Cuba and the Missile Crisis, and: Secret Missions to Cuba: Fidel Castro, Bernardo Benes, and Cuban Miami

In his book Cuba and the Missile Crisis, Carlos Lechuga blames the United States for the crisis and does not present any innovative argument that would contribute to our understanding of this event. The book is basically a political tract, full of the official rhetoric of the Cuban government. According to Lechuga, Nikita Khrushchev came out of his meeting with John Kennedy in Vienna in June 1961 convinced that the Americans were going to invade Cuba. From then onward, Khrushchev repeatedly told Fidel Castro that the Americans were coming. Lechuga affirms that, indeed, the Kennedy administration, after the Bay of Pigs experience, planned to topple the Castro government with an invasion by the U.S. military. Lechuga informs us that, at the end of May 1962, a Soviet delegation traveled to Cuba and offered the Cuban government deployment of nuclear weapons in the island. Castro immediately accepted.

The author says that the two main motivations, for both the Soviet and the Cuban governments, for deploying the missiles in Cuba were to defend Cuba against an attack by the United States and to strengthen the nuclear capabilities of the Soviet military in the face of an American quantitative advantage in nuclear weapons. Yet Lechuga emphasizes that the foremost cause of the missile crisis was growing threats of a military invasion of Cuba by U.S. armed forces. He asserts that an attack by the United States against the island appeared imminent at the time. He argues, "That-nothing else-was the root cause of the dangerous confrontation [the missile crisis]" (4).

Despite the litany that Lechuga presents of real or imputed threats to the Castro government in various American spheres-for example, in the press, in Congress, and in military exercises-he fails to refute a conclusion that various scholars have reached: that the Kennedy administration never intended to use the armed forces of the United States to attack Cuba. Not even after the Americans discovered the Soviet missiles in Cuba was an invasion (advocated by some top officials) of the island a first choice for Kennedy. Had Kennedy wanted to attack Cuba, he would not have discarded and abandoned the Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs.

Of the two main reasons for stationing the missiles in Cuba that Lechuga presents, he wants to emphasize the defense of the Castro regime from a possible American invasion. But from the story he tells, one could also conclude that the main motivation for the Soviets was to gain a bargaining chip in their worldwide confrontation with the United States. Lechuga's book does not refute this alternative explanation as the main cause for the deployment of the Soviet missiles. For example, the American missiles in Turkey bothered the Russians. Soviet rulers saw an opportunity to put missiles in Cuba, and apparently they intentionally played on the fears of the Cuban government that the Marines could land on the island. The Soviets got the Americans to remove their missiles from Turkey, and the Americans promised not to do what they did not want to do anyway-invade Cuba. When, on 27 October 1962, Robert Kennedy conveyed the offer to Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that the Kennedy administration was willing to trade the missiles in Cuba for a public announcement that the Americans would not invade Cuba and a verbal agreement to remove the missiles from Turkey, Khrushchev immediately accepted the trade.

Despite the superior scholarly quality of Levine's work, in contrast to Lechuga's book, one thing the two books have in common is that they present distorted views, Lechuga's of the Cuba policies of the Kennedy administration and Levine's of groups of activists in Miami who were opposed to the Castro government and of the Cuban American community in that city. Early in the book, Levine does justice to the fact that most Cubans arrived in Miami practically penniless and that through hard work ended up being mostly responsible for the growth and progress of the Miami metropolitan area. Also, Levine has made an important contribution in compiling a lot of details about interactions between the Cuban and American governments during the Carter and Reagan administrations. However, Secret Missions to Cuba: Fidel Castro, Bernardo Benes, and Cuban Miami ends up presenting a biased characterization of the Cuban-American community. The book intends to portray the nature of the Cuban-American community from 1959 to 2000. Extending the analysis to recent times makes the constructed image of the exiled community even more illusory.

To produce his portrait of the exiles, Levine uses the story of Cuban American Bernardo Benes who attempted to normalize relations between the Castro and U.S. governments and who advocated engagement with the Cuban regime. Levine equates groups or activists opposed to the Castro dictatorship with being "right-wing" and prone to terrorism, of having a tendency to suppress (usually by violent means) the freedom of speech of those who deviate from certain political views, and even of being anti-Semitic. The author implies that these attributes also apply in a more general sense to the Cuban-American community in Miami.

The facts are that anti-Castro (I would say pro-democracy) groups in the United States, and even in Miami, have never been homogeneous in their political views or in their strategies. This heterogeneity has increased with time. Exiles all along the politico-ideological spectrum want to see a democratic regime in Cuba. To attach the label "right-wing" to all those opposed to the Castro regime is unreasonable. For years now, there have been groups of Cuban exiles very active in the anti-embargo, pro-dialogue movement, and there are some radio programs in Miami that are quite sympathetic to the Castro government. Yet "the anti-Castro militants" are not perpetrating violence against them. For quite some time, the vast majority of pro-democracy groups in the exile community have adopted the position that change in Cuba should be sought by peaceful means. Cuban American support for opposition groups in Cuba has increased with time, and it is very clear that the activists in the island want to bring about a transition by peaceful means. More recently, the Varela Project, created and promoted by a leading democratic activist in Cuba, Osvaldo Payá, has gained widespread support among Cuban Americans. The project has petitioned the Castro government to hold a referendum on steps toward democratization based on legal statues of the 1976 communist constitution. Although many groups and individuals in Miami do not support the Varela Project, in large part because it is perceived to be a strategy for change within the communist system, disagreements about the project have not led to threats or violence in the community. In one last example that shows how far removed from current reality Levine's book is, the Cuban American National Foundation has officially adopted a position in favor of negotiations with officials in the Castro regime.