From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (112 page)

The rise of Fidel Castro in Cuba and his drift toward the Soviet Union brought the Cold War into the U.S. backyard. Many Cubans admired the United States, imbibed its culture, baseball especially, and liked its people. But they also resented outside domination and blamed many of their problems on the United States. For nearly a quarter century, they had suffered under Fulgencio Batista's oppressive regime. The U.S. government encouraged tourism in the 1950s to help deal with the worldwide dollar gap, and Batista brought in mobster Meyer Lansky to clean up Havana's casinos. An estimated three hundred thousand Americans flocked to Cuba yearly, making it a playground for the rich and a source of wealth
for U.S. organized crime.
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The Platt Amendment had been abrogated in 1934, but its essence in terms of U.S. domination—what Castro called "Plattism"—lived on. Batista scrupulously accommodated Washington on major issues and granted favors, sometimes in return for bribes, to U.S. corporations like International Telephone and Telegraph. Reliant on the export of sugar, the Cuban economy remained an appendage of the United States.
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Castro boldly set out to change this. The son of a wealthy planter, well educated, a good enough pitcher that the New York baseball Giants once offered him a five-thousand-dollar signing bonus, the young rebel was also a fiery nationalist and admirer of José Martí, who had insisted that a genuine revolution must be a revolution against the United States. Still in his twenties, quixotic by nature, Castro launched premature uprisings in 1953 and 1956 that ended disastrously. Undaunted, he organized in the Sierra Maestra mountains of southeastern Cuba the guerrilla army that would drive Batista from power. He benefited from Batista's complacency, ineptitude, and cruelty, popular unrest due to high unemployment, and rising middle-class discontent. On January 1, 1959, a victorious Fidel rode triumphantly into Havana on a tank given Batista by the United States.
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As with China a decade earlier, Americans later played the blame game of who "lost" Cuba, some claiming that the Eisenhower administration should have seen Castro for what he was and nipped his movement in the bud, others insisting that it should have been more accepting of his revolution.
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In truth, likely neither approach would have worked. There is no persuasive evidence that Castro entered Havana in January 1959 committed to a Marxist revolution. In any event, until this time the United States had been preoccupied with crises in the Middle East and elsewhere. It complacently assumed that Batista would prevail or, in the unlikely event Castro won out, as with previous Cuban leaders, he could not survive without U.S. backing. On the other hand, it is easy to exaggerate U.S. hostility. The United States was tainted by its long-standing support of Batista, to be sure, and it might have broken with him earlier. But it eventually cut off aid and pressed him to step down. Washington
was wary of Castro from the outset, but initially the bearded rebel in olive green combat fatigues was an object of fascination more than of hostility. Some Americans sympathized with his revolution. Eisenhower sent Philip Bonsal, an open-minded career diplomat, to Havana to work with Castro. In April 1959, when Washington welcomed him for an official visit, Nixon still hoped that the United States might "orient him in the right direction."
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This, of course, was the rub. Castro was determined to free Cuba of U.S. domination and in time saw the Soviet Union as a means to that end. In the tension-ridden Cold War environment of 1959–60, any move in that direction was anathema to the United States.

The two sides soon fixed on a collision course. Castro aroused U.S. suspicions not long after taking power by legalizing the Communist Party and welcoming leftists to his government. He drove off moderates and conducted show trials and public executions of Batista supporters, provoking outrage in the United States. He began to expropriate land and nationalize basic industries and sought to purchase weapons from Soviet-bloc nations. On a second, highly publicized visit to the United States in late 1959 he denounced U.S. imperialism before the United Nations. Perhaps most ominously, he advocated a Nasser-like neutralism and called for revolution throughout Latin America. The United States maintained the arms embargo imposed on Batista and vigorously protested Castro's nationalization and expropriations. It increasingly feared that the contagion of Cuba's revolution might spread through Latin America. As tension heightened, Castro in early 1960 pursued a bold option not open to previous Cuban revolutionaries by seeking a trade deal with the Soviet Union. Eagerly seizing this rare opportunity to gain an ally at America's back door, Soviet leaders responded positively—"we felt like boys again," one official later told an American.
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For Washington, Castro's move toward Moscow was the last straw. Labeling the Cuban a "madman," Eisenhower decided in March 1960 that he must go. Not wanting to overthrow him without an alternative available, the administration began to organize an opposition to prepare the way for a Guatemala-type operation.
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In response to this new challenge, the Eisenhower administration in its last months executed a reverse course in Latin America, mounting the most active approach to the hemisphere since the Good Neighbor policy. After years of coddling dictators, it publicly encouraged representative
government and actively supported moderate reformists such as Venezuela's Romulo Betancourt. It cut back and attempted to redirect the focus of the military aid programs that had drained resources desperately needed for development and helped keep brutal dictators in power. Belatedly conceding that economic deprivation provided a fertile breeding ground for Communism, it embraced aid programs it had once spurned. It acquiesced in commodity arrangements to help stabilize prices for Latin American exports such as coffee and raw materials. In the summer of 1960, it created a Social Progress Trust Fund of $500 million to promote medical, education, and land reform programs, not exactly the Marshall Plan Latin American leaders had pleaded for but a big step beyond earlier policies and a foundation for John F. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress.
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While seeking to improve relations with other Latin American nations, the United States set out to eliminate Castro. It launched full-scale economic warfare, including a virtual trade embargo, broke diplomatic relations, and sought to mobilize opposition to his regime among other Latin American nations. As in Guatemala, it mounted a propaganda campaign to incite rebellion in Cuba. It also began to organize political opposition among anti-Castro exiles and to arm and train an exile force for an invasion of Cuba. The CIA hatched a variety of plots to discredit and even assassinate Castro. Recognizing that the Batista-like and increasingly egomaniacal Rafael Trujillo posed the danger of another Castro in the Dominican Republic, the administration prepared a parallel set of actions to get rid of him.
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After years of official U.S. indifference, Latin America, by virtue of Communism, Caracas, and Castro, was back at the top of the U.S. foreign policy agenda.

Cuba was not the only problem facing the Eisenhower administration in its last years. The world of the late 1950s was increasingly complex and infinitely more dangerous. Conflict between the Soviet Union and China, although still not out in the open, intensified at the end of the decade, complicating ties between the two Communist powers and their relations with the United States. The relentless advance of technology raised growing fears of a nuclear war no one might win. Eisenhower and Khrushchev saw the need to ease Cold War tensions, but their cautious moves in that direction confused as much as they clarified relations between the superpowers.
The Cold War had a gained momentum of its own. The two leaders' initial steps toward what would later be called detente ran afoul of hard-line critics in each nation, institutional and economic imperatives, and conflicts in other parts of the world. Taking control of U.S. foreign policy after Dulles's death in May 1959, Eisenhower responded prudently and with admirable restraint to the multiple challenges of his last years, but at times he appeared to be reacting to events rather than shaping them. On occasion, he seemed to be stumbling. Remembering their 1952 electoral defeat, Democrats attacked the administration for allowing the nation to fall behind technologically and responding ineffectually to the Communist menace. The administration left office in 1961 in much the same milieu in which it had come to power in 1953—with the roles of the two parties reversed.

Nothing fed public anxieties and the political turmoil of the late 1950s more than the rising threat of nuclear war and concerns, often politically inspired, that the United States was lagging behind the USSR in technology. Nuclear weapons had been the centerpiece of the administration's New Look defense strategy, and Dulles often boasted that massive retaliation had won major Cold War victories. But in the second term, the reliance on nuclear weapons drew fire from different directions. Critics questioned the wisdom of a grand strategy based on such weapons when the other side also possessed them. Europeans correctly feared they might bear the brunt of a Soviet response in the event of a nuclear exchange and could not but question U.S. dependence on nuclear weapons. The impact on Japanese fishermen of radioactive fallout from a U.S. nuclear explosion in the Pacific highlighted growing popular fears about the dangers. Nevil Shute's 1957 novel
On the Beach
told the grisly story of the destruction of the world by nuclear war. Organized by internationalists and liberal pacifists the same year, the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy (SANE) drew support from many celebrities and held rallies and protest marches demanding an end to atmospheric nuclear testing, steps toward nuclear disarmament, and international control of atomic energy. Intellectuals and political leaders across the world took up the cause.
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The New Look also provoked opposition from the other end of the political spectrum. Army officers and a growing body of civilian defense intellectuals increasingly warned that the reliance on nuclear weapons narrowed the nation's options to launching nuclear war or doing nothing. Especially as the Cold War shifted to the Third World, critics of massive retaliation called for building up conventional forces and developing capabilities for dealing with insurgencies. With total war threatening
nuclear annihilation, political scientist Robert Osgood insisted that limited war was the only rational alternative. Democratic senators Stuart Symington of Missouri, John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, and Henry Jackson of Washington, arguing on the basis of badly flawed intelligence, warned that while relying on nuclear weapons the administration had allowed the United States to fall behind the Soviet Union in its means of delivering them. Charges of a "bomber gap" surfaced as early as 1954, accompanied by demands that the United States undertake a massive building program to outstrip the Soviets in nuclear weapons and develop invulnerable delivery systems.
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More than anything else, the
Sputnik
"crisis" shaped the American mood of the late 1950s. On October 4, 1957, with maximum fanfare and propaganda, the Soviet Union put into orbit with a huge R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile the world's first artificial satellite, a monumental scientific accomplishment. A month later, it orbited a much larger instrument carrying a live dog. The launch of
Sputnik I
and
Sputnik II
shook the United States to its core. The superiority of U.S. science was assumed to be the bedrock of the nation's security. What the
New York Daily News
called "Khrushchev's comet" appeared to undermine the basic principles of massive retaliation and the New Look—and add substance to Soviet rocket-rattling.
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Much like Pearl Harbor, it created a sense of profound vulnerability, raising fears that turned to near panic.
Sputnik
even provoked questions among Americans and across the world whether the Soviet system might be superior to that of the United States, a huge problem in the ongoing global competition for hearts and minds. The explosion of an American rocket on its launch pad just weeks later ("Kaputnik," "Stayputnik," Americans nervously called it) added humiliation—and fear. The report of a blue-ribbon panel headed by H. Rowland Gaither Jr., presented to Eisenhower in November and leaked in part to the public, reinforced popular anxiety by painting a frightening picture of the inadequacy of the nation's defenses and calling for a Manhattan Project–like program for missile development and even the construction of fallout shelters. A call to arms much like NSC-68, the Gaither Report, according to the
Washington Post
, portrayed a "United States in the gravest danger in its history."
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The
Sputnik
panic evoked calls from intellectuals for a refocus from the self-absorption in the era's consumer culture to a higher national purpose.

Eisenhower handled the
Sputnik
crisis with admirable calm and self-assurance. High-altitude U-2 spy planes flying over the USSR since 1956 provided up-to-date intelligence on Soviet military capabilities. The president knew—although he could not divulge it publicly—that while the Kremlin had scored a huge short-term propaganda victory, its missiles could not reach the United States. The USSR remained well behind in nuclear warheads, bombers, and even long-range missile technology. He had long feared that excessive military spending would require additional taxes, hold back capital accumulation, retard industrial growth, and risk a garrison state that could threaten American democracy. Through a series of speeches, he sought to reassure the nation that its defenses could deter any Soviet attack. He muted criticism by taking modest steps, a small increase in defense spending to calm public opinion and creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to promote space exploration. He supported feel-good and ultimately significant programs to advance U.S. education, especially in science, mathematics, engineering, and foreign languages—one of them revealingly entitled the National Defense Education Act. He ordered the construction of a super-secret underground bunker complex three stories deep and the size of two football fields adjacent to the posh Greenbrier Hotel in rural West Virginia where Congress could conduct the nation's business in the event of nuclear attack. But he firmly and courageously resisted the crash programs and massive spending called for by the military and panicky citizens. He would not commit billions of dollars to beat the Russians to the moon. His refusal to bend to popular pressures had a political cost, of course, permitting Democrats to continue to exploit charges of a defenseless America.
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