“Well, you have to understand the moment,” Hunter said. “We are talking about the Cold War. The United States could not allow a Soviet stronghold in its hemisphere.”
“Its hemisphere?” I asked.
“Well, I understand that the Monroe Doctrine It’s not very nice, but…”
“Superman fighting for justice against the villains who want to take over the world. Don’t the villains realize that the world already has an owner? Or they do not respect private property. Even so, at that time Cuba was not even a Soviet stronghold. Just a dangerous and arrogant attempt to be independent. How do these blacks and those white islanders think of doing without us? Is it that they didn’t learn anything with Guatemala? That was the problem. They learned too much from Guatemala.”
“Shyness was never a very effective strategy.”
Exactly. But, beyond the nationalizations and the claims of autonomy of the New Cuba, the Revolution did not have in mind to cut relations with its largest trading partner. Moreover, when Fidel Castro visited the United States on April 7, 1959, hired a U.S. agency specializing in public relations, Bernard Relin & Associates Inc. According to the magazine Time on July 8 of that year, the firm charged the Cuban government $72,000, an insignificant figure, considering Fulgencio Batista’s personal business dealings with U.S. companies, which amounted to almost 46 million dollars.[i] Apart from some interesting facts revealed by the Bernard Relin company, Castro did not take very seriously its recommendations, such as shaving his beard and changing his olive green uniform for a businessman’s suit.[ii] On the contrary, he gave his own instructions to the delegation: he forbade them to talk about money. Not even by accident.
“We are not beggars,” he said.[iii]
Secretary of State Christian Herter, met with the young revolutionary in Washington. Herter reported to Eisenhower: “It’s a pity that you didn’t meet with Fidel Castro. He is a more than interesting character… In many ways, it’s like a child.”[iv]
At lunch, he was introduced to William Wieland.
“Who is the lord?”
“Mr. Wieland,” Wieland’s assistant said, “is the director of the Bureau of Mexican and Caribbean Affairs and currently the official State Department official for Cuban Affairs.”
“Gee,” Castro said, “I thought that the person in charge of Cuban affairs was me.[v]
After a long conversation in a New York hotel, the CIA agent Gerry Droller (by then Frank Bender) concluded:
“Castro is not only not a communist, but he is a convinced anti-communist.
Vice President Richard Nixon reached the same conclusion, when he met for two and a half hours in his office on Capitol Hill with the Cuban, twelve days later.
None of these diagnoses stopped the plan to invade the island, on the desks of the CIA weeks before that first visit of the new revolutionary leader. The original sin was not to be or not to be, but to dispute Washington, the sugar companies and the casino mafia for control of the Pearl of the Caribbean. And, but that, setting a terrible precedent. Once again, as in 1898, the problem was the independentists, the unacceptable bad example of a Republic of free blacks, no longer cutting off the heads of their masters, as in Haiti, but by nationalizing lands and businesses, as President Árbenz tried to do in Guatemala.
Months before leaving the government, Eisenhower decided to postpone the invasion to leave it to the new, John Kennedy. By the end of 1960, Havana had already discovered CIA training camps in Guatemala. The CIA must have circulated the rumor in the press that it was a group of communist guerrillas and, to preserve the surprise factor, changed the landing in Trinidad to Bay of Pigs, an area closer to Havana, but less populated.
In the midst of the Cold War, letting a friendly dictator fall without Washington’s permission and, to make matters worse, dare to speak of national sovereignty in the face of the companies that lead the freedom of the Developed World could establish a terrible precedent in the banana republics of the South. For the CIA and for the White House, the quickest and cheapest solution was the same one that solved the problem in Guatemala: media war, invasion and regime change in the name of the fight against communism. Piece of cake.
“Pigs?” David Atlee Phillips, the CIA agent who was fluent in Spanish due to his sabotage work in Chile since the end of World War II, protested. “How do you think Cubans are going to support an invasion with that name?”
Perhaps for the same reason, Ernesto Che Guevara preferred to call Playa Girón to the most important defeat of US imperialism so far this century. Of course, it wasn’t just a matter of names. At that time, the polls showed that the Revolution had the support of ninety percent of the population. The revelation of clandestine cemeteries all over the island, full of Batista’s disappeared, only increased the repudiation of U.S. support and the Cuban mafia, now exiled in Miami.
“It is very difficult to find a Cuban who does not have a family member murdered by the Batista regime” said Ruby Hart Phillips, the journalist of the New York Times based in Cuba.[vi]
On August 17, 1961, a few months after the Bay of Pigs fiasco and seven thousand kilometers to the south, Che gave a speech in the auditorium of the University of the Republic of Uruguay. That afternoon, at his side, the senator and former candidate for the presidency of Chile listened attentively, Salvador Allende. At the exit of the crowd, someone shot and killed history teacher Arbelio Ramírez. Apparently, the bullet was destined for El Che. It was the first unsolved murder of the Cold War in that country, as befits cases planned by secret agencies that play in the First League. In his speech, El Che had observed that Uruguay did not need any revolution, because its democratic system worked. He didn’t know that, at the time, the powerful Howard Hunt was stationed in Montevideo, the same one that had successfully promoted its candidate for the presidency of that country, Benito Nardone. The same one who had hijacked the means to destroy democracy in Guatemala, had used them again to place his candidate in the presidency, this time without so much scandal. Democracy continued to work very well, for some, for the same as always. But, as was tradition, inconvenient influences had to be removed, as far as possible without violating freedom of expression. The example of Cuba’s independence, the anti-imperialist discourse of Che, fell into that category of undesirables.
Surely not by chance, the Cuban CIA agent Orlando Bosch was in the crowd that afternoon in Montevideo, when Professor Arbelio Ramírez was killed. Surely, he had not gone there to listen to Che’s speech.
Plans to assassinate Castro and reinstall a less arrogant dictator in Havana had begun the same night Batista fled to the Dominican Republic on a plane loaded with several suitcases of money. Washington, the CIA and the casino mafia did not hesitate for a moment. Fidel Castro knew this, but he needed the US market and believed that a new agreement with the northern giant would be possible. So, on September 18, 1960, he landed again on Long Island, this time to participate in the annual United Nations Assembly, four days later.
The arrival of the delegation was hailed by the American left and received with threats from The White Rose, a pro-Batista group that later, due to the discrediting of El General Mulato, would operate alongside other Miami groups as anti-Castro exiles.
This time, the Cuban plane that carried Fidel Castro to New York was forced to return to Cuba, as the delegation was driven to the Shelburne Hotel, located at Lexington Avenue and 37th Street. The hotel demanded an exorbitant deposit of twenty thousand dollars. The State Department decreed that the delegation could not leave Manhattan, but no other hotel in the area dared to receive them. Castro quipped that if New York was unable to provide accommodation for a diplomatic delegation from another country, then the UN should be moved to another city, such as Havana.
It was a rainy day, and the Cuban delegation piled their suitcases at the main door without having a confirmed hotel. Minutes later, a man entered the lobby of the Shelburne and asked to speak with the Cuban prime minister. When the bearded man appeared, the stranger said to him:
“Mr. Malcolm X has booked a hotel for his delegation.”
“That’s great, chico. Where is it?”
“It’s the Theresa Hotel. It’s an hour from here in Harlem.”
Castro didn’t know it, but the Hotel Theresa, by far less expensive than the Shelburne, had received black celebrities who were not accepted in midtown Manhattan, such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole.
“Right there we go,” Castro said.
The Harlem newspaper, the New York Citizen-Call, noting that the official delegation of Cuba was composed of whites and blacks, published:
“Some 2,000 brown New Yorkers stood in the rain Monday night waiting for Cuba’s Premier Fidel Castro to arrive at Harlem’s famous old Hotel Theresa. From the conversations among this rain-soaked mass of humanity, the idea began to build that Castro would come here to stay because he had found out, as most Negroes found out, the nasty ways the underdog was treated downtown. To Harlem’s oppressed ghetto dwellers, Castro was that bearded revolutionary who had thrown the nation’s rascals out and who had told white America to go to hell.”[vii]
A smaller group of Cuban Batista supporters also came to protest the Revolution.
On September 21, The New York Times headlined: “Castro Is Seeking Negroes’ Support.” In his column, journalist Wyne Phillips highlighted Dr. Castro’s strategy: pretending there is no racial segrega-tion in Cuba, when a year earlier he had forcibly removed a Cuban leader, Fulgencio Batista, who was half-Black. Despite all this, Phillips himself must admit that various testimonies from Black Americans visiting Havana acknowledged feeling like human beings, just like any white person walking the streets.
With the ink still fresh from the newspapers the day after his expulsion from the Shelburne Hotel and his impromptu entrance at the Harlem hotel, the most luxurious hotels in Manhattan offered the Cuban delegation free accommodation. But Castro decided to turn the initial humiliation into another moral blow to the giant’s arrogance. He turned down the offers and the delegation stayed in Harlem.
The History of the Theresa Hotel became a headache for Washington and an offense to a country that was suffering from a strong segregationist backlash, where the most moderate racists supported the solution of the interpretive law of the constitution, known as Equal, but separate. To add insult to injury, the Cuban delegation received a visit from the president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, right there, part of the soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev by the Prime Minister of India, Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and renowned intellectuals such as Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg and the professor at Columbia University Wright Mills, author of The Power Elite, a book where he exposed the existing conflict of interest between the military corporate power and politicians. Several researchers will recognize this book as the inspiration, unacknowledged, of President Eisenhower’s famous farewell speech on the dangers of the power of the Military Industrial Complex, for which he will be accused of being a communist.
Malcolm X visited Castro in his room. On the way out, questioned by journalists about his sympathies with Castro and Che Guevara, he proclaimed:
“Please don’t tell us who should be our friends, and who should be our enemies.”[viii]
Sidney Gottlieb, the chemical genius in charge of Project MK-Ultra of the CIA, proposed to make a fool of the dangerous leader in front of the eyes of the whole world. For the CBS interview, which for the purpose had to reach the largest number of people in the world, he proposed contaminating Castro’s shoes with thallium. This would cause him to over-secrete salivary while talking. At the same time, he would expose him to LSD to make him look drunk. It was not a new idea of propaganda sabotage (Howard Hunt had used similar resources in Mexico, against the painter Diego Rivera), but that time it did not work with the interviewee.
President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon did not hide their frustration. The FBI took note. One of its agents managed to enter the Hotel Theresa and spy on a meeting between Castro and Malcolm X. The CIA, lacking territorial jurisdiction, employed the mercenary firm founded by one of its former agents, Robert Maheu, to plan the first of 600 attempts to assassinate Castro. The private agency, Maheu, was the same one that, in the service of dictator Rafael Trujillo, had caused the disappearance of Professor Jesús Galíndez in New York four years earlier. The same one that served as the basis for one of the most popular series in the history of television: Mission: Impossible. The same series that several of the Batisteros fans of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, like Orlando Bosch, were fans of.
At the Plaza Hotel, Bob Maheu met with the CIA agent Jim O’Connell and with John Roselli, one of the leaders of the Italian-American mafia, owner of cabarets, brothels, and casinos in Cuba, protected by Batista and longed for by generations of Cubans nostalgic in the United States as The golden age in which all the Cuban people lived dancing salsa, drinking rum and making a lot of money from legal corruption.
These mafias had been displaced by the 1959 Revolution, so the CIA understood that it shared the same objective with them. To assassinate the bad dictator, who had been in power for a few months, Mr. Roselli put Maheu in contact with other mobsters in Tampa, Florida. Two of them were Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante Jr., both donors to Kennedy’s presidential campaign and then collaborators in the conspiracy for his assassination. Although, for some very good reason, the documents that end up proving this last information have not been declassified by Washington, the indications and testimonies that insist on pointing to the participation of the CIA and the Cuban mafia have been accumulating over the years as fertilizer in chicken coops.
Giancana was assassinated in Chicago in 1975, just before he testified before the Church Commission of the U.S. Senate, which investigated the CIA’s systematic assassination plans. Predictably, CIA Director William Colby, said: “We had nothing to do with it.”[ix]
Fidel Castro would have been an easy target in a black hotel that couldn’t even control the hot water in the bathrooms. But Maheu and the CIA knew that the assassination of a foreign leader on US soil would only worsen Washington’s reputation, so they decided to take the big moment to Havana. Upon his return, Castro gave a predictable speech from the balcony of Government House, which was interrupted by a bomb. A few minutes later, a second one exploded, and a few hours later, a third. It would have been a piece of cake to claim that the assassination was the work of the heroic Cuban dissidents and that “we had nothing to do with it.” That was one of 638 failed attempts to assassinate the only dictator that Washington, the CIA, and the mainstream media could see in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the rest of the world.
Other poisoning attempts followed, which several Cuban mercenaries, such as Juan Orta and other infiltrators made large amounts in dollars, but none achieved their objective. Nor did the plans for gas in interviews or weapons hidden in press microphones, such as the one organized from Bolivia, work, with the support of Cuban Antonio Veciana, when Castro visited Chile in 1971.
In his speech at the UN on Thursday 22, Castro responded to accusations from the mainstream press that Cubans had chosen a brothel to stay in:
“For some gentlemen” Castro said, “a humble hotel in the Harlem neighborhood, a black neighborhood of the United States, must be a brothel.”[x]
Years later, in the face of the provocation of a journalist, Malcolm X answered:
“The only white I liked was Fidel Castro.”
The CIA failed to assassinate the bearded Caribbean man, but the FBI managed to get Malcolm X assassinated in 1965, as always, as if it were someone else’s thing, lone wolves. The same strategy of indirect solutions had been practiced with Martin Luther King. The FBI pursued him for years to document his weakness for women. They knew he was suffering from depression and, as a young man, had attempted suicide. The idea was to expose any possible infidelity, destroy his marriage and push him to suicide. When this did not work, a murder at the hands of a lonely patient was facilitated, which came in 1968, at the Lorraine Motel, when the black leader was preparing to support a strike by health workers in Tennessee. In the collective memory only these two murders, attributed to lone wolves, will remain, not the FBI’s plan fine-tuned and executed for two decades, later known as Cointelpro (Counter Intelligence Program) with which the FBI infiltrated the black and Latino communities; they infiltrated unions, feminist and anti-imperial war groups to monitor and discredit them with provocateurs; to demoralize them and demobilize their resistance organizations. An FBI memorandum sealed on March 3, 1968, reported that “Martin Luther King, Jr. was attacked because (among other things) he might abandon his supposed obedience to white liberal doctrines (of nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism.” Eight years later, in April 1976, a Senate inquiry headed by Senator Frank Church concluded that this psychological warfare led to moral harassment under false reports and rumors planted in the media. “Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society, even if all the targets had been involved in violent activities, but Conteilpro went much further. The main unstated premise of the programs was that a law enforcement agency has a duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order.”[xi]
In 1967, the CIA had more success with its plan to assassinate Che Guevara in Bolivia. Che Guevara, accused for decades by the Miami media of being a cruel murderer, had returned to his habit of going to the front lines of his battles, a habit that the heroes of Batistero’s exile, such as Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, were not very fond of. Nor was it a characteristic of the many mercenaries who, according to the FBI, turned Miami into “The Terrorist Capital of the United States.”.[xii] Also The Monkey Morales Navarrete, José Dionisio Suárez, Virgilio Paz and the Novo brothers Sampol were more fond of dynamite and C4 plastic explosives of the CIA, always at a distance, than to smuggled cigars.
Weeks after the Theresa Hotel scandal, on October 12, 1960, the young Senator John F. Kennedy planted his stall in front of the hotel and gave a speech against racial discrimination and against the socialist ideas of the Cuban Revolution. Nothing better than hijacking the struggle of those from below and, at once, limit it to a specific area, the national one, just as firefighters burn a forest border to stop a larger fire. A couple of years earlier, in Congress, Senator Kennedy had recommended continuing to fund Latin American armies to keep Washington’s political influence in those countries.
“I don’t think giving this aid to South America is to strengthen them against the Soviet Union,” the young senator had said in 1958. “The armies are the most important units, and it is important for us to have a liaison in the number of countries involved, it is worth 67 million, which is down the drain in a military sense, but in the political sense we hope they make effective use of it.”
Chapter from the book 1976: The Exile of Terror
[i] “Cuba: Red Setback.” Time, 8 de junio de 1959.
[ii] LeoGrande, William M., and Kornbluh, Peter. Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana. United States, University of North Carolina Press, 2015, p. 15.
[iii] Idem, p. 18.
[iv] Idem, p. 7.
[v] Idem, p. 7.
[vi] Idem, p. 12.
[vii] Ralph Matthews, “Going Upstairs. Malcolm X Greets Fidel,” New York Citizen-Call, September 24, 1960, p. 48-49.
[viii] Markle, Seth M. “Brother Malcolm, Comrade Babu: Black Internationalism and the Politics of Friendship.” Biography, vol. 36, no. 3, 2013, pp. 540-67. JStor. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24570209.
[ix] “The mafia: The Demise of a Don”. Time Magazine, 30 de junio de 1975. content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,917569,00.html
[x] “Discurso pronunciado por el Comandante Fidel Castro en la Sede de las Naciones Unidas el 26 de setiembre de 1960”. Cuba.cu. http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1960/esp/f260960e.html
[xi] “U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence”. http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/94755_III.pdf
[xii] Montes, Rafael Miguel. Generational Traumas in Contemporary Cuban-American Literature: Making Places. United States, Edwin Mellen Press, 2006., p. 115.
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