had been a freemason, along with many of the key conspirators prior to the outbreak of the war. Knowing that large, closed-door meetings of important local figures would draw attention, Cubans used the seemingly innocuous practice of visiting local masonic lodges to plan their uprising.

5. When the Ten Years’ War broke out, sugar plantations were already common throughout the island, although the largest were mostly exclusive to the western half of the island. For this reason, the west is also where most of the enslaved black population lived. Wary of supporting independence, slave owners and those economically dependent on them became the bulwark of the Spanish regime. It was not without reason that they feared the road to independence would lead to slave uprisings and eventually outright abolition. Many of these same plantation owners had purchased or inherited Spanish aristocratic titles, hence Ricardo’s reference to “aristocracy.”

6. The policy of burning down sugar plantations had originated when Cubans burned down their own properties in the east to keep the Spanish from receiving any revenue from their seizure. After seeing the worst slavery had to offer in the west, the policy quickly became a moral imperative as well.

7. Raúl Roa (1907–1982) was a prominent Cuban intellectual from before the revolution who brought his years of experience and intellectual capacity to foreign affairs on behalf of the post-Batista government. His experience in the struggle against Machado and the resulting revolution of 1933 bridged the generational divide between both revolutions.

8. Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are, 149.

9. In Ted Sorenson’s Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History, 705; cited in Thomas, Cuba, 1417.

10. Joint Soviet-Cuban statement, September 2, 1960, in Franklin, Cuba and the United States, 58.

11. Gott, Cuba: A New History, 198.

12. Ibid., 203.

13. Ibid., 206.

14. Verde Olivo, October 6, 1968; cited in Thomas, Cuba, 1416.

15. When the Ten Years’ War drew to a close with Pact of Zanjón, between Spain and the Cuban rebels, a small group of radicals, under the leadership of Antonio Maceo, broke away and continued the war for a short period. Because of this, in Cuban history, Baraguá is a symbol of quixotic defiance, with signs in Havana reading “Cuba will be an eternal Baraguá.”

16. Gott, Cuba: A New History, 205

17. Thomas, Cuba, 1415, citing an interview with Che by Ricardo Rojo, in Che Guevara, 130.

18. Thomas, Cuba, 1409.

19. Franklin, Cuba and the United States, 58. Franklin’s sources are a 1984 speech by Fidel, a Soviet general at an 1989 conference on the crisis, and another Russian official at a 1992 conference.

20. Thomas, Cuba, 1413.

21. Ibid., 1417.

22. Ibid., 1407–1408.

23. Sorenson, Counselor, 706; cited in Thomas, Cuba, 1413.

24. Gott, Cuba: A New History, 196.

25. Bertrand Russell, Unarmed Victory (Simon & Schuster 1963), 29; cited in Thomas, Cuba, 1407.

26. It was during this speech that President Kennedy revealed to the public evidence of offensive mid-range Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba that were capable of striking key locations throughout the hemisphere. This was particularly significant because it disproved Soviet claims that all missiles were simply defensive and non-nuclear. Kennedy went on to call for their removal and announced a naval quarantine around the island until the situation was resolved.

27. Common Sense, Vol. 4, No. 2, New York, December 1962.

28. Robert Dallek, “JFK vs. the Military,” The Atlantic, September 10, 2013.

29. Thomas, Cuba, 1417.

30. For a full exposition of his ideas, read Edward Geary Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars: An American’s Mission to Southeast Asia (Fordham University Press, 1991).

31. Evan Thomas, Robert Kennedy: His Life (Simon and Schuster, 2013), 148.

32. Lansdale on Mongoose in Fabian Escalante’s The Secret War, 13–14.

33. US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (University of Chicago Press, 2008), 73–75.

Chapter 6: JFK’s Assassination

1. Thurston Clarke, JFK’s Last Hundred Days (Penguin, 2013), 250.

2. The National Archive likes to emphasize the fact that less than half a million documents are still “postponed in full,” or completely withheld from the public. Millions of other pages still contain at least partial redactions due to supposed security concerns.

3. To date, the CIA continues to contend that they cannot release at least 295 documents from his file because they would cause “extremely grave danger” to national security. The documents may be released in 2017, but the CIA may attempt to keep them classified. See Scott Shane, “C.I.A. Is Still Cagey About Oswald Mystery,” The New York Times, October 16, 2009.

4. Ibid.

5. The reader might recall that the revolutionary Directorio is the name of the armed radical offshoot of the student federation (FEU) that led the failed assault on the Presidential Palace in 1956. They later added 13 de Marzo (13 of March) to their name in memory of the date of the attack.

6. Interview with Jefferson Morley, November 12, 2013.

7. Scott Shane, “C.I.A. Is Still Cagey About Oswald Mystery,” The New York Times, October 16, 2009.

8. Jefferson Morley, “Celebrated Authors Demand that the CIA Come Clean on JFK Assassination,” Salon, December 17, 2003.

9. Joannides exercised an “important degree of control” over the Directorio, according to one CIA report. The New York Times, October 17, 2009.

10. Gus Russo, Live by the Sword (Bancroft Press, 1998), 44; Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico (Kansas, 2008), 130, 163. For the size of his team, see Franklin, Cuba and the United States, 46.

11. “US Select Committee to Student Government Operations,” US Senate, November 20, 1975, 71.

12. This refers to the downing of the U-2 spy plane near Banes, Cuba, during the height of the Cuban missile crisis. The plane’s pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson Jr. (1927–1962), perished in the crash.

13. In Arthur Schlesinger’s history, Robert Kennedy and His Times (Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 541. Donovan also reported to the White House that Fidel was “a most intelligent, shrewd, and relatively stable political leader,” 541, footnote.

14. Thomas Mann was the State Department’s premier expert on the region, gaining the unofficial title “Mr. Latin America.” He had opposed the Bay of Pigs vociferously in the preceding months.

15. Edward C. Keeper et al., Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Vol. XI: Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath (United States Government Printing Office, 1996), Document 320.

16. Fabian Escalante, JFK: The Cuba Files, 42; Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1978), Vol. 1, 543.

17. Thurston Clarke, JFK’s Last Hundred Days (Penguin Press, 2013); Robert Dallek, Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (Harper, 2013); David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (Free Press, 2007); James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he Died and Why it Matters (Touchstone, 2010).

18. Dallek, Camelot’s Court, 384.

19. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 15.

20. Talbot, Brothers, 222–223.

21. Ibid., 224.

22. Ibid.

23. Dallek, Camelot’s Court, 384, 387; James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, 177, 248–249.

24. Ibid., 390.

25. Ibid., 387.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid., 391.

28. Ibid.

29. Talbot, Brothers, 229.

30. Ibid.

Chapter 7: Latin American Revolution

1. McCone, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–63 (Government Printing Office, 1964), Vol. 10, 955.

2. Nancy Stout, One Day in December, 211.

3. Dr. Osvaldo Dorticós (1919–1983) was hand-picked for the presidency by Fidel to replace a troublesome interim predecessor. While never achieving the power usually associated with the title of president, Dorticós contributed ideas to the new government and was not an entirely inert figurehead.

4. Present were former president Lázaro Cárdenas of Mexico, then-Chilean senator Salvador Allende, and peasant leaders and socialists from Brazil, Uruguay, and beyond. Franklin, Cuba and the United States, 48.

5. Gott, Cuba: A New History, 184.

6. Ibid., 197.

7. Despite the restoration of the constitution of 1940 being a rallying point of the struggle against Batista, Fidel ruled by decree until 1976, when a new explicitly socialist constitution as drafted.

8. According to Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 12.

9. In the First Declaration of Havana, Fidel identified himself with the “Our America” that Bolívar, Hidalgo (Mexico), San Martín (Argentina), O’Higgins (Chile), Tiradentes (Brazil), Sucre (Venezuela), and Martí (Cuba) “wished to see free.” In Gott, Cuba: A New History, 184.

10. Ibid., 191.

11. Ibid., 217.

12. Debray, Strategy for Revolution: Essays on Latin America (Jonathan Cape, 1970), 108.

13. It is important to note that although his death in captivity was officially ruled a suicide by the government, this explanation has long been contested by supporters who point to a lack of suicidal tendencies in his past and to suspicious circumstances surrounding his death.

14. Betancourt 49.18 percent, URD/PCV 34.61 percent, COPEI 16.21 percent.

15. Roque Dalton, Small Hours of the Night: Selected Poems of Roque Dalton, ed. Hardie St. Martin (Curbstone Press, 1996), 189.

16. Ibid., 111.

17. Dermot Keogh, “El Salvador 1932. Peasant Revolt and Massacre,” The Crane Bag Magazine, 1982, Vol. 6, No. 2, 7.

18. Theresa Whitefield, Paying the Price: Ignacio Ellacuria and the Murdered Jesuits of El Salvador (Temple, 1995).

19. Hardie St. Martin, “Love Falls Like a Generous Rain,” preface to Small Hours of the Night: Selected Poems of Roque Dalton (Curbstone Press, 1996).

20. It is difficult to overstate the importance of Casa de las Americas to Latin American artists and writers during this period. Despite Cuba’s own questionable cultural policies and the obvious leftist agenda of the institution, it gave recognition, support, and sometimes even asylum along with a paying job to progressive and radical figures in Latin American culture whose work was often banned and whose personal safety was in danger in their home countries.

21. Dalton, Small Hours of the Night, 169, 172–173.

22. As a great poet, he was seen as having a higher calling than soldiering, which is something almost anyone could do. See Margaret Randall, More than things (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 29.

23. Whitefield, Paying the Price, 61.

24. Though publicly denied at first, the FMLN eventually admitted the truth.

Chapter 8: Enter and Exit Régis Debray

1. In both cases, this refers specifically to the party officially recognized by Moscow, the Parti communiste français (PFC). For attitudes to Algerian independence, see Allison Drew, We are no longer in France: Communists In Colonial Algeria (Manchester University Press, 2014). And regarding Vietnam, see Alain Ruscio, Les communistes français et la guerre d'Indochine, 1944–1954 (L’Harmattan, 1985).

2. Régis Debray, “Latin America: The Long March,” New Left Review, No. 33, September–October 1965.

3. Debray, Praised Be Our Lords: The Autobiography (Verso, 2007), 16.

4. Ibid., 24.

5. Ibid., 29.

6. Régis Debray, “Le Castrisme: La Longue Marche de l’Amérique Latine,” Les Temps Moderne, No. 224, January 1965.

7. George Ciccariello-Maher, We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution (Duke University Press, 2013), 19.

8. Debray, Praised Be, 39.

9. “Initiated” is Debray’s term for it. See Praised Be, 22.

10. For the details on this period of training in Cuba, read Debray, Praised Be, 22, 39, 42.

11. For a comprehensive and sympathetic history of Che’s guerrilla front in Africa, see Piero Gleijeses’s masterful Conflicting Missions (2003). In 2013, I interviewed the author, who lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies.

12. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 216. Gleijeses cites Gianni Mina’s interview with Fidel in An Encounter with Fidel (Ocean, 1991), 225.

13. Debray, Praised Be, 46.

14. Ibid., 69.

15. Ibid.

16. Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?

17. Ibid., cover blurb.

18. Ibid., 29.

19. Jon Lee Anderson, Che, (Grove, 1997), 694–695.

20. Ricardo and Debray both agreed that the Soviet pursuit of “peaceful coexistence” with the United States was at the expense of third world countries where rebels were seeking Soviet support for wars against Western colonial powers.

21. The Bolivian Communist Party opposed the armed struggle and may have included informants who led the CIA to Che. At one point, however, the party’s chairman, Mario Monje Molina, demanded leadership over the foco, which Che resisted. One of Monje’s objections was that Che’s column included only a minority of Bolivians. Another was Che only saw Bolivia as a springboard to Argentina and the Andes.

22. Debray, Praised Be, 65.

23. Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?, 21.

24. Gabriel García Márquez and Roberto Pombo: “Subcomandante Marcos: The Punch Card and the Hourglass,” New Left Review, May–June 2001.

25. Anderson, Che, 703.

26. According to Che’s notebooks, Debray was described as “white bread” (pan blanco), and he “stated too vehemently how useful he could be on the outside.” Quoted in Anderson, Che, 713.

27. Debray, Praised Be, 130.

28. Ibid., 131.

29. Ibid., 130.

30. Anderson, Che, 713.

31. Ibid., 718.

32. Led by Reies Lopez Tijerina, a Chicano land grant movement staged occupations in 1966–1967, and engaged in a shootout at the courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico, on June 5, 1967. When federal troops were sent, the raiders took to the mountains in northern New Mexico until they were eventually tracked down.

33. The Chicago Seven refers to eight radical activists, including myself, who were indicted by the Nixon administration, and tried and convicted in February 1970 for conspiracy to disrupt the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. The case was won in the 7th US circuit court of appeals.

34. Scanlan’s Monthly, January 1971. The numbers were based on reported incidents and categorized according to acts against police (423), high schools (392), and the military (101).

35. Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS: The Rise and Development of the Students for a Democratic Society (Random House, 1973), 445.

36. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Vol. V, Vietnam, 1967, Document 386: “Memorandum From the President’s Assistant (Jones) to President Johnson,” Washington, November 4, 1967.

37. Sale, SDS, 444.

38. According to a 1969 survey published by Fortune magazine, “Che Guevara was a more popular figure than Johnson, Nixon, Humphrey, or Wallace”—Sale, SDS, 480.

39. Verde Olivo, Havana, December 21, 1969.

40. Special Forces members James Jackson Jr., Dan Pitzer, and Edward Johnson.

41. The black and white photograph of Che that is now world-famous is named the “Guerrillero Heróico” (Heroic Guerrilla Fighter). It was taken by Korda while Che was marching in Havana along with thousands of others in protest of the explosion that destroyed the French freighter La Courbre on March 4, 1960. The exact cause of the explosion is unknown to this day, but Cuban authorities at the time claimed it was an act of CIA sabotage. The vessel had been carrying tons of Belgian arms recently purchased by the Cuban government, despite numerous attempts by US authorities first to dissuade and later to impede the sale. Many Cubans presumed that the CIA was behind the action, which further inflamed already deteriorated relations with Washington.

42. The Tet Offensive, which began on January 31, 1968, was a surprise military operation by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces, around the Vietnamese holiday of Tet. The scope of the assault and the unexpected nature of the onslaught caught US and South Vietnamese forces off guard. It is often considered a turning point in the war, in favor of North Vietnam.

43. Tom Hayden, “Two, Three, Many Columbias,” Ramparts Magazine, June 15, 1968.

44. Conversation with Richard Goodwin, 1988. According to historian Joshua Freeman, “Richard Goodwin later said that one of his influences in writing the Great Society speech had been the SDS’s Port Huron Statement, whose principal author, Tom Hayden, had adopted some of the cadences and tone that John Kennedy had used in his inaugural address, a measure of how much mainstream liberalism and movements to its left had penetrated one another by the mid-sixties”—Freeman, American Empire, 1945–2000 (Viking, 2012), 204–205.

45. The Catholic worker movement is a tendency founded during the Great Depression that pushed left-leaning American Catholics to take action to promote social justice and other progressive causes. Although a broad movement, each unit operates autonomously and without organizational structure. The far better-known Peace Corps was founded by President Kennedy in 1961 to channel American volunteers to foreign countries—in order to bring assistance while members of the corps would also serve as unofficial ambassadors for the United States abroad, improving the nation’s international image.

46. Before Kennedy’s murder in 1963, SDS decided to branch out to build community-based movements in ghettos, barrios, and the hollows of Appalachia. We wanted to create an “interracial movement of the poor” in tandem with the SNCC Mississippi Project. I moved to Newark with a team of twelve in June 1964, and remained nearly four years. We succeeded in building a base among the voiceless poor, but the effort crumbled as national resources were devoted to Vietnam.

47. Sargent Shriver (1915–2011) was a friend in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. After serving as the first director of the Peace Corps, he went on to head President Johnson’s “War on Poverty.”

48. The Alliance for Progress was an international initiative under the Kennedy administration created to promote economic cooperation between the United States and Latin America. The publicly espoused goals were benign, but Che, as well as others among the region’s Left, saw behind it an attempt to reform the system of exploitation without changing its essential nature.

49. Debray, Praised Be, 130.

50. Carlo Feltrinelli, “Comrade Millionaire, Part Two,” The Guardian, November 2, 2001.

51. Debray, Praised Be, 119.

52. Régis Debray and Salvador Allende Gossens, The Chilean Revolution: Conversations with Allende (Pantheon Books, 1972), 119.

53. Debray, Praised Be, 110.

54. Jean Paul Sartre, “Preface” to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (François Maspero, 1961).

55. The Cultural Revolution, sometimes known by the above-mentioned full title, was a process that took place in China between 1966 and 1976 at the behest and encouragement of Mao to battle “bourgeois” tendencies that had supposedly usurped the Chinese revolution. Spurred on by his so-called Little Red Book, numerous Maoist fanatics proceeded to perform a purge of heterodoxy in both high governmental offices and in local government.

56. Debray, Praised Be, 130.

57. Ibid., 128.

Chapter 9: The Revolutionary Flame

1. From Mark Rudd’s thoughtful autobiography, My Life with SDS and the Weathermen (Norton, 2009), 41.

2. In his televised appearance on August 24, 1968, Fidel publicly supported the USSR’s action against the “liberal” reforms that were leading to “counterrevolution” in Czechoslovakia.

3. The Tlatelolco massacre, which occurred on October 2, 1968, was the shooting of hundreds of unarmed students by the Mexican armed forces as a response to the growing strength and momentum of the student movement. The bullets were quickly followed by bulldozers, chasing away survivors and maiming the fresh corpses of the students that had been killed. Thousands more were beaten and jailed, and a notable number simply disappeared. The ensuing chaos of the incident made it difficult to reach an objective estimate of the death toll, but witnesses claim to have seen hundreds of corpses. It is considered by Latin Americans to be one of the most infamous massacres in the region’s long and bloody history.

4. Rudd, My Life, 143.

5. Ibid., 42.

6. Carlos Rafael Rodriguez (1913–1997) was a Cuban, Marxist, economist, intellectual, and one of the key political figures of twentieth-century Cuba. Serving as the head of the Cuban institution that directed and regulated agricultural reform (INRA), he was dubbed the “economic czar” by international media. In the following decades, he would serve as the Cuban representative to numerous countries in the Soviet bloc and would represent the island nation at important international events. He would also be the one to represent the Cuban Communist Party in Fulgencio Batista’s democratically elected 1942 government, as a part of the freshly forged alliance between the two old enemies.

7. Oglesby, Ravens In the Wind (Scribner, 2008), 233. Oglesby attributes this quotation to Bernadine Dohrn.

8. Sale, SDS, 500, 571.

9. Carlos Marighella was a Brazilian author of a handbook on urban guerrilla warfare, Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla (1969).

10. Karen Wald, handwritten notes in my files.

11. Ayers, Fugitive Days, 228.

12. Ibid., 247.

13. Rudd, My Life, 261–262.

14. See the Weathermen Manifesto, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows,” June 18, 1969.

15. Rudd, My Life, 110. Rudd, who helped set the blaze too, quotes J.J. as saying, “These motherfuckers have got to fall.”

16. Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (University of California Press, 2004), 172–173.

17. Kevin Gillies, “The Last Radical,” Vancouver Magazine, November 1998, 82.

18. Kate Phillip, “Palin: Obama is ‘Palling Around With Terrorists,’” The New York Times, October 4, 2008.

19. David Corn, “Clinton Bashes Obama’s Weathermen Connection, But What About Her Own?,” Mother Jones Magazine, April 17, 2008.

20. The term was made famous by the 1965 book of the same name by Robert Taber, which opens with: “The guerrilla fights the war of the flea, and his military enemy suffers the dog’s disadvantages: too much to defend; too small, ubiquitous, and agile an enemy to come to grips with.”

21. Carlos Fraenkel, “A Guerrillero-Gentleman,” The Nation, January 20, 2014.

22. Henry Kissinger: Years of Upheaval (Boston, 1982), 785.

Chapter 10: The Cuban Revolution Goes Global

1. Piero Gleijeses, The Cuban Drumbeat (Seagull Books, 2009), 19.

2. Piero Gleijeses, “The View From Havana: Lessons from Cuba’s African Journey, 1959–1976”—in Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser, In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Duke University Press, 2008), 112–113.

3. Ibid.

4. Gleijeses, The Cuban Drumbeat, 23.

5. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 97.

6. Wilfred Burchett, Southern Africa Stands Up (Urizen Books, 1978), 89.

7. Speech and interview, Claybourn Carson, SNCC fifty-year anniversary, Shaw University, North Carolina, April 15, 2010.

8. Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge (Simon and Schuster, 2006), 486–487.

9. Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were activists participating in a voter registration drive in June, 1964, when they were arrested by the local authorities. They were held incommunicado and concerned friends who called the facility where they were being held were lied to by officers who stated flatly that the three activists were not in their custody. Upon their release late at night, they were captured by a group of locals, including KKK members, who had been lying in wait, in collusion with local authorities. The KKK murdered all three and disposed of their bodies in the hinterland. The incident caused national outrage, spurring a federal investigation and resulting in relatively light sentences for some of those involved.

10. Newark News, August 19, 1966; cited in Kevin Mumford: Newark, A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America (New York University Press, 2007), 109.

11. Peniel Joseph, Stokely: A Life (Basic Books, 2014), 29.

12. Peniel Joseph, Stokely: A Life (Basic Books, uncorrected proofs, 2013), 198. This refers to the classic work, C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Rebellion (1938).

13. Stokely Carmichael with Ekueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) (Scribner, 2003), 580.

14. Joseph, Stokely (2014), 203.

15. Stokely with Thelwell, Ready for Revolution, 582.

16. Joseph, Stokely (2014), 202.

17. Ibid., 204.

18. Ibid., 208.

19. Ibid., 205.

20. Ibid., 207; Stokely with Thelwell, Ready for Revolution, 589.

21. Joseph, Stokely (2014), 205–206.

22. From my 2013 interview with Courtland Cox.

23. Joseph, Stokely (2014), 202; Stokely with Thelwell, Ready for Revolution, 591.

24. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 193.

25. Interview on December 17, 2013.

26. In a later interview, Thelwell argued that he and Stokely detected a racial stratification running through the Cuban Revolution, despite the presence of a few Afro-Cubans in its leadership. This racism, according to Thelwell, was rooted in the structure of the previous century’s plantation economy and could not be alleviated without a black consciousness movement in Cuba. Such a prospect seemed divisive to the Cubans, leading to sharp disagreement which took years to heal over. The same charges were leveled by another Black Panther leader who took temporary exile in Cuba, Eldridge Cleaver.

27. Stokely with Thelwell, Ready for Revolution, 633. In his autobiography, Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (Vintage, 1967), Stokely says that “the CIA was now propagating the smear that I was a CIA agent,” and “the Cubans began to withdraw from us,” 696. Fidel had just promoted Stokely as an international hero and provided Cuba’s material support.

28. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 193–194

29. Thelwell, Ready for Revolution, 692.

30. Carmichael and Hamilton, Black Power, 632. More on Stokely’s effort, from his autobiography: “I’d written to every legitimate liberation organization to check out the possibility of serving with them. I really wanted to participate as a front-line fighter.” His description appears immediately after he mentions that Makeba was at a New York concert and he was meeting with liberation groups in Tanzania.

31. Carmichael and Hamilton, Black Power, 626.

32. Ibid.

33. Carl Stokes, Cleveland, 1967; Richard Hatcher, Gary, 1967; Matthew Carter, Montclair, 1968; Luska Twyman, Glasgow, Ky. 1968; Howard Nathaniel Lee, Chapel Hill, 1968; Charles Evers, Lafayette, Mississippi, 1969; Kenneth Gibson, Newark, 1970; James McGee, Dayton, 1970; James Ford, Tallahassee, 1972; Ted Berry, Cincinnati, 1972; Coleman Young, Detroit, 1973; Clarence Lightner, Raleigh, 1973; Maynard Jackson, Atlanta, 1973; Tom Bradley, Los Angeles, 1973; Lyman Parks, Grand Rapids, 1973; Walter Washington, Washington, D.C., 1975; Henry Marsh, Richmond, 1977; Lionel Wilson, Oakland, 1978; Ernest Morial, New Orleans, 1978; Richard Arrington, Birmingham, 1979. Much of the national leadership behind these electoral victories came from the 1967 Black Power conference organized by the late Amiri Baraka.

34. Gleijeses notes US intelligence files from 1963 through 1973, and specifically one on Cuban foreign policy, dated September 15, 1967—in The Cuban Drumbeat, 82.

35. Matthews cited by Richard Gott in Cuba: A New History, 255; originally in The New York Times, March 4, 1976; also cited in Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 391.

36. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 187–189.

37. Gott, Cuba: A New History, 251.

38. David H. Shinn and Joshua Eisenman: China and Africa: A Century of Engagement (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 339.

39. Godfrey Mwakikagile, Congo in the Sixties (New Africa Press, 2014), 86.

40. Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa (UNC Press Books, 2013), 302; Tom Wicker, “In The Nation: Savimbi and Marcos,” The New York Times, February 21, 1986.

41. Gott, Cuba: A New History, 252.

42. Letelier and his American assistant Ronni Moffitt were killed on September 21, 1976, by a car bomb planted by Cuban exiles operating on the orders of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. George H.W. Bush, then the CIA director, initially blamed the bombing on leftists, apparently as an intentional diversion. The Cuban exiles were part of a multi-country assassinations and terror network named Operation Condor, operating with at least tacit support from US authorities. For a more detailed look at the assassination, Cuban exile participation, and tacit US support for Operation Condor, see John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and his Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (The New Press, 2005).

43. On October 6, 1976, seventy-three people, mainly young Cuban athletes, perished when their Cubana Airlines plane exploded on its way from Barbados to Havana because of bombs planted by Venezuelan operatives at the behest of Cuban exiles with CIA ties and training. The alleged mastermind was a US intelligence asset, Luis Posada Carrilles, a longtime leader of Miami’s Cuban exile groups. Posada is currently at liberty in Miami despite an outstanding Interpol warrant for his arrest.

44. The authoritarian and quasi-fascist Estado Novo was, in 1974, one of the last remaining right-wing, colonialist holdouts left in Europe. Extremely conservative and unabashedly proud of its colonial possessions, the regime was in bad repute with many of its neighbors, as well as large sectors of its own population, when a group of progressive-minded generals overthrew it in the so-called Carnation Revolution, on April 25, 1974. The new regime systematically recognized the independence of its foreign colonies in the following years, many of which had ongoing armed struggles against Lisbon’s control dating from the days of the Estado Novo.

45. In July, 1975, president Gerald Ford authorized the CIA to send funds, arms, and assistance to both the FNLA and UNITA as a part of a covert operation known as AI-FEATURE. The operation became public and the public backlash resulted in the Clark Amendment, which severely limited the US government’s ability to intervene directly in the conflict without congressional approval.

46. Gleijeses, The Cuban Drumbeat, 27

47. Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom, 29.

48. Gleijeses, The Cuban Drumbeat, 42.

49. Ibid., 62.

50. Gott, Cuba: A New History, 255.

51. When Mandela visited Havana in 1991, he was greeted by hundreds of thousands and asked approvingly, “What other country can point to a record of greater selflessness than Cuba has displayed in its relations to Africa?”—in Gleijeses, The Cuban Drumbeat, 73.

52. Burchett, Southern Africa Stands Up, 94.

53. Gleijeses, The Cuban Drumbeat, 34.

54. The Isla de la Juventúd (Isle of Youth) was originally the Isla de Pinos (Isle of Pines), where Fidel and countless other political prisoners had languished at the infamous Presidio Modelo (Model Prison). After the revolution triumphed the new government closed the prison, renamed the island, and several years later opened several schools for Cuban and foreign students there.

Chapter 11: The Liberal Democrats’ Default: The Carter Era

1. Wayne Smith, The Closest of Enemies (Norton, 1987), 86.

2. William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington (UNC Press Books, 2014), 94.

3. Ibid., 97.

4. Ibid., 99.

5. Smith, The Closest of Enemies, 85–90. Smith complained that having read over the interviews with Fidel, he has come to ¨the painful suspicion that they were right and I was wrong.”

6. Smith’s account references a statement by Rusk made on February 25, 1964; in Smith, The Closest of Enemies, 89.

7. The Dominican Republic had only just returned to democracy after three decades under one of the bloodiest dictators in the history of the Americas, General Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, who had enjoyed support from Washington almost until the time of his assassination by Dominican conspirators in 1961.

8. LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 104.

9. Ibid., 115.

10. Anderson, Che, 726.

11. LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 112.

12. Ibid.

13. Smith, 122–123. Brzezinski gave a not-for-attribution statement to the press on November 16, 1977, in which he said that Cuba’s operations in Angola made normalization “impossible.”

14. Robert Kaplan, “Supremacy by Stealth,” The Atlantic, July 1, 2003.

15. “Discovering the Caribbean” is a sarcastic Cuban way of describing the continuous flow of US envoys and experts who wander like Columbus until discovering the tropics without quite knowing where they are.

16. Refers to the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878).

17. http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/2013/12/13/interna/artic02.html

18. Kennedy is reported to have said that he wanted “to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

19. Stephen Schlesinger, “Ghosts of Guatemala’s Past,” The New York Times, June 3, 2011.

20. Jack Anderson, “Castro Stalker Worked for the CIA,” Washington Post, February 23, 1971; “6 Attempts to Kill Castro Laid to CIA,” Washington Post, January 18, 1971.

21. Gott, Cuba: A New History, 261.

22. Smith, The Closest of Enemies, 97.

23. LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 130–131. And personal interviews with Saul Landau.

24. Personal interview with Saul Landau, 2011.

25. Franklin, Cuban and the United States, 131.

26. Ibid., 132.

27. Smith, The Closest of Enemies, 107.

28. Tom Hayden, “Young a Symbol of ‘New Politics,’” St. Petersburg Times, April 11, 1977; originally published in Los Angeles Times.

29. Ibid.

30. Smith, The Closest of Enemies, 15.

31. Ibid., 122—123.

32. Refers to the so-called Downing Street Memo, named after the residence of the Prime Minister of the UK, in which the minutes of a meeting of senior British ministers are recorded and intelligence figures explain that they believed the information building up to a possible war in Iraq was being fixed. The memo’s leak to the public caused public outrage.

33. Smith, The Closest of Enemies, 123–124. The “study” in question is described by Smith as follows: “It consisted of two pages, the first a list of countries, with the CIA’s estimate of how many Cuban civilian and military personnel were in each, and the second a map showing where the countries were. Some study!” It had apparently been requested by Brzezinski merely as a reference of the Agency’s current estimates. Several of these estimates were dead wrong, but Smith doesn’t attribute any malicious intent to the report.

34. Ibid., 123.

35. Gott, Cuba: A New History, 260.

36. Ibid., 260.

37. Ibid., 265.

38. In conversation and in his writings, Pastor repeatedly refers to the “Soviet general” in a way suggesting that Cuban troops were servile mercenaries to Moscow in Ethiopia. The Soviet officer was General Vasily Petrof, who was charged with coordinating “the counteroffensive against Somalia,” which underscores that the military action was deterrent in nature (“The Soviet-Cuba Liaison,” by Captain Gary Payton, Air University Review, November–December 1979). The roots of the Soviet role went back to czarist times, according to Payton. The original aspiration was to unite those of Orthodox faith by cultivating ties with the feudal aristocracy of then-Abyssinia. There was an exchange of ambassadors in the 1880s and a brief establishment of a New Moscow Colony in 1889, when Western colonial powers were dividing Africa into their spheres of interests.

39. Lars Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 292. Sol Linowitz was the former US Representative to the Organization of American States, 1966–1969. His commission’s report was based on findings that previous policies had failed and that a new approach of phased, reciprocal steps toward normalization be taken.

40. Robert A. Pastor, “The Carter-Castro Years,” in Fifty Years of Revolution, Perspectives on Cuba, the United States, and the World, ed. Soraya Castro Marino and Ronald Pruessen (University Press of Florida, 2012), 248.

41. The second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, which would have put more stringent caps on US and Soviet missile production, was signed in 1979 by both parties but was never formally ratified in Congress, which was too divided on the merits of the treaty.

42. LeoGrande and Korhbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 224.

43. Pastor, “The Carter-Castro Years,” 257.

44. Ibid., 258.

45. Patrick Jude Haney, The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic Politics of an American Foreign Policy (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 28.

46. Pastor, “The Carter-Castro Years,” 246.

47. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 363. It is known as the Clark Amendment after the congressman who proposed it, Sen. Richard Clark.

48. David Binder, “House Vote Ends Aid to Angolans in Rebuff to Ford,” The New York Times, January 28, 1976.

49. William G. Howell and Jon C. Pevehouse, “When Congress Stops Wars,” Foreign Affairs, September–October 2007.

50. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 332.

51. Godfrey Mwakikagile, Congo in the Sixties (New Africa Press, 2014), 86.

52. Shinn and Eisenman, China and Africa, 339.

53. Gleijeses: Visions of Freedom, 302.

54. Tom Wicker, “In The Nation; Savimbi and Marcos,” The New York Times, February 21, 1986.

55. Samuel P. Huntington et al., The Crisis of Democracy (New York University Press,1975), 113.

56. Commonly referred to as the Powell Memorandum.

57. Robert E. Quirk, Fidel Castro (W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), 819.

58. The document they produced, “A New Inter-American Policy for the Eighties,” is popularly known as “The Santa Fe Report.”

Chapter 12: The Clinton Years: Yielding to the Cuban Right

1. Clinton never dodged the draft outright, but he does seem to have done everything in his power, short of breaking the law, to avoid going. See the editorial piece, “Bill Clinton’s Vietnam Test,” The New York Times, February 14, 1992.

2. James V. Grimaldi, “Clinton Quiet About Own Radical Ties,” Washington Post, May 19, 2008.

3. Ann Louise Bardach, Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana (Vintage, 2002), 145.

4. Although the president of CANF stated to the press that “Jorge was never a man who believed in terrorism,” the undeniable fact is that there exists a June 1965 CIA report which states that Canosa had presented his handler with a proposal “to blow up a Cuban or Soviet vessel in Veracruz, Mexico,” along with numerous other documents detailing additional operations. See http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB288/index.htm.

5. LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 271.

6. US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, “As I understand it, it was a chance encounter that Mr. Castro initiated.” See “Clinton shook Castro’s hand,” BBC, September 8, 2000.

7. Bardach, Cuba Confidential, 128.

8. Salim Lamrani, 31.

9. Ibid., 31–32.

10. The Período Especial en Época de Paz is the name Fidel gave to the new day that was dawning with the imminent collapse of the USSR, in a speech on October 10, 1991, the anniversary of the first independence war. This epoch-defining speech attempted to explain the hardships that were to come—equivalent, he argued, to wartime shortages, but in a time of peace.

11. State Security is the intelligence branch of the Cuban government charged with investigating potential threats to the standing order and, if possible, to prevent them. As opposed to emblematic G-men in the United States, Cuban agents of State Security often walk around in plainclothes, although those working in the Interior Ministry are usually dressed in military fatigues.

12. These Committees, abbreviated as CDRs, were originally convened with grassroots participation in order to watch for terrorist activity and attempts to subvert the revolution. In addition, they would organize activities that would help maintain the neighborhood, or that would be the organs through which a locality would request resources from the government for special projects. As time went on, however, they grew to be an extension of the government security apparatus.

13. Parapolice units made up of pro-government civilians who watch and respond to dissidents.

14. Gott, Cuba: A New History, 330–331. The language in quotation marks is from the law itself.

15. Octavio Paz (1914–1998) was a Mexican intellectual, poet, diplomat, and essayist of the Left. He was well respected, even by his opponents, as a man of principle after having resigned as Mexican ambassador to India in protest over the massacre of students in Tlatelolco Plaza, in 1968, mentioned above. See Enrique Krauze, “The Wars of Octavio Paz,” The New York Times, March 30, 2014.

16. Louis A. Pérez, Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 25.

17. In 1994, thousands of Cubans and Haitians (refugees from the overthrow of the elected Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide three years earlier), protested their deprivation and fled on rafts on the sea, earning their name los balseros, or “the Rafters.” Under US law, the Cubans could become legalized once they touched ground in the United States, and therefore many were turned back and held in Guantanamo. That September, “the numbers were so large that the United States was obliged to make a major and permanent change in its policy toward Cuban migration, as Castro had hoped. The two countries made a deal in September, negotiated on the Cuban side by Ricardo Alarcón, to bring the crisis to an end.” In Gott, Cuba: A New History, 300.

18. This refers to the February 1996 shoot-down of two planes belonging to the Cuban exile group Hermanos al Rescate (Brothers to the Rescue), after they tried to repeat their illegal violation of the airspace around Havana. This is incident is explored in greater detail later in this book.

19. Anthony Lake and Samuel “Sandy” Berger were national security advisers to Bill Clinton.

20. Refers here to the second war of independence (1895–1898), which achieved what the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878) was unable to do.

21. The malecón is a sea wall, parts of which date back to the colonial era, which follows the lip of Havana Harbor. Walking along the malecón or meeting there with friends is a favorite pastime of Cubans.

22. Stephen Kimber, What Lies Across the Water (Fernwood, 2013), 107. Published in Canada, Kimber’s is the best researched book released so far.

23. Former New Mexico governor and US cabinet official often deployed by the Clinton administration on Latin America-related issues. “They put me in charge of the bad guys they can’t talk to,” Richardson told me in 2011.

24. In Back Channel to Cuba, LeoGrande and Kornbluh write that, in 2011, Richardson said that “he could not remember to whom he had spoken” at the White House.

25. White House aide Richard Nuccio said the Brothers “got exactly what they were hoping to produce”—LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 314.

26. As explained earlier, of the three planes that Brothers to the Rescue sent, only one got away. Basulto was on that plane, which quickly turned back toward Miami once the other planes were shot down.

27. Frank, Cuban Revelations, 182.

28. Bardach, Cuba Confidential, 132.

29. E-mail correspondence, August 12, 2013

Chapter 13: Rethinking Marxism, Rethinking the Americas

1. Gott, Cuba: A New History, 244.

2. I had a similar experience when I spent several weeks in the Soviet Union in late 1975. I brought a close personal friend, a committed scientific socialist, to a clinic to treat his advanced cancer. In the cancer ward, all the patients were a jaundiced yellow or green, yet it was forbidden to tell them they had cancer. When my friend died an agonizing death in an advanced treatment ward a few months later in Houston, he cursed his belief in science as a faith that had shaken him in the Soviet hospital as well.

3. Raúl Castro’s daughter, Mariela, is internationally known for supporting marriage equality and LGBT rights, fifty years after Allen Ginsberg was expelled from Cuba and homosexuality was officially a counterrevolutionary crime.

4. Fidel Castro and Frei Betto, Fidel and Religion: Castro Talks on Revolution and Religion with Frei Betto, Introduction by Harvey Cox (Simon and Schuster, 1987).

5. Richard Gott, In the Shadow of the Liberator, Hugo Chávez and the Transformation of Venezuela (Verso, 2000), 18.

6. In February 1992, the young mestizo officer, Hugo Chávez, attempted a progressive coup in response to the neoliberal policies of the existing government, since he felt there was no solution within the electoral system. When the coup fell apart and he realized that further fighting would be a waste of lives, he surrendered himself to the government. He was allowed to appear on Venezuelan television to convince other rebels to put down their arms. He also took the opportunity to emphasize that they were only surrendering “por ahora" (for now).

7. Javier Corrales, “Hugo Boss,” Foreign Policy, January 4, 2006.

8. In Istán Mészáros’s interview with Chávez, cited by John Bellamy Foster in foreword to Marta Harnecker’s “Latin America and Twenty-First Century Socialism,” Monthly Review, July–August 2010.

9. The 1988 elections were so blatantly rigged that years later ex-president Miguel de la Madrid admitted that he had rigged the election of his successor, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and that the ballots had been burned to remove all traces. See Ginger Thompson, “Ex-President in Mexico Casts New Light on Rigged 1988 Election,” New York Times, March 9, 2004. While the 2006 election has not been irrefutably proven to have been rigged, many generally consider it to be at least undermined by dishonest practices.

10. Harnecker, “Latin America and Twenty-First Century Socialism,” 7.

11. Rodriguez quoted by Gott, In the Shadow of the Liberator, 109–117; cited by Bellamy, xvii.

Chapter 14: A New Model in Our Americas

1. Czech-born Hans Kelsen (1881–1973) was a formidable legal and political scholar who spent nearly three decades at the University of California, Berkeley. He was also deeply involved in the war crimes tribunals that followed World War II. His writings provided a strong defense of democracy and judicial independence against the executive branch.

2. A common point of discussion in Cuban historiography is the strain placed on democratic political mechanisms used by mambises during the struggle for independence. The earliest political systems used by Cubans in the Ten Years’ War were quickly found to be impractical, presupposing ideal peacetime conditions in terms of legislative quorums and limiting the powers of the executive. Local caudillos (warlords) were also capable of manipulating the system and subverting it, without sufficient centralized power. Martí and others struggled to find a balance between guaranteeing the basic elements for democracy, the cause for which they were risking their lives in the first place, and the practical concessions the war imposed upon them.

3. Most of the indigenous peoples living in the Spanish-dominated Antilles were wiped out by a combination of disease and an extremely intense forced-labor system known as the encomienda. Natives were “commended” to the care of Spaniards who would exploit them to an extent possibly worse than that of slaves later, because slaves had to be purchased while Indians merely had to be caught. Although indigenous peoples are mentioned throughout the rest of the colonial period, even playing important roles in fighting off piratical attacks in the seventeenth century, they became increasingly rare as time went on. It seems that the last remains of indigenous populations have been fully absorbed into the melting pot of the general populace.

4. Mills warned of the merging interests of two bureaucratic collectivisms, the Soviet state and American corporate capitalism. Among Western liberals, this “détente” was seen as a good thing because it lessened the risk of superpower warfare. For Ricardo and the third world, détente resulted in proxy wars like Vietnam, while reinforcing the shared interests of the superpowers in the global status quo. In retrospect, the Cold War was a struggle for dominance to the end, with the “socialist bloc” set back or dissolved.

5. Not to inflate the issue, but citing Rosa Luxemburg’s critique is quite the opposite of the view taken by Che Guevara in his September 14, 1961, interview with Maurice Zeitlin. When Zeitlin extolled Luxemburg’s criticism of Leninism, Che replied: “She was a great revolutionary, and she died a revolutionary as a consequence of her political mistakes”—in Scheer and Zeitlin, Cuba: An American Tragedy, 343.

6. The 1999 anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle were led by the AFL-CIO and a rainbow.

7. Nicholas Watt, “‘Blue-Eyed Bankers’ to Blame for Crash, Lula Tells Brown,” The Guardian, March 26, 2009.

8. Alexei Barrionuevo, “In Obama Visit, Brazil’s Leader Aims to Mend Fences,” The New York Times, March 17, 2011.

9. Mariel Bay is an excellent, deep natural port to the west of Havana. The lack of extensive urbanization and its natural characteristics make it the ideal port of entry for extremely large international vessels. In 1980, it became infamous for being the center of the Mariel boatlift, in which 125,000 Cubans traveled to the United States, including mentally ill and violent inmates who were placed on boats headed for Florida in an act of spite on the part of the Cuban government. Since then, the bay has largely laid dormant. With the advent of the new port, it is set to be the beating heart of economic revitalization and renewed international trade, as well as the flagship project of reformism.

10. The reader may be surprised by this, but it is technically true. Cuban law allows for 100 percent foreign ownership. However, in practice, such a concession is rarely, if ever, made.

11. In addition to limiting our own trade with Cuba, after Helms-Burton, the US government now prosecutes even non-American companies that trade with the island nation. The penalty can be a fine to the tune of millions of dollars.

Chapter 15: Rescuing Elián González, Losing Al Gore

1. During the Clinton administration, she was legal counsel to the State Department. She currently heads diplomatic negotiations with Iran.

2. Ethel Kennedy interview, February 6, 2014.

3. Elián was born on December 6, 1993.

4. Bardach, Cuba Confidential, 309–325.

5. See Deadlock, The Inside Story of America’s Closest Election (Public Affairs, 2001), 125.

6. Diaz-Balart’s grandfather, Rafael, was the lead lawyer for United Fruit and a former Batista cabinet member. In Bardach, Cuba Confidential, 320.

7. Tim Padgett, “Mob Scene in Miami,” Time Magazine, November 26, 2000.

8. Ibid.

9. This is likely a reference to John Unumb, a CIA agent.

10. CIA document in “Family Jewels” (1973), FOIA electronic reading room, CIA-retrieved, December 18, 2013, 297.

11. Bush’s CIA passed the word to Newsweek and other US media that the Chilean junta was not involved. The CIA told Newsweek, for example, that “the bomb was too crude to be the work of experts and because the murder, coming while Chile’s rulers were wooing US support, could only damage the Santiago regime”—Newsweek, October 11, 1976. The CIA had more than ample reasons to doubt their own explanation, however. As deputy assistant secretary Hewson Ryan noted, “we knew fairly early on that the governments of the Southern Cone countries were planning . . . some assassinations abroad in the summer of 1976. Whether if we had gone in [to proactive diplomatic meetings on the subject], we might have prevented this, I don’t know. But we didn’t”—Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (The New Press, 2004), 362–363.

12. Bardach, Cuba Confidential, 314.

13. Ibid., 315.

14. Duncan Campbell, “The Bush Dynasty and the Cuban Criminals,” The Guardian, December i, 2002.

15. Bardach, Cuba Confidential, 116.

16. Vivian Lesnik Weisman’s documentary film, The Man of Two Havanas (Latinovision, 2008).

17. Bardach, Cuba Confidential, 322.

18. Ibid., 319.

19. Ibid., 20i.

20. Ibid., 106.

21. Ibid., 105—106.

Chapter 16: Listen, Yankee!

1. Pastor, “The Carter-Castro Years,” 237–260.

2. LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 214.

3. Ibid., 192.

4. Max Lesnik is one of Ricardo’s oldest friends. Max, eighty-four years old, has lived in Miami since 1961, when he left Cuba in a quarrel over communism. He grew up with Fidel and takes frequent trips to the island. He is an advocate of reconciliation and has been involved in dialogues and papal visits at the highest level.

5. This refers to the strategy known in US circles as the “biological solution,” which refers to letting biology “solve” the “Fidel problem” through his inevitable death.

6. Miguel Díaz-Canel, Cuba’s first vice president since 2013, was born in 1960.

7. The so-called catastrophe scenario would mean the chaotic fall of the Cuban government, similar to the fall of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

8. The biggest exception to a general lack of mass protests is the so-called maleconazo twenty years ago, in 1994, when hundreds of Cubans took to the streets protesting the dire conditions of the “special period,” looting government stores and shutting down important parts of the city after spreading out from poorer neighborhoods. The protest was successfully defused by a countermarch personally led by Fidel.

9. The Cuban-born journalist Mark Frank makes the same assessment: “Discontent runs deep in Cuba, where no one has made a living wage for two decades, but most Cubans are seeking change through reform and evolution of the system, not in open alliance with Washington and Miami’s political establishment which seeks regime change”—in Cuban Revelations: Behind the Scenes in Havana (University Press of Florida, 2013), 207.

10. “Cuba’s Military Power Elite,” Cuba Facts, Issue 61, January 14, 2014. By another count, according to Cuban-born Nelson Valdés, there are six military men and eight civilians on the present Politburo—correspondence with Nelson Valdés, University of New Mexico, January 27, 2014.

11. Frank, Cuban Revelations, 248.

12. Ibid., 250.

13. Arnold August, Cuba and Its Neighbors (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013).

14. These can be thought of as a sort of non-legally binding plebiscite.

15. Frank, Cuban Revelations, 205.

16. Ibid.

17. Scheer and Zeitlin, Cuba: An American Tragedy, 250.

18. Lamrani, 43–44.

19. Paul Haven, “Cuba, US Try Talking, But Face Many Obstacles,” Associated Press, June 21, 2013.

20. Patricia Rey Mallén, “Cuba’s First Year of Immigration Reform: 180,000 People Leave the Country . . . And Come Back,” January 14, 2014.

21. Julia E. Sweig and Michael J. Bustamante, “Cuba After Communism: The Economic Reforms that are Transforming the Island,” Foreign Affairs, July–August 2013.

22. Richard E. Feinberg, “Soft Landing in Cuba? Emerging Entrepreneurs and Middle Classes,” Brookings Institution, Latin America Initiative, November 2013.

23. Sweig and Bustamante, “Cuba After Communism,” Foreign Affairs, July–August 2013.

24. Ibid.

25. “EU agrees to launch negotiations with Cuba,” BBC, February 10, 2014.

26. According to Mark Frank, there were 1,669 barber shops and beauty parlors in Cuba in 2011 before control was returned to private owners. In Cuban Revelations, 176.

27. La Rampa—“The Ramp”—is a tourist-oriented neighborhood of a few city blocks that contains both the Hotel Nacional and the Habana Libre, along with numerous clubs and bars. The hill that starts at the Habana Libre, at 23 and M streets, then slopes downward toward the malecón. Although there are residences along these short blocks, the entire economy of the street life is centered on tourism.

28. Desmond Butler, Jack Gillum, and Alberto Arce, “US secretly created ‘Cuban Twitter’ to stir unrest,” Associated Press, April 4, 2014.

29. “Sudden US Thaw Worries Cuban Dissidents,” The New York Times, December 27, 2014.

30. “Questions from Yoani Sánchez to POTUS,” Wikileaks, US Interests Section, August 26, 2009. In Frank, Cuban Revelations, 180.

31. Salim Lamrani, “Forty Questions for Yoani Sanchez,” Palgrave blog; without citing his source, Lamrani quotes her as saying: “The blockade has provided the regime with a perfect excuse to maintain its intolerance, its control, and its repression of internal dissent. If economic sanctions were to end tomorrow, I doubt very much that the effects would be felt.” The reason her statement seems credible is because of its consistency with the filmed interview of her husband.

32. Reinaldo Escobar interview in the Tracey Eaton documentary, Diplomacy Derailed (2013).

33. Susan Eckstein, The Immigrant Divide: How Cuban Americans Changed the US and Their Homeland (Routledge, 2009); Louis A. Pérez Jr., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (University of North Carolina Press Books, 1999); Bridges to Cuba, ed. Ruth Behar (University of Michigan Press, 1995).

34. Christine Armario, “Cuba Suspends Consular Services in US,” Associated Press, April 14, 2014. Cuban Americans traveling to Cuba spend an average of $3,238 USD per person while visiting.

35. Susan Eva Eckstein, The Immigrant Divide: How Cuban Americans Changed the US and Their Homeland (Routledge, 2009), 8. Over one million Cubans emigrated to the United States between the 1959 revolution and the decade of the 2000s—“Washington most warmly welcomed Cubans when they served its Cold War geopolitical agenda.” About 225,000 came between 1959–1962, after Castro took power. Between 1965–1973, another 260,000 came on so-called Freedom Flights. In the eighties and nineties, the United States clamped down on immigration in hopes of inspiring an Eastern-European-style uprising. From 1985–1994, the United States issued only 11,222 visas. On three occasions, 1965, 1980, and 1994, Fidel unilaterally let Cubans leave “to defuse and deflect domestic discontent.” See Eckstein, 12–13.

36. Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution, 268.

37. Lamrani, 71.

38. Between April 2013 and June 2014, Cuba estimates a loss of $205.8 million in rum and cigar sales alone. Russia Today, September 10, 2014: “Cuba calculates loss of 54 yr US embargo at $1.1 tn.”

39. “Cuba still on the US list of state sponsors of terrorism”—Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times, May 30, 2013.

40. Orlando Bosch is one of the more rabid of the anti-Castro terrorists. In 1968, he fired a homemade bazooka at a Polish freighter that was entering Miami’s Biscayne Bay, the freighter’s only crime being that Communists ruled in Warsaw. In the late eighties and early nineties, even the US Justice Department wanted him deported as an undesirable and, more specifically, a terrorist. It took a presidential action on the part of Bush pére for him to go free, but only after making Bosch promise to no longer support the use of force for regime change in Cuba. Bosch would later call this vow a “farce.” He died, free and unrepentant, in Miami, in early 2011.

41. Jacobo Timerman, Cuba: A Journey (Knopf, 1990); Alma Guillermoprieto, Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution (Vintage, 2005).

42. Pete Seeger, Pete Seeger in his own Words, ed. Rom and Sam Rosenthal, (Paradigm, 2012), 186.

43. Bardach, Without Fidel: A Death Foretold in Miami, Havana and Washington (Scribner, 2009) 205.

44. Gott: Cuba: A New History, 294.

45. Congressional Research Service, November 6, 2012, 21.

46. Interview with William Orme, director, UN Development Program, 2013. Orme stresses that the three factors that constitute the rankings are difficult to compute. Cuba ranks low on income measured by purchasing power, but near the top in health and education. The reason, he says, is that the Cuban state has subsidized basic necessities, causing per capita purchasing power to appear lower than it is in reality.

47. These are not based on official Cuban statistics, which could be accused of bias and manipulation, but instead on the figures used by the World Bank, available on their own website. Average life expectancy has remained steady at seventy-nine years since 2009.

48. The total number of medals won by Cuban athletes in the Olympics, without counting winter events, is 208, of which twelve were won during the first half of the twentieth century. This is based on a table supplied to the author by the Olympic Committee’s Press Office, also available on the organization’s website.

49. Frank, Cuban Revelations, 66.

50. Ibid., 66–67.