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Who has told the United States that the people of Latin America cannot choose socialism? Who has granted them the role of gendarme and tutor of our destiny? Why do we have to accept as a model a capitalist society that exploits the sweat of others, that discriminates against blacks, exterminates Indians, and denigrates Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and other Latins, that prostitutes women and sexually exploits children—a society of violence, vice, alienation and crime? Who can oblige us to live forever under an egoistic, pitiless system condemned by history? —Fidel Castro, January 1979 There really is no way to bridge the gap between our positions. —Robert Pastor, December 1978 10 RECONCILIATION AND ESTRANGEMENT THE CARTER YEARS Cuba was not an issue in the 1976 campaign. There was nothing to argue about: both party platforms took similar swings at the Castro government, both candidates opposed normalizing relations, and both ignored Cuba in the three presidential debates.¹ And as with Cuba, so with most other policy issues. Pollsters reported that the contest involved “character ”—that the always crucial moderates who had voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and then switched to Richard Nixon in 1968 were looking for a president who knew the difference between right and wrong and whose administration would be based on simple honesty. Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter succeeded in focusing the campaign on just that issue, attacking arrogant, cynical manipulators—out-of-touch politicians who earned praise for adding the word “détente” to the everyday vocabulary but then threw it away by adding a second unfamiliar word, “Watergate.” It was clearly not a good time to be either a Republican or a Washington insider, and Gerald Ford was both. A member of Congress since 1948, he was as moderate as Carter at a time when his party was moving to the right under the prodding of California governor Ronald Reagan, who had picked 292 Reconciliation and Estrangement up the conservative banner dropped by Barry Goldwater in 1964. In 1976, Reagan was demonstrating that a Hollywood actor could claim the White House, but his victory did not come until 1980; now, voters had to choose between President Ford and challenger Jimmy Carter, both of whom appeared decent if wooden. In addition, Carter sometimes seemed a bit too pious, but no one questioned his intelligence—a problem for Ford—and when Carter confessed to a Playboy interviewer that he occasionally experienced lust in his heart, polls showed that voters applauded his honesty, probably because they could bet the farm he would never do anything more than think about it.² During the campaign Carter criticized the realpolitik that for the past eight years had been guiding U.S. policy to support Latin America’s most brutal dictators, promising that “we will once again be a beacon light for human rights throughout the world,” although he then added, “I do not wish to see us swing from one extreme of cynical manipulation to the other extreme of moralistic zeal.”³ With little said about Cuba during the campaign , the best indicator of the new administration’s policy appeared in the two reports issued by the private Commission on U.S.-Latin American Relations, chaired by the corporate attorney who had been LBJ’s ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS), Sol Linowitz. The commission ’s 1974 report, issued just after Nixon’s resignation, had argued that isolating Cuba had failed to advance U.S. interests, and an update issued immediately after Carter’s election urged the incoming administration to “take the initiative in launching a sequence of reciprocal actions” leading to a normalization of relations. Suggested steps included a White House condemnation of terrorist attacks by Cuban exiles and a partial lifting of the embargo to permit sales of food and medicine in the hope that Cuba would reciprocate by withdrawing its troops from Angola, by ceasing to carp on the issue of Puerto Rican independence, and by releasing U.S. citizens held in Cuban jails.⁴ The Linowitz Commission’s staff director, Robert Pastor, became the NSC’s principal Latin Americanist. Pastor aroused the suspicion of traditional cold warriors such as General William Odom, on loan to the NSC from the Pentagon, who considered him excessively liberal (“He was left—way, way left”), which may have been true at the time on some issues, such as the all-consuming Panama Canal treaties. A young political scientist, Pastor aged toward the center, and on Cuba he kept moving rightward after he...

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