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12 The Carter-Castro Years A Unique Opportunity Robert A. Pastor Fidel Castro stuck his long, pale index finger in my chest. “Pastor,” he said with his intimidating voice, “you don’t have to tell me about the policy of the United States. I know the policy. I have people at the highest levels of your government.” The words and the power of the man literally took my breath away. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was at the end of a marathon conversation . Peter Tarnoff, the executive secretary of the Department of State, and I, the director of Latin American Affairs on the National Security Council (NSC), had been sent by President Jimmy Carter to explore the prospects for normalizing relations between the United States and Cuba. “OK,” I finally said, “then you tell us what U.S. policy is.” “Your policy,” the Comandante said, “is to wait for me to die. And I don’t intend to cooperate.” Since the late 1960s, when the United States stopped trying to expedite Castro’s demise, that statement had accurately and succinctly captured U.S. policy—except, ironically, at the moment that Castro said it. Jimmy Carter, alone among all the presidents since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, decided to make the normalization of relations with Cuba an objective of U.S. foreign policy. The story of Carter’s policy is therefore of special importance in trying to understand why the two governments failed at that moment and how they might succeed in the future. The Window to Normalcy Throughout the twentieth century—from the time the United States started building the Panama Canal in 1904 until the end of the cold war—America’s 238 · Robert A. Pastor presidents had a recurring nightmare: that a foreign rival would use a poor nation on the U.S. periphery to threaten the United States and its interests, including the Panama Canal. Indeed, virtually every U.S. intervention in the Caribbean and Central America since 1904 could be viewed as a way to prevent that nightmare from coming true.1 This is the point of departure for understanding the U.S. perspective on the Cuban Revolution. To understand Castro’s perspective, one needs to recognize that U.S. interventions made it impossible for these small governments in the Caribbean basin to be truly independent. Cubans felt earliest and deepest that affliction of constrained nationalism, and Fidel Castro was the product of the resentment stemming from American dominance. Although a small, relatively poor island, Cuba was important to the United States because of its proximity. Castro’s decision both to defy the U.S. government and to ally with its principal rival, the Soviet Union, placed the island in the middle of the cold war and at the crossroads of the world’s most dangerous conflict. In October 1962, President John F. Kennedy awoke to America’s worst nightmare. Cuba and the Soviet Union had agreed to install nuclear missiles on the island, and that decision, combined with Kennedy’s declaring it unacceptable, brought the world to the very precipice of nuclear catastrophe . With great skill and courage, both Kennedy and Khrushchev resolved the crisis, but to Fidel Castro, the Soviet decision to withdraw the missiles without consulting him was an act of betrayal, which he related emotionally to Tarnoff and me in January 1980 when the subject was another “betrayal ”: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Because Castro had chosen to put his island in the middle of the principal international political rivalry of the era, it was logical that a change in U.S. policy toward the island would require a reduction in tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States or an alteration in the international balance of power. The outline of those changes became visible in the early 1970s with three events: the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam; Soviet success in reaching nuclear parity with the United States; and growing tension between the Soviet Union and China as the latter built a credible nuclear deterrent. These three seismic shifts led the Soviet Union and the United States to begin serious talks to reduce nuclear armaments. Soviet interest in détente grew after the United States opened a dialogue with China during President Richard Nixon’s visit in 1971. By 1974, journalists were asking the obvious question: If the United States can pursue détente with the Soviet Union and [18.190.156.80] Project MUSE (2024...

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