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17 chapter 1 The Cuban Drumbeat The Last Hurrah: Gorbachev in Havana Mikhail Gorbachev visited Cuba in April 1989. Some of his closest aides had urged him not to go: Fidel Castro was a political dinosaur, they argued, his policy in the Third World was reckless, and going to Cuba would irritate the United States. Other aides disagreed. In a memo to Gorbachev accompanying a draft of the speech the Soviet leader would deliver to the Cuban National Assembly , Georgi Shakhnazarov noted Cuba’s economic crisis and added: “I have attempted to include warm words about the significance of the Cuban revolution . . . to give moral support to the Cuban government in this moment that is so difficult for them.”¹ Gorbachev did not consider Castro a relic of the past. He wrote in his memoirs , “I had and have a high opinion of this man, of his intellectual and political abilities. He is, without doubt, an outstanding statesman. . . . In my conversations with Castro I never had the feeling that this man had exhausted himself, that he, as they say, ‘was a spent force,’ that his worldview was cast in cement, that he was unable to absorb new ideas. It was possible to have a constructive dialogue with him, to attain mutual understanding, to count on cooperation.”² In Havana, Gorbachev was a tactful and respectful guest. The Cubans appreciated that he did not try to lecture them, give them advice, or criticize them. At the press conference after the talks, when a journalist asked “What advice did the charming Gorbachev give the Cubans?” Castro quipped, “Gorbachev is charming precisely because he does not tell other countries what to do.”³ The Soviet leader assured the Cubans of continuing support. “Cuba—it is our revolutionary duty, our destiny to help her,” Gorbachev wrote after leaving the island.⁴ His promises rang hollow, however, against the backdrop of the rapidly deteriorating situation in the Soviet Union and in the Soviet bloc. Seven 18 The Cuban Drumbeat months later, the Berlin Wall fell. Throughout Eastern Europe, Communist regimes crumbled. Castro had told Angola’s President José Eduardo dos Santos in late 1988, as détente between Washington and Moscow blossomed, “We don’t know how the United States will interpret peace and détente, whether it will be a peace for all, détente for all, coexistence for all, or whether the North Americans will interpret ‘coexistence’ as peace with the USSR—peace among the powerful—and war against the small. This has yet to be seen. We intend to remain firm, but we are ready to improve relations with the United States if there is an opening.”⁵ There was no opening. For the next three years, as the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of collapse, U.S. officials pressured Gorbachev to cut all aid to Cuba.⁶ The collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 meant that Havana was alone, and in desperate economic straits. Washington tightened the embargo , making it as difficult as possible for third countries to trade with Cuba. U.S. officials hoped that hunger and despair would force the Cuban people to turn against their government. The Burden of the Past Why such hatred? The answer lies, in part, in Castro’s betrayal of the special relationship that had existed between the United States and Cuba since the early 1800s, when President Thomas Jefferson had longed to annex the island, then a Spanish colony. Jefferson’s successors embraced the belief that Cuba’s destiny was to belong to the United States. No one understood this better than José Martí, the father of Cuban independence. In 1895, as Cuba’s revolt against Spanish rule began, he wrote, “What I have done, and shall continue to do is to . . . block with our [Cuban] blood . . . the annexation of the peoples of America to the turbulent and brutal North that despises them. . . . I lived in the monster [the United States] and know its entrails—and my sling is that of David.”⁷ The next day he was killed on the battlefield. In 1898, as the Cuban revolt entered its fourth year, the United States joined the war against an exhausted Spain, ostensibly to free Cuba. After Spain surrendered , Washington forced the Platt Amendment on the Cubans, which granted the United States the right to send troops to the island whenever it deemed it necessary and to establish bases on Cuban soil. (Today, the Platt Amendment lives on in the U.S. naval...

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