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1 introduction rebuilding bridges Our relations are like a bridge in war-time. I’m not going to talk about who blew it up—I think it was you who blew it up. The war has ended and now we are reconstructing the bridge, brick by brick, 90 miles from Key West to Varadero beach. It is not a bridge that can be reconstructed easily, as fast as it was destroyed . It takes a long time. If both parties reconstruct their part of the bridge, we can shake hands without winners or losers. —Raúl Castro to Senators George McGovern and James Abourezk, April 8, 1977 In early April of 1963, during talks in Havana over the release of Americans being held in Cuban jails as spies, Fidel Castro first broached his interest in improving relations with the United States. “If any relations were to commence between the U.S. and Cuba,” Castro asked U.S. negotiator James Donovan , “how would it come about and what would be involved?”1 Sent to Cuba in the fall of 1962 by President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert to undertake the first real negotiations with Cuba’s revolutionary regime, Donovan had secured the freedom of more than one thousand members of the CIA-led exile brigade that Castro’s forces had defeated at the Bay of Pigs. In addition to the prisoners, Donovan also secured Castro ’s confidence. Through trips in January, March, and April 1963, he built on that confidence to negotiate the freedom of several dozen U.S. citizens detained after the revolution. In the respectful nature of their talks, Castro found the first trusted U.S. representative with whom he could seriously discuss how Havana and Washington might move toward restoring civility and normalcy in the dark wake of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis. “In view of the past history on both sides here, the problem of how to inaugurate any relations was a very difficult one,” Castro observed. “So I said, ‘now do you know how porcupines make love?’” Donovan remembered responding. “And he said no. And I said well, the answer is ‘very carefully,’ and that is how you and the U.S. would have to get into this.”2 As Donovan pursued his shuttle diplomacy during the spring of 1963, some Kennedy administration officials sought to use his special relationship 2 introduction with Castro to begin a dialogue toward ending hostilities with Cuba. Within the CIA, however, others saw a different opportunity—an opportunity to use the negotiations, and the negotiator, to assassinate Fidel Castro. Knowing that Donovan planned to bring a scuba diving suit as a confidence-building gift for the Cuban leader, members of the covert “executive action” unit developed a plot to contaminate the snorkel with tubercle bacillus, and poison the wetsuit with a fungus. “They tried to use him as the instrument . . . the lawyer who was negotiating the liberation of the Playa Girón prisoners!” Castro exclaimed years later.3 Only the intervention of Donovan’s CIA handlers , Milan Miskovsky and Frank DeRosa, prevented him from becoming an unwitting, would-be assassin.4 The CIA’s infamous assassination plots—exploding conch shells, poison pens, poison pills, sniper rifles, toxic cigars—are the stuff of legend in the history of U.S. policy toward the Cuban revolution. Washington’s efforts to roll back the revolution, through exile paramilitary attacks, covert action, overt economic embargo, and contemporary “democracy promotion” programs, have dominated and defined more than a half century of U.S.-Cuban relations . What Henry Kissinger characterized as the “perpetual antagonism” between Washington and Havana remains among the most entrenched and enduring conflicts in the history of U.S. foreign policy. The Untold Story There is, however, another side to the history of U.S.-Cuban relations, far less known but more relevant today: the bilateral efforts at dialogue, rapprochement , and reconciliation. Every president since Eisenhower has engaged in some form of dialogue with Castro and his representatives. Some talks have been tightly circumscribed, dealing only with specific, narrow issues of mutual interest, such as immigration, air piracy, and drug interdiction . Others have been wide-ranging, engaging the full panoply of issues at stake between the two sides. Some episodes of dialogue produced tangible agreements, formal and informal; others sputtered to a halt with no discernible result. But every U.S. president, Democrat and Republican alike, has seen some advantage in talking to Cuba. Indeed, both Democratic and...

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