Tome traces Cuba efforts

By Charles D. Ameringer

This book marks the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution and traces in meticulous detail the efforts of 10 U.S. presidents, from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush, to undermine the Revolution and get rid of its leader, Fidel Castro.

These efforts ranged from covert operations (sabotage, commando raids and assassination plots) to conventional measures (diplomatic isolation, economic denial and propaganda). Why such hostility?

Professor Lars Schoultz suggests three motivating factors in roughly chronological order: economic (the complaint of U.S. investors in Cuba that a Communist dictator was robbing them of their properties); national security (Castro’s alliance with the Soviet Union in the Cold War); and politics (the critical vote of the Cuban-American population in electoral-rich Florida).

However, he bundles these in one overriding root cause: the persistent obsession of the United States to “uplift” the Cubans.

He makes his case by citing William Howard Taft, who, in overseeing the U.S. occupation of Cuba in 1906, declared, “We are here only to help you on. With our arm under your arm, lifting you again on the path to wonderful progress,” and George W. Bush, who said virtually the same thing a hundred years later with reference to a post-Castro Cuba, “And then you’ll see the United States do exactly what we should: Go down and lift those people up.”

Professor Schoultz enlivens his narrative by letting the principal actors speak for themselves. Drawing upon extensive research, he cites minutes, notes, memoranda, reports and statements to provide a fly-on-the- wall perspective to Washington policymaking.

For example, Attorney General Robert Kennedy confided to a special planning group in early 1962 that the overthrow of Castro was “the top priority of the United States Government — all else is secondary — no time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared.”

Secretary of State Alexander Haig boasted to President Ronald Reagan during a National Security Council meeting, “You just give me the word and I’ll turn [Cuba] into a parking lot.”

And Lyndon Johnson, only days after taking office in 1963, told CIA director John McCone, “the Cuban situation was one that we could not live with and we had to evolve more aggressive policies.” A short time later, he repeated his concern to Senator J. William Fulbright in more colorful language.

In time, U.S. policy was less aggressive, but incidents of the “Infernal Little Cuban Republic” variety irked official Washington. During Jimmy Carter’s presidency, relations improved slightly, but the intervention of Cuban troops in Africa and the Mariel boatlift embarrassed the president and stoked a hard-line revival.

Moreover, in 1992, when Russia discontinued economic assistance to Cuba and sent the Cuban economy into a tailspin, the U.S. further tightened the economic screws on the island in the belief that one last turn would topple Fidel Castro.

Schoultz concludes that U.S. policy toward Cuba has been a failure, having dragged on far too long, among other reasons. He writes that, with Cuba no longer a national security threat following the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. business interests lobbied to lift the trade embargo that denied them access to the Cuban market.

Bush 41, Bill Clinton and Bush 43 held out, influenced largely by the Miami-based Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) that denounced the lack of political freedom and violation of human rights in Cuba.

If change ever takes place, Schoultz asks that the U.S. overcome its urge to uplift the Cubans and respect Cuba’s right of self-determination.

Charles D. Ameringer is professor emeritus of Latin American history at Penn State. The University Press of Florida has just published his “The Socialist Impulse: Latin America in the Twentieth Century.”