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We no longer believe in your philosophy of exploitation and privilege. We no longer believe in your philosophy of gold, the gold you rob from the work of other peoples. We no longer are willing to submit to the orders of your ambassadors. We no longer are disposed to follow in tow your reactionary policy, which is the enemy of human progress. —Fidel Castro, August 1960 We who in living memory rescued the island from medieval bondage; we who have given order, vitality, technical wisdom and wealth are now being damned for our civilizing and cooperative virtues! —Senator Karl Mundt, August 1960 5 1960 THE YEAR OF PUSHING AND SHOVING “We will bury you.” So Nikita Khrushchev had boasted in late 1956, and a year later the Soviet Union had won the race into space. When the United States placed a satellite in orbit two months later, a relieved Fulgencio Batista cabled President Eisenhower that the Cuban leader, for one, had never doubted “the security which is found in American resources and its scientific capacity to surpass the achievements being made by the Russians .” But nearly everyone else conceded that the Russian word “Sputnik” now identified the cutting edge of space technology, and that fact alone almost guaranteed that the 1960 election would focus on America’s fading global supremacy. “Most informed people agree that the Soviets are ahead of us technologically,” warned General James Gavin, who popularized the term “missile lag,” and the Eisenhower administration’s public response, intended to reassure, had the opposite effect; in early 1960 the grandfatherly president reluctantly acknowledged that “the Soviets have made some very spectacular achievements” and then followed with a lame admonition— “I don’t think that we should begin to bow our heads in shame.” His next sentence sounded even more defensive: “Our country is not asleep, and it is not incapable of doing these things.”¹ Then why weren’t the Republicans doing them? Clearly aware of the issue being handed him on a silver platter, Democratic presidential candi- 110 The Year of Pushing and Shoving date John Kennedy reminded voters a few months later that “the first passengers to return safely from a trip to outer space were named Strelka and Balka, not Rover or Fido or Checkers.” Not content to drag Vice President Richard Nixon’s dog into the debate, Kennedy also made fun of his rival’s well-publicized kitchen debate at a U.S. trade exhibit in the Soviet Union, telling a campaign audience that the best Nixon “could do in that Moscow kitchen was to wag his finger in Mr. Khrushchev’s face and say: ‘You may be ahead of us in rocket thrust, but we’re ahead of you in color television.’” Then, in the next sentence, came Cuba: “He tells us now that economic aid to Cuba and Latin America five years ago would have prevented the rise of Castro—but he neglects to say that he was there five years ago and didn’t do anything about it.”² In this election year, Cuba was about to become for the Republicans what the loss of China had been for the Democrats eight years earlier—a political albatross. IN CUBA, the new year began as the old one had ended, with more bad news for U.S. investors—the expropriation of another seventy thousand acres of U.S.-owned sugar lands, half belonging to the United Fruit Company, whose executives maintained exceptionally close ties to the Eisenhower administration. Focusing on Cuba’s promise to pay in bonds rather than cash, the U.S. protest note on 11 January was delivered to Cuban authorities just as counterrevolutionary exiles were escalating their occasional bombing of Cuban targets into a concerted effort to destroy the sugar harvest, hitting several sugar mills the day after the note’s delivery. A week later, an airplane dropped four bombs on Havana, while another dropped incendiary white phosphorus on a LasVillas sugar mill; the next week,Camagüey was hit by five aerial bombings and Oriente by another three. Since all of the attacks had been launched from Florida, it was Cuba’s turn to lodge a protest, which Fidel Castro delivered in a blistering public attack on 18 January, lashing out at both the counterrevolutionaries and their supporters , which he vaguely identified as “international oligarchies” and “foreign tyrannies.” Asked about Castro’s charge, a seemingly puzzled President Eisenhower told reporters, “We don’t know really the foundation of these accusations.”³ That...

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