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13 The Reagan-Castro Years The“New Right”and Its Anti-Cuban Obsession Ramón Sánchez-Parodi Montoto Nothing essential was modified in the issues that framed the dispute between the United States and Cuba when Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency of the United States on January 20, 1981. What did radically change was the concept that the new administration in the United States had already elaborated about the appropriate direction for U.S. policy toward Cuba: that it should be viewed within the context of a war against “the empire of evil.” That day in January marked the end of a phase that had experienced highs and lows since its beginning in June 1972, when the governments of the United States and Cuba started down a road that saw a search for ways to bring about a normalization of relations. It was publicly well known that the new administration about to come to power in Washington intended to open a phase of confrontation with Cuba. This was certainly the message communicated to Cuban officials—including the author of this chapter—by exiting officials of the State Department in the last days of December 1980. Ronald Reagan was the representation of what was called the American “New Right”—a force that had gelled as a reaction to social, political, and economic shocks taking place in the United States during the decades of the 1960s and ’70s: the struggle against race discrimination and for civil rights; the opposition to the war in Vietnam; the counterculture movement of young people embodied in sexual freedom and the use of drugs; the growth of violence and crime; the impact of the oil embargo and “stagflation ”; the Watergate scandal; the Vietnam syndrome; and others. In many sectors of the population, mistrust was generated in the face of governmental actions perceived as insufficient to confront the threats that weighed on society—as well as disenchantment with the wastefulness of government 262 · Ramón Sánchez-Parodi Montoto spending and the intrusiveness of bureaucratic regulations. That was the cauldron within which the New Right brewed.1 Faced with what they considered “modern” society’s excesses and licentiousness —and propelled by the sermons of fundamentalist evangelists like Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority and Pat Robertson of the Christian Coalition—think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute were joined by newspaper columnists like William F. Buckley and George Will and economic theorists from the Chicago school of Milton Friedman. The New Right chorus proclaimed support for the defense of traditional “family values,” opposition to abortion and to the decision of the Supreme Court in 1973 (Roe v. Wade) reaffirming women’s right to abortion, resistance to the equal rights amendment, rollback of governmental regulations that limited the actions of companies regarding sale of products and relations with workers, easing of environmental regulations , and stronger foreign and military policies. With such positions, the New Right was able to capture the Republican Party and propel Ronald Reagan to victory in the 1980 presidential election.2 On the international front, the flagship of the Reagan administration’s foreign policy was confrontation with the Soviet Union, involving the launching of a sophisticated and extremely expensive arms race as well as schemes against movements of national liberation and revolutions in various regions of the world—making use of what administration theoreticians called “low intensity conflicts.”3 It is in this context that the U.S. policy toward Cuba was determined. What emerged was a return to destabilizing political and paramilitary covert actions, a hardening of economic aggression evidenced by the trade and economic blockade of Cuba, and mounting threats of and preparations for direct military actions against Cuba. The president’s own diary, for example , noted on February 11, 1981—less than a month into his presidency— that “intelligence reports say Castro is very worried about me. I’m very worried we can’t come up with anything to justify his worrying.”4 The justification for a hardening Cuba policy can be found in arguments wielded by Alexander Haig, Reagan’s secretary of state from January 1982 until his resignation on June 25, 1982. According to Haig, U.S. stability was threatened from abroad by several problems, and the sources of those problems needed to be destroyed. Cuba was certainly seen as one of these sources. At the beginning of the 1980s and in the waning days of the Jimmy Carter administration, that is, this “cold war...

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