The Batista dictatorship that took over a few years later served US "commercial and export interests in Cuba" admirably, thus enjoying full support.

Castro's overthrow of the dictatorship in January 1959 soon elicited US hostility, and a return to the traditional path. By late 1959, the CIA and the State Department concluded that Castro had to be overthrown. One reason, State Department liberals explained, was that "our business interests in Cuba have been seriously affected." A second was the rotten apple effect: "The United States cannot hope to encourage and support sound economic policies in other Latin American countries and promote necessary private investments in Latin America if it is or appears to be simultaneously cooperating with the Castro program," the State Department concluded in November 1959. But one condition was added: "in view of Castro's strong though diminishing support in Cuba, it is of great importance, however, that the United States government not openly take actions which would cause the United States to be blamed for his failure or downfall."

As for Castro's support, public opinion studies provided to the White House (April 1960) concluded that most Cubans were optimistic about the future and supported Castro, while only 7 percent expressed concern about Communism and only 2 percent about failure to hold elections. Soviet presence was nil. In the United States, Jules Benjamin observes, "The liberals, like the conservatives, saw Castro as a threat to the hemisphere, but without the world communist conspiracy component."

By October 1959, planes based in Florida were carrying out strafing and bombing attacks against Cuban territory. In December, CIA subversion was stepped up, including supply of arms to guerrilla bands and sabotage of sugar mills and other economic targets. In March 1960, the Eisenhower Administration formally adopted a plan to overthrow Castro in favor of a regime "more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the U.S." -- the two conditions being equivalent -- emphasizing again that this must be done "in such a manner as to avoid any appearance of U.S. intervention."

Sabotage, terror, and aggression were escalated further by the Kennedy Administration, along with the kind of economic warfare that no small country can long endure. Cuban reliance on the US as an export market and for imports had, of course, been overwhelming, and could hardly be replaced without great cost. The New Frontiersmen were obsessed with Cuba from the first moments. During the presidential campaign of 1960, Kennedy had accused Eisenhower and Nixon of threatening US security by allowing "the Iron Curtain...90 miles off the coast of the United States." "We were hysterical about Castro at the time of the Bay of Pigs [April 1961] and thereafter," Defense Secretary Robert McNamara later testified to the Church Committee. A few days before the decision to invade Cuba, Arthur Schlesinger advised the President that "the game would be up through a good deal of Latin America" if the US were to tolerate "another Cuba"; or this one, JFK determined. Much of Kennedy's Latin American policy was inspired by the fear that the virus would infect others and limit US hegemony in the region.

At the first cabinet meeting after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the atmosphere was "almost savage," Chester Bowles noted privately: "there was an almost frantic reaction for an action program." The President's public posture was no less militant: "the complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong...can possibly survive," he told the country. Kennedy broke all diplomatic, commercial, and financial ties with Cuba, a terrible blow to the Cuban economy, given the dependency that had been established under US suzerainty. He succeeded in isolating Cuba diplomatically, but efforts to organize collective action against it in 1961 were unsuccessful, perhaps because of a problem noted by a Mexican diplomat: "If we publicly declare that Cuba is a threat to our security, forty million Mexicans will die laughing." Fortunately, the educated classes in the United States were capable of a more sober evaluation of the threat posed to the survival of the Free World.¹⁰

Theoretically, medicines and some food were exempt from the embargo, but food and medical aid were denied after Cyclone Flora caused death and destruction in October 1963. Standard procedure, incidentally. Consider Carter's refusal to allow aid to any West Indian country struck by the August 1980 hurricane unless Grenada was excluded (West Indians refused, and received no aid). Or the US reaction when Nicaragua was fortuitously devastated by a hurricane in October 1988. Washington could scarcely conceal its glee over the welcome prospects of widespread starvation and vast ecological damage, and naturally refused aid, even to the demolished Atlantic Coast area with longstanding links to the US and deep resentment against the Sandinistas; its people too must starve in the ruins of their shacks, to satisfy our blood-lust. US allies timidly followed orders, justifying their cowardice with the usual hypocrisy. To demonstrate that its malice is truly bipartisan, Washington reacted in much the same way when a tidal wave wiped out fishing villages leaving hundreds dead and missing in September 1992. The New York Times headline reads: "U.S. Sends Nicaragua Aid As Sea's Toll Rises to 116." "Foreign governments, including the United States, responded with immediate help today for the survivors," the Times excuse for a reporter wrote, while Washington announced "that it was making $5 million available immediately as a result of the disaster." Such nobility. Only in the small print at the end do we discover that the $5 million is being diverted from scheduled aid that had been withheld -- but not, Congress was assured, from the over $100 million aid package that the Administration had suspended because the Nicaraguan government is not yet sufficiently subservient to its wishes. The humanitarian donation amounts to an impressive $25,000.¹¹

Any weapon, however cruel, may be used against the perpetrators of the crime of independence. And, crucially, the awed self-adulation must never falter. "It was a narrow escape," Mark Twain wrote: "If the sheep had been created first, man would have been a plagiarism."¹²

The Kennedy Administration also sought to impose a cultural quarantine to block the free flow of ideas and information to the Latin American countries, fearing the rotten apple effect. In March 1963, JFK met with seven Central American presidents who agreed "To develop and put into immediate effect common measures to restrict the movement of subversive nationals to and from Cuba, and the flow of materials, propaganda and funds from that country." The unwillingness of Latin American governments to emulate US controls on travel and cultural interchange always greatly troubled the Kennedy liberals, as did their legal systems, requiring evidence for crimes by alleged "subversives," and their excessive liberalism generally.¹³

¹⁰ Benjamin, US and Origins, 186ff. Paterson, in Paterson, Kennedy's Quest; Mexican diplomat quoted in Leacock, Requiem, 33.

¹¹ NI, 177, 101. Shirley Christian, NYT, Sept. 4, 1992.

¹² "Patriotic America," 1903; Zwick, Mark Twain's Weapons, 161.

¹³ Envío, Jesuit Central American University (UCA), Managua, Jan.-Feb. 1992; NI, 176f., 67-8; PI. 22f.