That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution

Introduction: Neighbors

INTRODUCTION NEIGHBORS Imagine living in a neighborhood where the family across the street irritates you. It’s a wide street, fortunately, so most of the time you can simply ignore them, but every so often they do something annoying— your kids go over to play with theirs and wobble back home with the marijuana giggles, or these neighbors welcome some out-of-town houseguests who are clearly up to no good, placing you nervously on guard until you see them leave. Or what about that morning when you awoke to discover that a few of their many children had pitched a tent in your front yard, complaining they can no longer endure living at home? They apparently intend to stay forever. Then imagine that you try not to let all this bother you. You understand that these neighbors haven’t had your advantages. They come from different stock—a “tropical” people, outwardly cheerful but hopelessly emotional and pathologically frenetic, investing most of their energy in billowy arm-waving and oral pyrotechnics. Style is fairly insignificant, of course, but when combined with the irresponsible behavior, it all adds up, sometimes to the point where you simply cannot take any more. That’s when you march across the street to set them straight. Usually, you don’t have to do anything more than raise your voice—they know the consequences when you get angry, so they quickly promise to behave better. Yet can they? Probably not without your help, which requires lots of solid advice and sometimes a modest loan but also makes you feel good. After you’ve set 2 Introduction them on the right path, you always return home with a sense of genuine accomplishment. Then imagine you do this once too often. WHAT HAPPENED NEXT was called the Cuban Revolution. Of course, the revolution involved much more than shooing the Yankees back across the street, but this book focuses on the U.S.-Cuban relationship. It examines how the United States deals with a difficult neighbor. The story focuses on the island’s revolutionary generation, which grew to maturity in a country characterized by widespread deprivation, extreme inequality, and extraordinary corruption. And, unfortunately, many Cubans of that generation were convinced that the United States bore much of the responsibility for the problems that faced them. The first chapter of this book explains what the dean of historians of Cuba meant when he wrote that “almost any comprehensive history of Cuba is, of necessity, a discourse on U.S.-Cuban relations.”¹ This initial chapter also introducesWashington’s mental image of Cuba, focusing on the widespread expectation that the United States would act as a guardian of the less-developed peoples of the Caribbean but emphasizing that the root of this hegemonic presumption was a benevolent disposition and an unshakable belief that proximity to the United States was the region ’s singular good fortune. Or, as an assistant secretary of state asserted in 1916, “Nature, in its rough method of uplift, gives sick nations strong neighbors.”² Three months later the United States sent several hundred soldiers to lift up what was then Cuba’s sickest province, Camagüey, where they stayed for five years. The trouble really began several decades later, in 1959, when a group of rebels ousted a perfectly acceptable dictator and proceeded to cause more trouble than anyone could have imagined. “There was something on Cuba every five minutes,” complained an exasperated secretary of state,Christian Herter, and while he and President Dwight D. Eisenhower at first tried to be accommodating, they soon lost patience and began planning the Bay of Pigs invasion. “There is a limit to what the United States in self-respect can endure,” Eisenhower said when he announced the closing of the U.S. embassy , and when he handed John F. Kennedy the keys to the White House three weeks later, Eisenhower also passed along an admonition: “We cannot let the present government there go on.”³ That was in 1961.Twenty years later, Eisenhower and Kennedy were both dead and buried, yet Fidel Castro was boasting that “we will still be here Introduction 3 in another 20 years.” Not if incoming U.S. president Ronald Reagan and his new secretary of state, Alexander M. Haig Jr., had anything to say about the matter. During the 1980 campaign, Reagan had proposed a blockade of Cuba, and now, at the first meeting of his...