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Cuba, Castro and Eisenhower Batista, Cuban Liberals and the United States Fulgencio Batista, a former army sergeant, had stepped down from power in Cuba in 1944 - a wealthy man. He returned to power in a coup d'etat in 1952, his regime quickly recognized by the United States. The United States had just signed an agreement with Cuba to install an Army, Navy and Air Force mission on the island and to provide military equipment under a mutual defense assistance act. Strategists in the U.S. were pleased with Batista, who was known to them as a reliable friend and a good anti-communist. Batista took power with claims that he would honor all international agreements, guarantee lives and property and continue public work projects. The army was Batista's main support in Cuba, and also many Cuban businessmen gave Batista their support. Some from the middle and upper classes were opposed to Batista, while his major opposition was from students - also from the upper and middle classes. Students were planning a massive demonstration and a symbolic burial of Cuba's 1940 Constitution. Four student leaders were arrested and taken to Batista. He told them they were free but that he had a great desire to talk with them. He told them he had taken power to avoid a civil war, that he needed the cooperation of all Cubans in order to reorganize the institutional life of the nation and that the Constitution had not died. One of the student leaders accused Batista of planning to ban all opposition, and Batista denied it, saying opposition was a necessity, especially a constructive opposition. Batista said he had once been an idealist youth like they, that he admired them and was not against their demonstration itself but against the "profession agitators" who will capitalize on it. One of the agitators that Batista worried about was a law student, Fidel Castro. Castro was the son of a wealthy plantation owner who leased a large tract of land from the United Fruit company and sold his cane back to it. Fidel presented himself as an idealist. His hero, he said, was José Martí, Cuba's poet and fighter for independence of the 1890s. Fidel was an aggressive idealist - one of the gun-toting student activists involved in the sometimes violent conflicts between rival student political groups. Castro wanted to be rid of Batista through armed uprising, and in 1953, at age 26, he organized a dawn assault on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba. He had a hundred youths willing to follow him, poorly armed but aiming to capture weapons. The plan went awry. The insurgents were overwhelmed, and the defending soldiers went on a rampage, beating to death those who had surrendered, and they fanned out and killed anyone they believed had taken part in the attack. In Santiago de Cuba, it was a bad time to be bandaged after some minor mishap. The bishop in Santiago de Cuba, with others, met with Batista and stopped the killing and torture of those suspected of having taken part in the attack on the barracks. Only a few of Castro's hundred followers survived. Castro and his half-brother Raúl were captured a week after the attack, Castro found hiding in the hills, after widespread protest had made treatment of prisoners more circumspect. Cuba's middleclass, liberals, and professional people had been outraged by the army's rampage - especially people in Santiago de Cuba. Castro was imprisoned and tried. He made a speech and won considerable publicity and was sentenced to 15 years in prison, Raúl to 13 years. On November 1, 1954, Batista held elections, and, with only half of the electorate going to the polls, he won for himself the presidency. No one had run against him. He constructed a cabinet and was inaugurated in February 1955. The Constitution of 1940 was said to have been restored, and Batista told Cuba's Congress that he wanted amnesty and peace but that there could be no amnesty during terrorism. He was referring to occasional bombings by dissidents and the continuing political turmoil at the university. But congressmen in the weeks ahead were enthusiastic for an amnesty. Prosperity was in the air, brought on in part by an agreement to sell reserve sugar to the Soviet Union. Vice President Richard Nixon came in February and gave Batista the Eisenhower administration's blessing. Batista was relaxed and confident. The period of uncertainty, he believed, was over. In midApril, he granted amnesty, and among the prisoners released were Fidel and Raúl Castro, who went into exile in Mexico. Economically, Cuba was thriving in the mid-fifties. Cuba's main export, sugar, was getting a good price in the United States. American investors were pouring money into the country and already owned half of Cuba's sugar industry. International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) bought Cuba's telephone service. U.S. citizens were investing in petroleum and mining. And U.S. goods of all kinds were marketed in Cuba. The United States and Cuba were enjoying a good relationship. Seventy-one percent of Cuba's imports were from the United States and 67 percent of its exports went to the United States. Tourism was Cuba's second largest industry - before tourism had become common for the average U.S. citizen. People with money went to Cuba to enjoy its fine beaches - for their exclusive use - for the casino gambling, lewd shows and open prostitution of all kinds. A percentage of the money won from the tourist industries went straight to Batista, and Batista paid his go-betweens well. The best casino was run by a U.S. gangster, Meyer Lansky, a casino that for a while had the only honest gaming. The Cuban government had Lansky instruct and transform Cuban-owned casinos into honest establishments similar to his. Among Latin American nations, Cuba was third in per capita income. (Venezuela was first at around 38 percent of the average income of U.S. citizens, and Argentina was second at 24 percent.) The average Cuban made 19 percent of what the average U.S. citizen earned, and in Cuba a large gap existed between better off families and the common Cuban worker. Forty-three percent of the population was still rural. Sugar cane harvesting occurred only a couple months of the year, leaving cane cutters unemployed the rest of the year. Telephones were still for the middle and upper class in the major cities - one person in 38 having a telephone. On paper everyone had the same rights. The races got along, the Cubans accustomed to intermixing. Batista was one of the mixed - part Chinese, Spanish-Indian and Afro-Cuban. But there was some elitism. Even Batista had been refused membership in Havana's elitist yacht club. What concerned U.S. strategists about Cuba was its Communist Party. Cuba had a Communist Party of about 25,000 - in a population of a little more than 6 million. The Party had described Castro's assault on the military barracks as putschist, a dirty word for Marxist-Leninists. They saw Castro as politically immature, and they believed in working peacefully within Cuba's labor movement while waiting for that wonderful day when the Cuban masses would acquire the correct consciousness for taking power. Batista had tolerated them for years before 1954. He had had communists in his cabinet during the Second World War, and between 1952 and 1954 he had had a couple of communists in his cabinet representing labor. Then in 1954 he had outlawed the Party. That was the year that John Foster Dulles had gone to a meeting of the Organization of American States in Venezuela and had asked for a strong resolution against "intervention" in Latin America by "international Communism." And in April 1955, Dulles' brother Allen, head of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, visited Cuba, inspected Cuban security and complained about the danger posed by the Cuban communists. Fidel Castro and the Overthrow of Batista The attack on the army barracks in 1953 increased Fidel Castro's prominence among those opposed to Batista. Castro went to the United States and gathered $9,000 in contributions from Cubans there, before complaints from the Batista regime resulted in the U.S. taking away his visa, forcing him to leave. Castro also received donations from Puerto Ricans, Costa Ricans, Venezuelans and from Cuban businessmen who hoped that Castro would end corruption and mismanagement. It was about corruption that Castro complained. People with Batista were enriching themselves, he said, while the pockets of his movement were empty. Castro also complained of "foreign trusts" stealing millions from Cuba and of money being wasted in "gambling, vice, and the black market." Castro's movement was called the 26 of July Movement, named for the day he had attacked the Moncada barracks. For his movement, Castro bought arms, and he bought a boat named Granma for $20,000 from an American living in Mexico City. With Castro were 130 others, but only 81 could fit on the boat, and, on November 25, 1956, the 81 chugged down the Tuxpan River (halfway between Tampico and Veracruz) and into the Gulf of Mexico, hoping they were not noticed by Batista's agents. After a miserable seven days at sea they ran aground in a swamp at the foot of the Sierra Maestras in eastern Cuba. An airplane had spotted them, and Batista's army was waiting for them. A government report claimed that forty of the invading rebels had been killed, including Castro. Only a few of the rebels made it into the Sierra Maestras - among them Fidel, his brother Raul and a gun toting, asthmatic Argentinean physician, Che Guevara. These few survived with the help of people who lived in the mountains, while outside the Sierra Maestras few knew of the rebel's existence. In early 1957, Herbert Mathews of the New York Times sneaked by army checkpoints, interviewed Castro, and returned to New York. Publication of his interview was a sensation and was followed by Cuba's minister of defense calling the story a fantasy. The New York Times published a photo of Mathews and Castro, making the Batista regime look foolish, and some who disliked Batista drew hope. Soon a cell of support among Cubans working at the US naval base at Guantánamo, in Cuba, was stealing arms for the rebels in the hills. Castro had competition in his fight against Batista. On March 13, 1957, a student-based urban group stormed Batista's palace, seized a radio station and tried to assassinate Batista. After fierce fighting they were crushed. Castro denounced the assault. The real fight, he said, was in the mountains. Batista denounced the communists for having participated in the attack, although the communists were not involved. Through 1957, Cuba's economy boomed, and investments continued to pour into the country, while few tourists came. Castro's guerrilla campaign won an occasional small battle here and there around the Sierra Maestras, his purpose not to kill but to capture more weapons. And his force grew slightly, to nearly a hundred. It was the attitude of the great numbers outside the Sierra Maestras that Batista had to worry about, including those who filled the ranks of his army. If a significant number of them went over to Castro then Castro would win. And the Eisenhower administration worried about this also. By 1958, the Eisenhower administration was concerned about the war for hearts and minds being lost in Cuba. The United States was also facing criticism from the middle and left side of the political spectrum. It was in May, 1958, that Vice President Richard Nixon made his goodwill tour of Latin America. Young people hostile to dictatorships and American support for them attacked Nixon's motorcade. A thousand troops rushed to the U.S. military base at Guantanamo in preparation to rescue the vice president. The president of Costa Rica, José Figueres, said he was sorry about the treatment of Nixon, but he criticized the U.S. for talking much about the human dignity that the people in the Soviet Union should have and nothing about the dignity of people living under dictatorships in Latin America, and he said that the U.S. should not sacrifice human rights for the sake of "investments." The Eisenhower administration refrained from intervening militarily to rescue Batista, and Batista supporters were angered, claiming that the U.S. was not being as tough as it should and reminding U.S. leaders that communism threatened Latin America. In 1958 Batista launched a major military offensive against Castro, sending a force of some 10,000 against him. But his troops performed poorly in the mountains. And, fortunately for Castro, it was not a point in history in which helicopter gunships and their trained crews would be available to Batista's forces. Batista's forces were more exposed than the rebels who waited for them, striking when they wanted to and then withdrawing. Communications between the various army units was poor, while Castro's communications were superb. Batista's offensive failed. Morale among his troops fell. Castro acquired more weapons, including a tank, and more people saw the coming of a Castro victory and a Batista defeat. By December, a force under Che Guevara was expanding into central Cuba, and soldiers were deserting Batista's army in droves. Castro's success was creating support for revolution in the cities - to be described as a little engine (the guerrillas) driving the big engine (the masses). Batista decided that the game was up. On New Year's Eve he and a group he had invited to his party boarded three planes. Batista's plane flew to the Dominican Republic - ruled then by the brutal Trujillo family. The other two planes went to the United States, avoiding Miami, where many Cubans were hostile toward Batistianos. On New Year's Day, 1959, people in Cuba were joyed by Batista's departure. In the days that followed, people cheered the rebels riding in trucks coming from the hills to proclaim the success of the revolution. Castro came and walked among the cheering crowds, unafraid of assassination and relishing the opportunity to appear as a man of the people. Castro versus the Eisenhower Administration On January 4, Castro named a judge, Manuel Urrutia, president. Urrutia's cabinet consisted of other anti-Batista liberals, but it was Castro's opinion that Urrutia would wait for him before making a decision. The immediate agenda for Castro was Cuba's economy, which had been declining in 1958 - a year of recession in the United States. In March, the telephone industry was nationalized in response to a special hostility that had risen in Cuba against International Telephone and Telegraph. Also on Castro's agenda was his version of war-crime trials. Around 700 of Batista's enforcers were executed, the firing squads creating discomfort in the United States where they were shown on television - a discomfort Castro attributed to people in the U.S. not knowing Batista-like repression and torture except through novels and movies. Castro compared his shootings of Batista murderers favorably against the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where innocent women and children had been killed. And there was other rhetoric from Cuba that displeased people in Washington. In April, Castro went to the United States, invited by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Castro and his entourage went determined to avoid appearing to be begging for help from the Yankees. Some in the Eisenhower administration recognized that Cuba could use loans to restore its economy, and they hoped that help and good relations might tame Castro. Others in the administration were uninterested in helping Castro. They disliked Castro's talk of neutralism in the Cold War as much as they did the neutralism of Nasser of Egypt and Nehru of India. Some saw Castro's rhetoric as a danger to the standing of the United States in various nations across Latin America. The new Secretary of State, Christian Herter, did not like Castro's emotionalism and his waving his arms around when he spoke. And suspicions existed that Raul Castro and Che Guevara had communist sympathies. Eisenhower snubbed Castro, leaving town to play golf. Instead, Vice President Nixon met Castro in his office, and they talked for three hours. Nixon asked about elections, and Castro told him that the Cuban people did not want elections, that they were suspicious of elections and believed that elections produced bad government. Nixon asked him about the over-ruling of the acquittal of Batista's aviators, and Castro spoke of carrying out the will of the people, leaving Nixon with the impression that Castro was too inclined to follow the passions of the mob rather than leading a nation in a rule of law. Nixon asked Castro about communism, and, after Castro left, Nixon complained that Castro was "either incredibly naive about communism or under communist discipline." His guess, he said, was the former. Castro laid a wreath at the Lincoln Memorial, and he was invited to meet the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, telling them that he would not expropriate the property of Americans and that he was against dictatorships and for a free press. The Eisenhower administration chose to wait and see how Castro behaved rather than to offer him any assistance. The director of the CIA, Allen Dulles (brother of John Foster Dulles who had just died of cancer) spoke of the possibility of using punishment politics. He spoke of Congress reducing the purchasing of Cuban sugar if Castro did not prove cooperative. Castro returned to Cuba having said to a Social Democrat friend that he was not a communist because communism was the dictatorship of a single class and meant hatred and class struggle. On television he told the Cuban people that extremists had no place in the Cuban revolution. He appeared to be a free-enterprise nationalist but in search of remaking Cuban society. By now Cuba's Communist Party had joined the Castro's revolution - not unlike the Bolsheviks in early 1917 had joined the revolution that overthrew Tsar Nicholas of Russia. And the Communist Party complained that Castro was endangering Cuba's revolution. Castro instituted agrarian reform. With exceptions having to do with productivity, estates larger than 1,000 acres were subject to expropriation, with compensation paid to the owners in 20-year bonds at 4.5 percent annual interest - higher interest than MacArthur's land reform in Japan, and repayment faster than the land reform in Taiwan. In the future, land could be bought only by Cubans; after the harvest of 1960, sugar plantations would have to be owned by Cubans; and agricultural holdings were to be no less than 67 acres. Sugar company stocks fell on the New York Stock Exchange. U.S. executives protested to the U.S. government. More talk erupted in the U.S. about communism in Cuba, and the Eisenhower administration argued with Cuba over its new agrarian reform. During the agrarian reform, hostility was in full swing between anti-communist members of Castro's revolution (the 26 of July Movement) and its communist members. The anti-communists were calling the communists melons (green on the outside, as in green fatigues, and red on the inside). The Communists denounced the red-baiting and spoke of the need for unity. Bombs exploded in Havana, believed to be the work of counter-revolutionaries, and Castro veered to the side of those supporting unity. In increasing numbers anti-communists began abandoning Castro. President Urrutia objected to the heightened radicalization of Castro's movement and resigned. So too did had his prime minister, José Cardona. Osvaldo Dorticós was now Cuba's new president and Castro was the prime minister. One of Castro's old anti-communist compañeros, Hubert Matos, was soon to be arrested for treason and having disrupted agrarian reform. He was to be tried and sentenced to 20 years in prison. In September, Khrushchev visited the United States and met Eisenhower at Camp David, creating what was called the "spirit of Camp David." The Eisenhower administration believed it was doing enough for peace, and it was facing criticism from some who thought it was being too soft on communism. In February, 1960, the Soviet Union's Anastas Mikoyan visited Cuba to inaugurate a Soviet trade exhibition. He signed a five-year trade agreement with Cuba, promising the purchase of one million tons of sugar annually. Cuba was to receive petroleum products in exchange. The Eisenhower administration decided to work with anti-Castro groups inside Cuba in hope of overthrowing Castro. In March, a French ship, carrying a shipment of Belgian small arms, exploded in Havana harbor, killing dozens of workers and soldiers. Castro publicly accused the CIA of sabotage, and the U.S. protested the accusation. Also in March, Eisenhower ordered the CIA to train Cuban exiles for an invasion of Cuba - with Batistianos forbidden to join the force. Eisenhower approved $13 million for the project. Soviet tankers arrived with crude oil. The three oil refineries in Cuba - the Esso and Texaco refineries and a refinery owned by the British - refused to refine the oil. Castro nationalized the refineries. Castro saw the U.S. as having declared economic war on Cuba. And the following month - July - the Cuban government passed a nationalization law providing for the expropriation of foreign holdings in Cuba. Two days later, President Eisenhower reduced the purchase of Cuban sugar by 95 percent, cutting off 80 percent of Cuban exports to the United States. Then the Soviet Union announced that it was willing to buy the sugar that had been destined for the United States. Anti-Castro Cubans in the Sierra Maestras, trying to replicate Castro's success, were caught and shot. Neighborhood watch groups had arisen, watching for people bent on sabotage, treason and violence against the revolution. Castro was now more strongly on the side of those advocating unity and opposing "red-baiting," and his old friend Che Guevara was describing himself openly as a communist. Seeing a threat of U.S. intervention, Khrushchev announced that Cuba could be defended with rockets. He declared the Monroe Doctrine an anachronism and said that the Soviet Union would purchase the sugar that the U.S. was rejecting. On August 16, members of the CIA launched their first assassination attempt against Castro, with poisoned cigars. A leading journalist in the U.S., Walter Lippmann, anticipated the tactics from the 1970s towards Communist China, favoring economic cooperation and friendly relations with Cuba. He criticized the Eisenhower administration for having "pushed the Cubans behind the iron curtain." The right thing to do, he wrote, "is keep the way open for their return."