The Penguin History of the World

Yet, for all the nervousness in Washington, there was little revolutionary activity in Latin America. This was in spite of the victorious revolution in Cuba, of which much was hoped and feared at the time. It was in a number of respects a very exceptional problem. Cuba’s location within a relatively short distance of the United States gave it special significance. The approaches to the Panama Canal had often been shown to have even more importance in American strategic thinking than Suez had in the British. Secondly, Cuba had been especially badly hit in the Depression; it was virtually dependent on one crop, sugar, and that crop had only one outlet, the United States. This economic tie, moreover, was only one of several that gave Cuba a closer and more irksome ‘special relationship’ with the United States than had any other Latin American state. There were historic connections that went back before 1898 and the winning of independence from Spain. Until 1934 the Cuban constitution had included special provisions restricting Cuba’s diplomatic freedom. The Americans still kept their naval base on the island. There was heavy American investment in urban property and utilities, and Cuba’s poverty and low prices made it attractive to Americans looking for gambling and girls. All in all, it should not have been surprising that Cuba produced, as it did, a strongly anti-American movement with much popular support.

The United States was long blamed as the real power behind the conservative post-war Cuban regime, although after the dictator Batista came to power in 1952 this in fact ceased to be so; the State Department disapproved of him and cut off help to him in 1957. By then, a young nationalist lawyer, Fidel Castro, had already begun a guerrilla campaign against a very corrupt government. In two years he was successful. In 1959, as prime minister of a new, revolutionary, Cuba, he described his regime as ‘humanistic’ and, specifically, not Communist.

Castro’s original aims are still not known. Perhaps he was not clear himself what he thought. From the start he worked with a wide spectrum of people who wanted to overthrow Batista, from liberals to Marxists. This helped to reassure the United States, which briefly patronized him as a Caribbean Sukarno; American public opinion idolized him as a romantic figure and beards became fashionable among American radicals. The relationship quickly soured once Castro began to interfere with American business interests, starting with agrarian reform and the nationalization of sugar concerns. He also denounced publicly those Americanized elements in Cuban society that had supported the old regime. Anti-Americanism was a logical means – perhaps the only one – open to Castro for uniting Cubans behind the revolution, and there was little doubt that he shared some of these attitudes himself.

Soon the United States broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba and began to impose other kinds of pressure as well. The American government became convinced that the island was likely to fall into the hands of the Communists upon whom Castro increasingly relied. It did not help when the Soviet leader Khrushchev warned the United States of the danger of retaliation from Soviet rockets if it acted militarily against Cuba and declared the Monroe doctrine dead; the State Department quickly announced that reports of its demise were greatly exaggerated. Finally, the American government decided to promote Castro’s overthrow by force.

It was agreed that this should be done by Cuban exiles. When the presidency changed hands in 1961, John Kennedy inherited this decision. Exiles were already training with American support in Guatemala, and diplomatic relations with Cuba had been broken off. Kennedy had not initiated these activities, but he was neither cautious nor thoughtful enough to impede them. This was the more regrettable because there was much else that boded well in the new president’s attitude to Latin America, where it had been obvious for some time that the United States needed to cultivate goodwill. As it was, the possibilities of a more positive approach were almost at once blown to pieces by the fiasco known as the ‘Bay of Pigs’ operation, when an expedition of Cuban exiles, supported by American money and arms, came to a miserable end in April 1961. Castro now turned in earnest towards the Soviets, and at the end of the year declared himself a Marxist-Leninist.