As you might expect, the Miami Herald has an excellent retrospective on the life of Fidel Castro who has passed away at the age of ninety. He was such a consequential man that there many angles one can take. As the Herald notes, “By the time he was 35, two American presidents had devoted a considerable amount of time and effort to killing him.”
Those efforts to assassinate Castro weren’t divulged to the Warren Commission and didn’t come to light until the early 1970’s when Congress began looking carefully at the activities of the CIA. But they explain a lot about why Castro ruled his island nation with an iron fist. That doesn’t excuse Castro, but it’s a perspective was that missing for too long as Americans formed their opinions of him.
His death is anticlimactic in a way, both because he turned the reins over to his brother years ago and because the Obama administration has improved relations with Cuba and lifted the travel restriction. Had he died during a period of greater tensions, it might have signaled a greater change in relations between our two countries.
There was a lot of reckless behavior on all sides during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that the world very nearly came to an end as a result of Castro’s decision to invite Soviet warheads into his country, a mere ninety miles off the coast of Florida.
How you ultimately feel about Castro’s legacy probably reflects how you feel about America’s historic role in the world. That he outlived John F. Kennedy by fifty-three years is remarkable. So many things changed in the interim.
One thing that changed is that our country went insane.
Fidel Castro is dead!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 26, 2016
I doubt that was vetted with the State Department.
The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.
The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. – H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun on 26 July 1920.
I believe that H.L. Mencken nailed it.
There was a lot of reckless behavior on all sides during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that the world very nearly came to an end as a result of Castro’s decision to invite Soviet warheads into his country, a mere ninety miles off the coast of Florida.
Perhaps describing the US “reckless behavior” that preceded and was on-going when Castro made the dastardly decision to install nukes would make for better balance of the statement. What were the better options for Cuba at that time? Wait until the next US invasion was militarily robust like the invasion of Iraq? Or one of the “exploding cigars” would succeed?
In real time, the Cuban Missile Crisis was very scary for ordinary people. Perhaps because it was by then foreign for Americans to fear being eminently vulnerable to an foreign power. And yet, there was a degree of confidence in both the government and men in office in the US and USSR that a way out that didn’t include nuclear attacks would be found. It was. Much to the displeasure of anti-Castro expats in the US that officially Cuba was hands-off for a US military takeover.
That’s an ahistorical and glib characterization of the challenge Kennedy and Khrushchev faced in finding a way out.
Ahistorical and glib is all the rage these days.
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As you weren’t there and some of us here were, your characterization of my comment as “ahistorical and glib” is merely evidence of how much of real historical events gets wiped out for future generations.
LOL I was living in base housing in Topeka, Kansas.
Marie, you’re simply factually wrong on a formulative point. That error undermines your analysis.
Kinda leaves out Turkey, no?
Kennedy offered Dobrynin two things in exchange for Soviet removal of the Cuban missiles: (1) the U.S. would publically pledge never to invade Cuba and (2) the U.S. would secretly withdraw missiles from Turkey. The U.S. refused to publically admit to removing the Turkish missiles because it did not want to appear weak. The Soviet Union accepted this offer the next day.
After the Fall of the Soviet Union it was learned that the warheads were operational, though neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev knew it.
Khrushchev came to regard Castro as a lunatic, bent on War. Castro WANTED to fire the missles. He wanted nuclear war. This much is clear from the Soviet Files.
We were very close to invading Cuba. Had we invaded Castro would have, the Soviet archives make clear, taken control of the missiles and launched them.
The Soviets never fully trusted Castro again.
I do not agree with description of the facts.
Very interesting to have those Soviet archives available for scholars to mine for some of the whys and wherefores.
Yes, Castro recklessly inferred in his telegram to Khrushchev that a nuclear attack should be launched on the United States. But that was the point of the telegram; he needed to demand action from Khrushchev.
It would have made no sense to give even a chance of operational control to an agent not involved in the negotiations. Castro might have liked operational control, but I know of no evidence that he had a realistic chance of actually grabbing that control from the USSR. Was the Cuban government prepared to execute a sustained, successful military attack against the Soviets on the island at the same time the U.S. was invading?
Thank the divine that we never had the opportunity to see how the actors would have responded to a second invasion.
Presumably Castro would have needed the launch codes. Only the Soviets had them. Torture their military personnel to get the codes — word would have gotten back to Moscow. At that point, the Soviets themselves may have begun bombing Cuba.
The most crucial ahistorical aspect of this presentation is the claim that “…Castro made the dastardly decision to install nukes…”.
Khruschev and the Russian government made that decision. They were the ones who had the weapons, and they were the ones who initiated and controlled the installations. Though Castro and his Cuban government agreed with the basic decision, they did not have the power to initiate and dictate such a plan.
Yes and no. Khrushchev and the Kremlin initiated the decision to deploy missiles to Cuba. Interestingly, per Arthur Schlesinger at one of those decades-later Missile Crisis conferences, it was learned that Castro was not in favor of deploying them.
Later of course he wanted to preemptively use them.
We also didn’t learn until much later that the Soviets had already sent 100 tactical nukes to the island, capable of hitting Miami presumably, as well as hitting and destroying tens of thousands of US Marines had we invaded.
All I really have to say is that this is probably the worst year in so many ways — but I hold out hope that it comes for Henry Kissinger before New Years.
A full retelling from the declassified material.
“The image of the world standing still is due to Sheldon Stern, former historian at the John F Kennedy Presidential Library, who published the authoritative version of the tapes of the ExComm meetings where Kennedy, and a close circle of advisers, debated how to respond to the crisis. The meetings were secretly recorded by the president, which might bear on the fact that his stand throughout the recorded sessions is relatively temperate, as compared to other participants who were unaware that they were speaking to history. Stern has just published an accessible and accurate review of this critically important documentary record, finally declassified in the 1990s. I will keep to that here. “Never before or since,” he concludes, “has the survival of human civilization been at stake in a few short weeks of dangerous deliberations,” culminating in the Week the World Stood Still.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/15/cuban-missile-crisis-russian-roulette
Becheloss’s book is tremendous.
Kennedy my have over-reacted – may have – but in the reading I have done he resisted the push to invade Cuba.
The picture that emerges does great credit to him.
Had the Cuban missile crisis been avoided, one wonders if the de-stalization program would have gained speed.
I suspect Kennedy realized early on that accepting a new status quo of offensive missiles in Cuba, the Adlai approach, would have meant he would face a massive political firestorm in the US, a solid majority or greater in Congress screaming that he’d better act or else face impeachment.
Thank goodness he kept a level head throughout. The best crisis management by a president in history.
Can’t agree about Beschloss though (haven’t read his book on the CMC), a rather second-rate popular historian who cranks ’em out and rarely goes deep or against the accepted wisdom grain. Sheldon Stern is very good, especially as he carefully noted that the early many tomes of transcripts put out by the Miller Center/Zelikow, were in substantial part in error, often making for nonsense or the opposite of what was said.
Just saw (and very briefly scanned) that Guardian article — Noam Chomsky. About as trustworthy in commenting about JFK as Ken Starr was about Bill Clinton. A long-time Kennedy hater. Everything JFK did was evil, reckless, or insincere according to Noam.
LOL You are probably the first to actually follow the link. A lot of DNR around here.
Yeah, was pretty slanted, even for him. But the quoted material was interesting.
Pace the Sage of Baltimore and his Nietzschean disdain for democracy (I’ve often thought his hatred of FDR was less about policy and more about being proved wrong, that a majority could elect a first-rate individual President), the moron about to assume office does so thanks to an eighteenth-century mechanism designed in part to prevent the tyranny of the majority. In 2016 the majority behaved responsibly and chose the better candidate; the minority instead acted the part of the mob in the thrall of the demagogue, and was rewarded for it.
On a non-political note, Cuban urban holistic agriculture is admirable. Totally sustainable with no synthetic imputs.
Pro-ecological actions are “political,” mino. Any action that resists the corporate profit-before-survival position is just about as “political” as it gets.
AG
Welcome to the vanguard of post-socialistic reconstruction, comrade. Pass the mulch.
Nice, but…when did the “post-” thing happen? I must’ve missed the socialism part.
Darn!!!
Post-neoliberal, maybe?
Post-alt. right, with any luck?
We shall see…
AG
Well if this is post-capitalism than socialism must adapt. The great inadmissible truth of the 20th century is that capitalism and socialism are actually first cousins.
The worst effect of Western free trade with the Global South is their loss of food security. Even FOOD AID is conditioned to bi-lateral trade concessions.
The monetization of human health.
AG
This is the self-imposed curse on the United States of America as well. God help it from spreading any further.
I would also object to the implication from the Miami paper that Kennedy know of and approved assassination attempts against Castro. I haven’t seen the proof yet.
The quote selected above “two presidents devoted considerable amount of time to killing him” also cleverly distracts us from the plain fact that it was far more the CIA, and not any one president, which was most eager to kill Castro. To my knowledge, the Agency never got authorization from JFK , though post-Dallas when the CIA-Mafia plots were uncovered, certain bad actors and liars from Langley tried to assign blame to Kennedy, as if they were only following orders.
This is completely wrong. Totally, catastrophically wrong.
The Kennedys authorized and pressured the CIA to solve the Cuba problem by assassination. At the same time, they told them to back off sabotage attempts and tell the exiles to chill out. It’s this latter part that elements in the CIA disobeyed, even during the height of the missile crisis.
Really? Even in the final 13 months of his presidency, post-Crisis, when he’d pledged a no-invasion of Cuba to the Soviets, where assassination of Castro can easily be assumed to run with that agreement? Sounds dangerous and reckless, just after he’d managed to avoid a full nuclear exchange over that tiny island.
Kennedy (same for Bobby) doesn’t strike me as reckless, nor hell-bent to kill a foreign leader. During the decision to green light the BoP operation for instance, he specifically disapproved the CIA’s assassination component. And in 1963 when be briefly approved plans to oust Diem, then later retracted (but too late), he was deeply shocked when the coup occurred and Diem was killed. Naive perhaps, but a genuine un-faked shock when he learned the news.
Be happy to see any reliable sources you have, as I don’t claim to know all that happened in that period. In the JFK assassination research community, my impression is those who find he did not authorize assass’n attempts against Castro or anyone greatly outnumber those who do.
Would be surprising perhaps to some close to Castro, as the latter seemed to be of the belief that it was the CIA, not Kennedy, going rogue and directing the kill attempts. Castro always seemed to have great regret JFK was murdered just as he, early on, had a keen insight into who had really killed JFK. He wouldn’t have been quite so regretful had he learned in his long life that Kennedy had in fact wanted him dead.
The least you can say is that the role of JFK and RFK in these attempts against Castro remains a murky and controversial subject.
The most you can say is that the idea doesn’t make any sense:
(From http://jfkfacts.org/cia-was-in-the-loop-for-castro-peace-feelers/)
Arthur Schlesinger explained to Anthony Summers in 1978 why the CIA did not want JFK to negotiate with Fidel Castro during the summer of 1963:
“The CIA was reviving the assassination plots (against Castro) at the very time President Kennedy was considering the possibility of normalization of relations with Cuba – an extraordinary action. If it was not total incompetence – which in the case of the CIA cannot be excluded – it was a studied attempt to subvert national policy.”
(There are so many other examples of CIA attempts to subvert national policy while JFK was president, that sounds a lot more likely.)
It’s true that you can’t get anyone on the record on this and that the CIA essentially took the blame for it through a blizzard of obfuscation and perjured testimony. I believe they did this because their ethos required them to protect their main client, who is always the POTUS.
Lansdale knew what they were doing and he wasn’t the rogue officer that, say, some of the overzealous folks in Operations clearly were.
I think the confusion arises out of the fact that the CIA did have rogue elements over the Cuba policy, and that they continued to enable and encourage acts of sabotage in contradiction of direct orders.
This allows people to easily imagine that everything they did was free lance and that the whole agency was working at cross-purposes with their orders.
It’s amusing to go back and read about how everyone, including CIA director McCone, freaked out after McNamera brought up liquidating Castro and other officials in a widely-attended deputies meeting at the State Department. The CIA even went so far as to reprimand McNamara for his indiscretion and tell him never to say anything like that, and to scold Lansdale for ordering them in writing to follow up.
Yet, they had been trying to assassinate Castro for months at that point, and continued to do so.
It’s been noted before that Richard Helms managed to avoid having his name attached to almost any documents related to Operation Mongoose, and that despite being intimately involved in it.
The people doing this stuff understood that some things are never put in writing, and never discussed “in so many words.”
Here’s McNamera pretending he didn’t discuss it or hear anyone else discussing it, and pretending that Lansdale didn’t order the CIA in writing to give them options.
Castro’s tragedy (if it was one, or if he would have seen it as one) is that he outlived ideology: not only his own, but ideology in general, the market for which has now been destroyed by Mr. Trump. Henceforward, all pseudophilosophy is TL;DR . Watch for the European totalitarian movements to begin adapting to this.
I have always understood Mencken’s comment in the sense of the American people voting for the candidate with whom they identified more.
Cuba would had been another Guatemala, Haiti, Colombia without Castro. Che and Castro saw in the fate of Jacobo Arbetnz that a power concession would only increase nation’s pain at those times.
With ideologies hardly sustainable, banana republics can dominate.
Meh on the tweet.
What’s interesting to me as someone who grew up in a post cold war world, is how Castro is irrelevant to the debates in the world today. Everyone has market economies and the debates are about authoritarianism, religion/nativism.
He became irrelevant. Everyone else concluded stalinism didnt work
I saw pictures of mao in china. None of marx or lenin. Communism as a defensible form of government no longer exists
In an interview in 2010 he supposedly said the Cuban Model doesn’t even work for Cuba so he’d probably agree.
BUT the potential of a post work world brought on by automation and AI suggests an evolution for the concept as an economic system.
And that moron is delivered to the country by…. the political media!
Thanks booman!
Always loved this from April 2015… watch the media go nuts. Now that we know how it ended, this should have been a warning.
https://youtu.be/xuGprM5iqlk
Wow, that was exciting.
Inadvertently another metaphor… no content at the link! Trying again to show media chasing Clinton like a pack of dogs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuGprM5iqlk
No, I did see it. I was being sarcastic, not at you, but at the non-eventfulness of it. I guess it struck me a slightly different way.
From what I understand, she tended to avoid talking to the press.
Never thought about it before, but now that it’s news again, I suppose Castro had a fairly profound effect on my life, others as well. Not bad that he distracted otherwise evolving Americans to the point they ‘lost track’ for a year or two while some of us were in our wonder years. Poor mom and dad. Won the war but less than twenty years later had to face the prospect of severe disorientation again. Looking back, overall, I’d say the 20th century was pretty good; communists and all. In terms of “progressive” goals we’re still stuck at the late 70s, early 80s of last century. And that’s not bad for most of us born before then. Still have no idea what anyone born since then knows. None of them seem to agree with one another. Most of the ones that kind of sound intelligent say they have no clue, or variations of that like a fourteen-year-old would say, honestly, ‘they both suck.’
But that’s what passes now for honesty. Saying it well. And that’s what’s always been understood, that to call a bright star slow is missing the point.
My experience: in terms of politics and morale, the best time was something like 1958-1963. Sputnik, great comedians, Kennedy, had a lot to do with that. Of course that couldn’t be allowed to last. It was ended by war and assssinations, but we were young and we made our own counter-culture. It really was that, and for sheer psychic survival. A lot of people today, I think, don’t understand that. (In England, it was mostly about style, yet here the English groups became icons of a real counter-culture; the Beatles were first heard in America right after the JFK assassination, which means also the beginning of the Vietnam War.) Early 70s, Nixon, lots of repression, lots of demonstrations. Through the 70s, things gradually getting yuppified. About 1978 everything started to be about money, Reagan World, the beginning of Trump World. Things have sucked more and more since then. (I was somewhat insulated, spent most of 1978-85 in England, but Thatcher took charge and you could see the yuppification starting there too. Whenever I was back in the states nobody talked about anything but money and investing. I wasn’t interested, didn’t have any money anyway.)
I can’t look at Trump and his cronies without thinking: here comes the new counter-culture. These guys remind me of the Nixon administration, only much worse.