Guatemala and Cuba #3 - ¡Patria o Muerte!

Fulgencio Batista has fled Cuba and the Cuban Revolutionaries are victorious. As Fidel Castro implements a revolution from above, the Latin American bourgeoisie and Central Intelligence Agency plot a destabilization campaign (modeled after the 1954 coup against Jacobo Arbenz).

Guatemalan President Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes invites the CIA to establish anti-communist training camps in Guatemala. In the opening shots of the Guatemalan Civil War, anti-Castro Cubans piloting CIA B-26s bomb rebel soldiers in defense of the coup regime.

Recalling his firsthand experience witnessing the CIA coup in Guatemala, Che Guevara takes a leading role in purging the Cuban Army of counter-revolutionaries. As the anti-Commmunist Cubans of Brigade 2506 prepare to invade the Bay of Pigs and roll back the Cuban Revolution,  Che and Fidel take measures to ensure that Cuba 1961 will not become Guatemala 1954.

• Prologue - November 13, 1960
• Chapter 1: Counter-Revolution in Guatemala
• Chapter 2: Cuba’s Revolution From Above
• Chapter 3: Defending the Cuban Revolution
• Chapter 4: Yanqui Terror
• Chapter 5: The Bay of Pigs

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Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:38 Prologue: November 13, 1960
• 13:41 Chapter 1: Counter-Revolution in Guatemala
• 1:05:50 Chapter 2: Cuba’s Revolution From Above
• 1:28:17 Chapter 3: Defending the Cuban Revolution
• 2:24:14 Chapter 4: Yanqui Terror
• 2:53:03 Chapter 5: The Bay of Pigs
• 3:47:34 On The Next Episode...

Transcript

The Movements is a leftist history and politics podcast. Support the show at patreon.com/movementspod 

On the last episode…

Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara attempts to organize a civilian militia to defend the Guatemalan government from a CIA backed coup, but President Arbenz hesitates to distribute arms to his supporters and the army removes him from office. Che flees Guatemala amidst a violent purge of communists and labor organizers. He obtains refuge in Mexico City, where he meets a young public interest attorney by the name of Fidel Castro. Che and Castro sail to Cuba, where they join the struggle against the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. 

The anti-Batista coalition succeeds, with Fidel Castro emerging as the leading figure of the revolution. As the Latin American upper classes conspire to purge communists and protect American imperial interests, Che and Fidel make plans to ensure that Cuba 1959 would not become Guatemala 1954.

With that I bring you…

Guatemala and Cuba Part 3: Patria o Muerte

In the early, pre-dawn hours of November 13, 1960, 150 Guatemalan soldiers raided the Matamoros barracks in Guatemala City, seizing weapons, jeeps and tanks. Their commanders were part of a larger conspiracy of junior officers who commanded one third of the army. The rebel soldiers captured key military bases in Zacapa and Puerto Barrios, but these early victories were undermined when a majority of conspirators failed to join the rebellion as planned. Their progress halted, the rebel soldiers fortified their positions and waited. 

President Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes and the military high command of Guatemala had anticipated the rebellion, the planning of which had gone on for more than a year. As the plot neared fruition, the army began to arrest junior officers, likely contributing to cold feet for many of the would-be rebel officers. Fuentes had spent the past several months warning of an imminent communist invasion by Cuba and he seized upon the rebellion as proof-positive that the rebel officers were receiving their orders from Fidel Castro and Communist agents.

There were indeed Cubans in Guatemala. Hundreds had infiltrated the country over the past several months. A total of 1,500 Cubans would eventually arrive at secret military training camps. These Cubans were not communists, however. Nor were they taking orders from Fidel Castro. These were CIA training camps, run by agency contractors. The instructors were mostly American, but some were from Eastern Europe. What they had in common was ideology and a professional skill set. They were anti-communist special operators. And they were very good at killing communists.

But there was no communist threat in Guatemala. While later experiences would radicalize the survivors of the rebellion into Marxist guerillas, the rebel officers of 1960 were diverse in ideology, spanning from the left to the right. They shared a sense of national pride and frustration at the policies of President Fuentes. In particular, they regarded the presence of foreign military bases as an insult and a threat to national sovereignty. 

 As they waited, the rebel officers no doubt remembered the events of 1944. During that summer, mass protests ousted the dictator, Jorge Ubico. Demonstrators continued to mobilize against his successor, who tried to uphold the dictatorship. After months of mass mobilization against the regime, young military officers joined the struggle and toppled the dictatorship in October of 1944. It was the end of Guatemala’s Banana Republic era, and the beginning of a brief period of constitutional rule and “New Deal” social democracy, known as the Ten Years of Spring.

In 1950, one of the hero officers of 1944, Jacobo Arbenz, was elected President with 65% of the vote. Arbenz was a radical reformer, moderate in his politics, but economically inspired by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was nowhere near a communist, but he allowed communists to participate in political and civic life, eventually asking leaders of the PGT, the Guatemalan Labor Party, to advise him during his presidency.

The PGT was an independent Communist party with no significant links to the Soviet Union. The PGT leaders were petit bourgeois and ladino, practically white in a majority indigenous country. They were small in membership, but they earned respect from indigenous labor organizers by demonstrating honesty and integrity. The rural masses regarded the PGT as a partner in struggle, despite the organization’s small size and demographic differences.  

Arbenz sought advice from the PGT leadership, due to their exceptional understanding of the social and economic problems of Guatemala. The PGT was integral to the crafting of Agrarian Reform law. The massively popular law extended labor protections and enforcement into the feudal plantations where most Guatemalans lived. It also redistributed uncultivated land, for which the owners would be compensated according to market prices. For the crime of replacing feudalism with constitutional rights in the countryside, The Guatemalan Revolution needed to be crushed.

The Guatemalan right-wing failed to topple Arbenz, as they had failed to topple Arevalo before him. But the United Fruit Company would spend years and millions of dollars lobbying the United States, targeting both democrats and republicans. President Truman authorized Operation Fortune. Eisenhower, Operation Success. Both tasked the CIA with regime change.

The CIA recruited the incompetent Castillo Armas to lead a small invasion force. They lost every engagement with the Guatemalan army, but Arbenz’s unwillingness to enact emergency measures left the revolution vulnerable. CIA sponsored sabotage, bombings and a hemispherewide disinformation campaign threw the country into chaos. Many of his civilian supporters, including a young Che Guevara, appealed for weapons. The arming of militant workers had thwarted coups past, but Arbenz refused until the last minute. He instructed the military to distribute weapons, but it was far too late. His generals refused to carry out the order. It was the end of his Presidency and the end of the Ten Years of Spring.

Labor organizers and communists were arrested en masse. Land was violently seized and returned to the wealthy land-owners and foreign corporations. Economic chaos and political instability characterized each successive coup regime, prompting growing discontentment within the Guatemalan military. When Fuentes took power in a nominally democratic election in 1958, he set out about creating an anti-communist bourgeois republic that would solve the land and economic problems of the country without alienating large landowners and capitalists. When the right-wing utopian project failed, Ydigoras instead relied on the division of his enemies and violent repression to remain in power.

It was November 13, 1960, when President Fuentes received word that the rebel uprising had begun. He contacted his CIA allies and together the Guatemalan army and Cuban anti-communist mercenaries of Brigade 2506 launched non-stop attacks on rebel positions for the next three days. As casualties mounted, the surviving rebels retreated into the hills.

On the 16th, a US Navy Aircraft carrier arrived off the coast of Guatemala carrying 85 fighter-bombers and 2,000 US marines, under the pretext of a supposed invasion by the Cuban army.

These accusations were absurd. The only foreign invasion that had taken place was that of the hundreds of armed Cubans preparing for an armed counter-revolution in Cuba, under the sponsorship of the United States.

Brigade 2506 was created with one mission. Invade Cuba, overthrow Fidel Castro and restore American dominance of Cuba. Some had previously supported Castro, others had supported the Batista dictatorship. They too were united by a violent hatred of communists. And so they volunteered, enthusiastically, to put down the Guatemalan rebellion. From their perspective, shedding “communist” blood, whether Guatemalan or Cuban, was a cause worth fighting for.

Felix Rodriguez, a former Brigade 2506 fighter and CIA officer, described his participation in crushing the rebellion:

“Just about everyone volunteered to help the Guatemalan president, and 200 of us were selected. We were issued weapons, then trucked to the… air base where we were to board planes that would take us to Puerto Barrios… It was incredible to watch from the hatch of our C-46 as the bombers dived, circled, and dived again to do their deadly work. One scored a direct hit on a truckload of rebel soldiers, and from our vantage point 2,000ft away some of us said later they could see the bodies fly.” (Alejandro Quesada, Stephen Walsh, The Bay of Pigs_ Cuba 1961, pg. 14-15)

By November 17, the rebellion against President Fuentes was over, the leaders arrested or in hiding. In the 2009 book The Bay of Pigs: Cuba 1961, a celebratory account of Brigade 2506’s history, Felix Rodriguez is portrayed as a Cuban patriot set on liberating Cuba from Communists. Rodriguez would play a key role in the capture and murder of Ernesto Che Guevara in 1967. In his decades long career, Rodrigeuz was responsible for anti-communist violence in Cuba, El Salvador, and Vietnam. He shared photos depicting the severed hands of Guevara to friends, a copy of which was shown to Jon Lee Anderson in 1997. Anderson noted that the photo was accompanied by Rodriguez’s signature and a friendly note to the recipient. (Anderson, pg. 734)

Accounts sympathetic to Brigade 2506 emphasize the courage and tenacity of the fighters who would later be stranded and largely captured in the Playa Giron. Yet the events of November 13, 1960 draw attention to an uncomfortable truth: From the very beginning, the anti-Castro movement was aligned with the most anti-democratic forces in Latin America. Their first taste of combat did not occur on the beaches of Cuba in April 1961. They occurred in the skies over Puerto Barrios, as anti-Communist Cubans dropped bombs on Guatemala. They helped to crush the rebellion of November 13. It was the opening salvo of what would become a gruesome 36 year civil war and genocide.

Accounts gloss over the Guatemala episode, in part because it subverts the narrative of a Cuban Revolution betrayed by Castro and illuminates the internationalism of the Latin American bourgeoisie and middle classes. For all the attention given to the internationalism of the Cuban Revolution, the cross-national regional solidarity between privileged classes, often with military or paramilitary backing, preceded the militarization of the Cuban revolution and Castro’s consolidation of power.

This is not to absolve the Cuban Revolutionaries, Castro first and foremost, of criticism. But rather, to provide context to understand why Latin American revolutionaries, or for that matter, revolutionaries worldwide, hardened after the 1954 coup and counter-revolution in Guatemala. Arevalo and Arbenz eschewed militancy and terror in favor of diplomacy and compromise, even when dealing with bad faith actors, specifically the United States and the Latin American middle and upper classes. If Guatemala had actually resembled the red-menace caricature illustrated by the CIA and bourgeois newspapers of the Americas, it might have stood a chance. Referring to false allegations that a red terror was occurring in Guatemala, Guevara noted : “if those shootings had taken place the government would have retained the possibility of fighting back.” (Anderson, pg. 155)

Chapter 1: Counter-Revolution in Guatemala

In 1945, the Guatemalan people elected Juan Jose Arevalo, a university professor, in the country’s first legitimate Presidential election. Almost immediately, conservative elements within Guatemala began plotting. 

During Arevalo’s term alone, the Guatemalan Revolution survived dozens of coup attempts and aborted plots. The most severe threats came from the Army Chief of Staff, Francisco Arana. In 1949, Arana announced plans to run for President. In a clear violation of the constitution, he refused to resign his post as army Chief, threatening to use the military to seize and dissolve congress if it rejected his candidacy. In response, the Arévalo government hatched a plot to arrest and send the insurgent general into exile. Arana was killed while resisting arrest, prompting accusations of assassination from the right-wing.

The year after Arana’s death, Jacobo Arbenz was elected President with 65% of the vote, easily defeating the 19% vote share of Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes. Over 70% of eligible voters participated in the elections. The new government was popular while the right-wing opposition was splintered and weak. Despite dozens of attempts, the right-wing of Guatemala proved incapable of dislodging either Arévalo nor Arbenz. In 1952, the government enacted decree 900, the Agrarian Reform law crafted by Arbenz in consultation with members of the PGT.

At this time, the CIA was a relatively young intelligence agency, officially formed in 1947 as the successor to the Office of Strategic Services (the OSS), which had originally formed during World War 2 to conduct spy operations against the Axis powers. Between 1953 and 1961, the CIA was run by Allen Dulles, one of the most notorious spymasters in American history. During his tenure, Dulles presided over several coup operations against left-leaning governments, including Iran and Guatemala, as well as the infamous MKUltra “mind control” program, in which CIA operatives hired private medical and mental health professionals at US and Canadian institutions in order to experiment on non-consenting humans with drugs and other abusive manipulation techniques. 

Dulles and his brother, John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State and a board member of the United Fruit Company, had spent decades in the diplomatic and intelligence services of the United States. The Dulles brothers were both lawyers who, as private citizens, engaged in private lobbying on behalf of wealthy clients. Both were early admirers of Nazism and Adolf Hitler, with Allen spending much of the War and early-postwar era protecting his friends and contacts in the Third Reich. Dulles directly disobeyed and undermined the FDR administration’s policy of “unconditional surrender”, carefully destroying evidence out of fear that he might later be charged with treason. Dulles biographer David Talbot posits that Dulles would have been prosecuted if not for Roosevelt’s death at the end of the war, describing his OSS career during WWII as a “reign of treason”. (Talbot, pg. 60)

Dulles was never punished for his role in securing the rehabilitation of former Nazis, nor his efforts to slow the dissemination of news that the Nazis were exterminating Europe’s Jews. After the war, Dulles secured the political future of former Nazi intelligence officers and used them to build West Germany’s intelligence apparatus, justifying his actions on the basis that 

Most men of the caliber required to [run the new Germany] suffer a political taint… We have already found out that you can’t run railroads without taking in some [Nazi] Party members… (Talbot, pg. 95-101, pg. 126-127)

Throughout his career, Dulles had allied himself with fascists whom he admired for their committed anti-communism. At the helm of the CIA, Dulles sought allies in Guatemala who could carry out the operation against Arbenz. Throughout the Arbenz presidency, the CIA shipped arms to anti-communist rebels, organized acts of sabotage, set up training camps in neighboring countries, fed disinformation to Latin American and US newspapers, and established contacts with sympathetic counter-revolutionaries throughout the countryside and capital city. 

Even during the late stages of the CIA destabilization campaign, Arbenz allowed counter-revolutionaries and coup advocates to operate and organize openly throughout the country. Repression was minimal, a measure taken in response to only the most serious of threats. In September 1953, a Panamanian by the name of Jorge Delgado approached the Arbenz government and revealed his link to the CIA, running messages between the agency station in Mexico City and right-wing training camps in Nicaragua. For the next four months, he provided information on the CIA’s counter-revolutionary activities, culminating in a mass arrest in January of 1954. (Cullather, Secret History: The CIA's Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954, pg. 54)

The Arbenz government published a wealth of documents gathered during the sting operation, detailing the plan to destabilize the country through a disinformation and sabotage campaign, the goal of turning the military against Arbenz, the complicity of the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza, and the locations of counter-revolutionary training camps, among other details. Naively, Arbenz expected the media coverage would embarrass the Americans and result in a suspension of CIA operations. Nick Cullather, historian and author of Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-54, writes:

The January revelations revealed how much the "plausible deniability" of PBSUCCESS relied on the uncritical acceptance by the American press of the assumptions behind United States policy. Newspaper and broadcast media, for example, accepted the official view of the Communist nature of the Guatemalan regime. In the spring of 1954, NBC News aired a television documentary, "Red Rule in Guatemala," revealing the threat the Arbenz regime posed to the Panama Canal. Articles in Reader's Digest, the Chicago Tribune, and the Saturday Evening Post drew a frightening picture of the danger in America's backyard. Less conservative papers like the New York Times depicted the growing menace in only slightly less alarming terms. The Eisenhower administration's Guatemala policy did not get a free ride in press or in Congress. In early 1954, a number of editorials attacked the President's failure to act against Arbenz, citing the continued presence of US military advisers as evidence of official complacency. Walter Winchell broadcast stories of Guatemalan spies infiltrating other Latin American countries and urged the CIA to "get acquainted with these people." This line of criticism led reporters to hunt for signs of inertia, not for a secret conspiracy. When Arbenz revealed the plot, American newspapers dismissed it as a Communist ploy, another provocation to which the administration responded far too passively. (Cullathers, pg. 56)

 Bolstered by the support of the US media in its crusade against Arbenz, the CIA moved forward with the plot. In Guatemala, the revelations backfired, increasing anxiety and fears of a US backed invasion. Counter-revolutionary Guatemalans accused Arbenz of faking the revelations in advance of a dictatorial takeover. To fight isolation abroad, Arbenz dispatched his foreign Minister Guillermo Toriello on a diplomatic mission to the Organization of American States, but the efforts were fruitless as John Foster Dulles, brother of Allen and Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, had already leveraged US aid and trade deals to ensure a dominant pro-US bloc. Toriello was able to make denunciations to great applause from the OAS member states, but the body adopted Dulles’s resolution condemning Guatemala. (Cullathers, pf. 59)

In Guatemala, the CIA found enthusiastic support for a coup within the local Catholic church. Archbishop Rossell y Arellano openly attacked education and literacy programs for indigenous Guatemalans with racist rhetoric and likened land reform to “agrarian dictatorship” and “the devil incarnate”. (Grandin, pg. 80) In the spirit of diplomacy, Arbenz refused to bar foreign clergy from the country, despite the large presence of fascists among the ranks of Spanish and Italian priests now organizing in the countryside. (Grandin, pg. 81)

Meanwhile, in Guatemala City, the government prioritized the training of bureaucrats, engineers, and other professionals to take part in the modernization of the country. Until 1961, San Carlos remained the sole University in Guatemala. Consequently, the students and graduates of the institution would play decisive roles in political life. (Vrana, pg. 63) While a majority of San Carlistas were likely sympathetic to the general idea of the October Revolution, a number of these middle class students were deeply anti-communist. Dozens of anti-communist student organizations were formed in the early 50’s, with one in particular becoming a key ally of the Central Intelligence Agency. (Grandin, pg. 84)

In This City Belongs To You: A History of Student Activism in Guatemala, 1944-1996, Heather Vrana describes key role played by the Committee of Anti-Communist University Students in shaping the counter-revolution:

For around nine months, CEUA students carried out counterinsurgency propaganda plans devised for them by agents in a CIA field office, spreading leaflets and painting graffiti in an effort to win over the hearts and minds of the pueblo. These middle-class anti-communist students ‘functioned as a broker between the upper echelons, both domestic and foreign, of reaction and the streets thugs and paramilitary forces responsible for some of the worst acts of counter-revolutionary terror…

The plan was to intimidate government officials and create the impression of a broad anti-government movement. For months, CIA staffers spent hours imagining projects for the students to carry out… CEUA students marked government officials’ homes with signs reading “A Communist Lives Here” and sent fake funeral notices to President Jacobo Arbenz and José Manuel Fortuny. One poster that appeared in the capital city read “Guatemalteco: On the day of the Liberation, those who aid Arbenz WILL DIE! Those who support the Patriotic Resistance will fight and WILL LIVE for a better Guatemala! The great day is coming! Choose!” (Vrana, pg. 65-66)

During their first propaganda action, CEUA activists placed 106,000 stickers displaying anti-communist slogans on public buses and trains in a single day on September 15, 1953. This was followed by sending death notices to Arbenz and Fortuny, the founder of the PGT. In another action, the students employed women working in public markets to distribute pamphlets authored by Archbishop Rossel y Arrellano “calling for a crusade against Communism”. Among the CEUA’s most hypocritical activities was a campaign accusing the Arbenz government of obeying the will of foreign entities. As the anti-communist students were literally following orders from and disseminating propaganda written by CIA agents, they were simultaneously painting the number “32” on public buildings and infrastructure, a reference to the constitutional article banning foreign political parties. (Cullathers, pg. 64-65)

In the months leading up to the coup, the CEUA became frustrated with the CIA. The students were carrying out the most dangerous operations on the ground, disseminating the most divisive propaganda. The CIA, however, retorted: “We are not running a popularity contest, but an uprising.” (Grandin, pg. 85) By May 1954, the brazen actions of right-wing students had attracted the attention of Arbencistas and forced the government to arrest 10 students, a major blow to an organization whose official membership was in the dozens.

The students were correct in their concerns that they were being used as bait. Cullathers quotes one CIA operative who stated that the intent was to “invite complete suppression of overt anti-Communist, anti-government units and then use such suppression to demonstrate to the people here and abroad the nature and seriousness of the menace and refute claims of 'democratic freedoms.’” (Cullathers, pg. 67) As a result of the arrests, the Arbenz government had successfully weakened the CEUA’s ability to carry out destabilization efforts, but the students would remain free to take on their own initiatives independent of the CIA.

Counter-revolutionary students insisted on expanding their activities to politics. Through the political realm, they could communicate a vision for an anti-communist Guatemala. However, this should not be mistaken as a move away from militancy and towards democratic participation. Their political campaigns and activity would run parallel to a larger strategy that continued to embrace disinformation, sabotage and militant counter-revolution, achieving what they could through formal politics and policy, but ready to use violence and deception as needed.

Meanwhile, left-wing supporters of the revolution attempted to do what Arbenz wouldn’t do. Occasional vigilante violence was directed towards anti-communist media figures. Right-wing radio stations and newspapers faced occasional unarmed, physical violence at the hands of non-state actors. As the crisis deepened, the government took a harder line, but these efforts were too little, too late. Cullathers writes: “Opposition elements remained active owing largely to the failure of Guatemalan police to make systematic arrests. Guatemala Station reported that the government's behavior demonstrated a ‘desire to crush opposition activity together with what appeared to be a lack of knowledge as to how to proceed most effectively.’ In the ensuing weeks, the police would cast scruples aside and move decisively to suppress the remnants of the opposition.” (Calluthers, pg. 67)

While Arbenz remained popular among the majority of Guatemalans, the CIA’s efforts were working. Guatemala was facing international isolation and forced to purchase defensive weaponry from Czechoslovakia, an action which right-wingers used as further justification for their efforts to overthrow Arbenz. Anti-communist students, seeking to strenthen their autonomy and preparing to implement counter-revolution,  proceeded to expand their networks internationally and form deeper ties to middle class student organizations throughout Latin America. The students would now use their organizational strength and professional networks to shape the political future of the counter-revolution. Greg Grandin writes:

…these professional students, often the sons of middle planters, affected an energetic internationalism. They formed émigré groups in Mexico, El Salvador, and Honduras…established front solidarity organizations… and promoted the “salvation” of Guatemala as merely the “first step” in freeing Latin America from Communism. They created a tight organizational structure and demanded party discipline. As insurgents, they sought, as did the archbishop with whom they worked closely together, to destroy any possibility for compromise… Armed with U.S. training and equipment, they mounted an escalating campaign of terrorism that included sabotage, bombing, and propaganda which they hoped would inspire “people to take up arms, to punish those responsible, and to eradicate communism totally and definitively…” (Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, pg. 83)

By June, the final CIA push to topple Arbenz was underway and Castillo Armas invaded Guatemala from Honduras, backed by CIA aircraft running bombing and strafing operations. Despite Armas’s military incompetence on the ground, the combination of air bombing and ongoing disinformation campaigns, often coordinated from within the US embassy in Guatemala City, had convinced the military that Arbenz was on his way out. By the time Arbenz finally decided to arm his supporters on the streets to defend the revolution, his generals informed him that this was not an option. Without the military’s loyalty, Arbenz resigned and left the country. Castillo Armas entered Guatemala City. In the following weeks and months, the popular reforms of Arevalo and Arbenz would be repealed, land was violently seized from rural peasants and the feudal system of worker peonage was restored in the countryside. The Guatemalan counter-revolution had begun.

This was the moment that counter-revolutionary activists had been waiting for. In December of 1953, CEUA published Plan Tegucigalpa through its bulletin. The plan reflected the class interests and perspectives of the urban middle class university student. That is, the document echoed the language and idealism of the October Revolution while advocating a fervently anti-communist nationalism. The plan rejected Arbenz’s land reform, despite the mass support it had received from indigenous Guatemalans who had benefited from the law. Plan Tegucigalpa would instead take land away from the indigenous masses and return it to United Fruit Company and other large landowners. 

The plan foreshadowed future attempts by middle and upper class technocrats to address popular grievances with neoliberal solutions, though the term had not yet been theorized. In short, educated, pro-American experts knew what was best for the masses better than the masses themselves. An example of this attitude can be found in the language addressing the role of indigenous culture in Guatemala. Plan Tegicugalpa ignored the self-actualized efforts by indigenous labor organizers who worked in collaboration with the PGT and the Arbenz government. Instead, it painted the entire endeavor as foreign and communistic. Vrana describes the plan’s framing of the problem and the solution: 

Instead of celebrating Guatemala’s indigenous culture, most statesmen had championed foreign ideas at the pueblo’s expense. The toll was exacted upon the very physical body of the nation, disfiguring the body politic by forsaking its indigenous essence. In other words, national unity was necessary for progress and the fight against communism. Only once foreign ideologies had been expunged could Guatemala be herself. The CEUA wrote, “now is the time for us to stop being vessels for imported thoughts, for strange forms and exotic ideologies… we remember that we are Guatemalans, and that, with mighty national sentiment, founded in the true presence of the fusing [of[ indios and ladinos, Guatemala stands tall [and] will follow its path.” Whether a sincere or strategic appeal, the students sought an authentic nationalism that was “[n]either the extreme right nor the extreme left [but rather] the heart of Guatemala.”

Guatemala, a nation figured as female, was the progeny of the indigenous and the ladino… CEUA students went on to predict, “like the sexes, the two halves of one destiny will come together to generate the future, and then, the genius of the Guatemalan people will shine.” Then, the students added, “Guatemala will be herself.” The Plan detailed specialized institutions for guidance in “cultural, social, and economic improvement” in order to develop “what [the indios] have that is useful.” (Vrana, pg. 71)

The document reflected a minority perspective of the urban, ladino middle class. The plan was archived by the U.S. Library of Congress and by March 1954, it was presented at the Tenth Inter American Conference in Caracas, Venezuela. Three months later, Castillo Armas had successfully installed himself as President and began to dismantle institutions representing the indigenous majority. This coincided with a mass purge of Arbencistas and communists from government. The beneficiaries of the purge were the very same anti-Communist students who helped to overthrow the government. CEUA students and alumni took vacant positions in the presidential cabinet and secretariat. (Vrana, pg. 73)

Campesinos and labor activists attempted to defend the agrarian reforms. The uprisings were organized locally, some involving as many as hundreds of participants. In one July 15 incident, campesinos set fire to their land before it could be confiscated by the counter-revolutionary regime. However, the campesinos were largely unarmed and lacked the protection of the army or government, both of which were being purged of sympathetic officers and officials. The regime had compiled lists of names of suspected communists and agitators for arrest and murder, some identified with CIA assistance. Labor organizers were prime targets, rendering the spontaneous uprisings unable to sustain themselves. Rachel May, author of Terror in the Countryside: Campesino Responses to Political Violence in Guatemala, writes that “as late as 20 August there were still reports from Escuintla of ‘agrarian campesinos’ attacking the ‘Liberation Army’ of Castillo Armas”. (May, pg. 5) But within weeks of the coup, hundreds of labor organizers, indigenous community leaders and communist supporters were dead. May writes:

Thousands more were held as political prisoners without due process, while countless others were forced into exile. The state encouraged massive firings of both public and private employees. Mario López Larrave claims that every union was ‘beheaded without exception’. On 2 July, El Imparcial reported that “anti-comunistas” captured and murdered seventeen workers from Tiquisate on the southern coast… After a few weeks of summary executions such as this and other forms of widespread official violence, the majority of those local leaders who were still alive and who had not yet been detained fled their communities. At least 1,600 prisoners filled the two city jails and the police school (which was converted to handle the overflow)... Decree 23  institutionalized this repression by creating the Committee for Defense against Communism in late July . The committee was made up of three members, designated by the presidential junta. It obligated civil and military authorities to respond effectively and quickly as it pursued its principal target, organized labor. The committee’s function became the enforcement of the Preventive Penal Law against Communism. This law designated as a crime “communism in all its forms, including activities and protests that [were] contrary to the traditional democratic institutions of Guatemala and its vital demands.” The law required the Committee for the Defense against Communism to draw up a “register” of the names of “all of the people who [had] in whatever form, participated in communist activities.” (May, pg. 4-5)

The language of the Law Against Communism was vague and designed for wide application. Organizing strikes, handing out leaflets and possession of political literature was enough to be named and added to the register. Terrorism was punishable by death, though the exact definition of terrorism was left intentionally vague. Under these conditions, with feudalistic repression restored in the countryside, mass popular resistance was severely limited during the subsequent years as few were willing to risk arrest or execution. The dismantling of popular labor organizations and venues for participation in government would result in a move towards clandestine, secret organizations, a trend that would only accelerate as the civil war began in the 60’s and heated up in the late 70’s.

However, life in Guatemala City retained a modicum of normalcy, at least for the privileged ladino middle classes, and there remained an expectation that democracy would be restored, even if severely hindered.

The coup regime ruled without a constitution during it’s first year in power. Public pressure for a new constitution boiled over until Armas finally acquiesced to demands in 1956. Again, the anti-communist students and alumni of San Marcos were on the forefront of counter-revolutionary politics. Vrana writes: 

The 1956 Constitution formalized the ideological influence of the CEUA on the counterrevolution, as it adopted many of the principles of the Plan de Tegucigalpa: the promotion of the nation’s economic activity through the citizen's obligation to contribute ”to the progress and social well-being of the nation through work,” the state’s responsibility to maintain “harmony between capital and labor,” and the promotion of credit for small-scale farmers… (Vrana, pg. 73)

The new constitution failed to address the fundamental problems in Guatemala. Among university students, those who supported Castillo Armas aligned with the apolitical language of the counter-revolution. According to Vrana, “Pro-Castillo Armas students claimed that partisan or sectarian commitments would inhibit objective study and investigation. They equated apoliticism with university autonomy because politics were not the purpose of the university. Arbencistas on the other hand, drew on the language of the 1945 Constitution and insisted that their education entailed a responsibility to participate in politics.” (Vrana, pg. 74)

The development of a new revolutionary generation of Guatemalan students can be seen in the events of 1956. The country experienced a wave of mass demonstrations during International Workers’ Day, just two months after the new anti-communist Constitution was set to go into effect. Trade unions had been banned under the new constitution, so few could legally participate in the May 1 demonstrations. Thousands marched regardless. Floats were adorned with defiant slogans such as “We are regressing to 1935” and “We demand the repeal of 570 and 584”, referencing two anti-labor provisions of the constitution. (Vrana, pg. 77)

Tensions remained heightened in the capital, particularly in the aftermath of an unsolved bombing that had recently occured during a busy Friday afternoon. (Vrana, pg. 76) On the streets, fights between demonstrators, police and possible provocateurs broke out.

One group who identified themselves as campesinos from the farm “El Tesoro”... carried progovernment signs in the parade. Observers quickly noted how their signs contained none of the orthographic errors that one would expect from rural workers with limited literacy. It seemed likely that they had not written the signs at all; perhaps they were even misinformed about what the signs said… some observers heckled them calling them dupes. A few blocks later, a mob attacked the campesinos and destroyed their signs. The police responded with force.

In another incident, three students... were arrested for shouting antigovernment slogans… They had apparently yelled ‘Death to the Liberation!’ during the march. Around midnight, agents in civilian clothes and one uniformed lieutenant forcibly entered [the] house. The young men were taken to a nearby police station without explanation and interrogated the following morning. In an irony so common in Guatemala’s small and tight-knight professional class, the students’ interrogator was Edmundo Sagastume, one of [the students’] law professors and legal advisor to the general director of national security. The three students were charged with possessing communist literature and released later in the afternoon.” (Vrana, pg. 77)

A decade later, such relative leniency would seem quaint.

For the time being, student newspapers and labor activists portrayed the demonstrations as a success, showing weakness on the part of the regime. Castillo Armas was unpopular, even among the right-wing Guatemalans and anti-communist students who had supported his “liberation” in 1954. Armas’s attempts to reconcile opposing forces in the country while maintaining an anti-communist political system were floundering, as the two goals were mutually exclusive. 

From 1954 to 1957, the counter-revolution coalesced behind Castillo Armas’s political organization, the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN), a party that would outlive its increasingly isolated founder.. Anti-communist groups, including the CEUA, formed the organization with the stated purpose of opposing both communism and dictatorship. In Grandin’s words, the organization borrowed “contradictatorily from liberal democracy, Spanish fascism, and anti-communist Catholicism.” (Grandin, pg. 86) It’s 1958 platform declared itself in favor of: “ ‘liquidation of social injustice,’ while the party’s platform declared that the ‘dispossessed represents the majority and weakest part of society’.” (Grandin, pg. 86)

Despite the MLN’s nominal commitment to political liberalism, Armas was left with few allies after 1954. The contradiction between a commitment to social justice and anti-communism meant that anyone with ties to the Arbenz government was purged or left out of political coalition. Since the Arbenz government had been popular and broad, the eligible coalition partners available to the coup regime was  limited to the most conservative elements in Guatemalan political life. Armas appointed Ubico’s secret police chief, José Bernabé Linares, to head of national security. Linares proceeded to ban works of literature by Victor Hugo and Dostoevsky, while Armas used his absolute power to reverse land reform and strip the illiterate of voting rights.

Meanwhile, Guatemala’s economy was faltering. The country was hit with drought, followed by tough negotiations with international coffee buyers. The government failed to attract much foreign investment, aside from mafia owned gambling operations. In order to survive, the coup regime became increasingly dependent on aid from the United States. It was becoming clear that the Armas regime was on its last legs. (Cullather, Secret History: The CIA's Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954, pg. 113-114).

On June 23, 1956, two days before the 12 year anniversary of the Guatemalan Revolution, the police and army blocked a memorial procession to the gravesite of Maria Chincilla, the schoolteacher whose death sparked the 1944 unrest. After dispersing, some members of the crowd, which included law students, professors and journalists, met in the law school to discuss how to respond. The police surrounded the building and forced the group to disband. Later that evening, the police mass arrested a group of scholars and audience members participating in a panel discussion on the law school campus, including the president-elect of the law students association. (Vrana, pg. 83)

On June 25th, the country was placed under a state of emergency for 30 days, giving the police and army extralegal authority to detain, question and use force as they deemed fit. The student union drafted a letter demanding Armas restore constitutional protections within 24 hours, at which point the body would call for a strike and appeal to the UN for support. A group of 500 students began to march in defiance of the state of emergency, though they were cautioned against action by the student union. They gathered at 5:30pm, beginning a slow and careful march while singing the national anthem. Vrana writes:

There the first gunshots were fired. Students sought cover in doorways and shop windows. Some continued marching forward until the attack was too intense. Newspapers reported that some youths continued to sing the hymn while under fire. Many fell, injured or killed; still others fell to the ground for safety. Alvaro Castillo, president of the CSE and the Economics Student Association (AEE) died at the scene… Police arrested 186 protestors and took them to police stations throughout the city where they were imprisoned for two days before their hearings. (Vrana, pg. 84)

 Students and activists continued to appeal to the constitution and the Guatemalan Revolution in opposing the Armas regime, which responded with more arrests and abuses, including a June 1956 incident in which the police seized 30,000 copies of a major student newspaper, confiscated their treasury, then arrested the editors in the dead of night and drove them to the border of Honduras where they were abandoned half naked. (Vrana, pg. 89)

The protests, though ultimately failing to topple the anti-communist, counter-revolutionary regime, placed additional pressure on the Armas regime. New forms of consciousness and thinking were developing. During this period, many Abrencistas and opponents of the Armas regime were paying close attention to developments outside the country and looking for inspiration from struggles abroad. Vrana writes:

On June 26, 1956, alongside news of the State of Siege and student disturbances, El Imparcial reported on the arrest of Fidel Castro and nineteen fellow combatants in Mexico, young men labeled ‘subversives,’ ‘conspirators,’ and ‘terrorists.’ This would have certainly captured the attention of young universitarios. Among some cadres, Guevara’s time in Guatemala during the revolutionary decade was a point of pride. San Carlistas also participated in international exchanges with the communist friendly International Union of Students (IUS) and the anti-communist International Student Conference (ISC). These congresses helped some San Carlistas to link their struggle against Castillo Armas regime to anticolonial nationalist struggles around the world. 

A new transitional youth power was rising and San Carlistas were part of it. (Vrana, pg. 89-90)

Internationalization of class and civil conflict was a growing phenomena. The latter half of the 50’s saw the acceleration of decolonization throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia. Algeria waged a war of independence against the French from 1954 to 1962, a conflict which would receive international support from revolutionaries and nationalists worldwide. Struggles would break out in several other countries as well, each with their own particular conditions and unique histories, but the trend was clear. Internationalism, much of it overtly Marxist or at least fellow-traveling, was linking national liberation movements throughout the world. Accordingly, right-wing and liberal anti-communist responses to the rise of left-wing and nationalist movements attempted to hold off the rise of these movements by targeting the emerging professional middle classes and providing development aid to poor countries in order to disincentivize these new classes from aligning with communists and revolutionary movements. Vrana writes:

Seemingly, every major international interest had some soft imperialist project of exchange or study abroad. The United National Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) spent a considerable amount of time and resources promoting transcultural exchange within the Americas. Students of medicine were eligible to apply for a scholarship from the United Fruit Company (UFCO) to pay for a year of study at Harvard Medical School in fields related to public health, hygiene, and industrial health. San Carlistas were also the beneficiaries of Rockefeller and Kellogg Foundation grants in 1956 and both foundations donated trucks and lab equipment to the faculties of Agronomy and Medicine… These programs were part of what A. Ricardo Lopez has called ‘humanist governance,’ projects that called on national experts and policymakers to legitimate foreign incursion. (Vrana. Pg. 90)

These efforts can be seen as early examples of aid and development diplomacy that would define US soft power in much of the developing world, once known as the third world, more accurately described as the global south. If Teddy Roosevelt advocated speaking softly and carrying a big stick, future presidents such as John F. Kennedy would softly speak of the “peace corps” and other development initiatives designed to appeal to the national bourgeoisie of these new nations. The European Union and other international bodies would participate as well, seeking to develop the growing middle and upper middle classes into pro-West, pro-American, pro-foreign capital technocrats. 

These programs appealed to some middle class Guatemalans, while others continued to eschew these efforts, recognizing their own class interests while attempting to reconcile the role of the urban, educated middle class revolutionary. Vrana cites a student editorial which was likely influenced by Marxist class conflict theory, as shared perspectives similar to that emanating from national liberation struggles throughout the world. Vrana writes:

Just after International Workers’ Day in 1956, El Estudiante published an article entitled, ‘The Role of the Middle Class.’ It argued, ‘Almost without exception, History reveals that in every revolutionary moment of triumph and the ascension to power, before long, the persistent schism and division between the two will emerge.’ …the anonymous author went on to assert that the middle class was always suspicious of the proletariat. Its passion for revolution quickly dissolved into ‘sterile struggle’ and class divisions. The achievement of true revolution depended on the ability of the middle class to abandon this tendency. The editorial admonished that recent events should have been enough to convince the middle class of its shared fate with urban and rural proletariat, even if it remained ‘inexperienced so far’ in the social struggle. It offered a different interpretation of the middle class in the 1944 Revolution than the one widely shared in popular memory that celebrated how teachers, professors, students, urban workers, and rural campesinos worked together to overthrow tyranny and build a great democracy. The editorial argued the 1944 revolution had not been a true revolution. The middle class and workers should join together to present a ‘great united national front for an ongoing battle with the industrial and agrarian oligarchy,’ for ‘a middle class that is deeply revolutionary, in close alliance with the rural and urban proletariat, in the hope of Guatemala”. (Vrana, pg. 93)

The editorial, while perhaps overly optimistic in hindsight, was prescient. It brings to mind the theories of Amiclar Cabral, who that year would found the national liberation movements for not one, not two, but three African countries under Portuguese domination. Cabral, who died shortly before these movements ended the Portugese Empire, theorized about neo-colonialism and decolonization under a national bourgeoisie, advocating that emerging petit bourgeois professionals commit “class suicide”, aligning their interests with that of the urban and rural masses. Failure to do so would result in the establishment of neocolonialism, wherein formal colonial relations between an imperial government and a subject people were replaced by an indirect colonial relationship between foreign capitalist interests and the national bourgeoisie, the professional classes who nominally ran the country. For the nominally independent Latin American republics who continued to endure American imperialism long after formal independence, these sorts of ideas would ring true and influence the generation of revolutionaries and guerillas to come.

For now, however, the Guatemalan revolution remained civic and legalistic, eschewing armed struggle. It seemed only a matter of time before the weak Armas regime would collapse. On July 26th, 1957, Castillo Armas was assassinated by a member of the presidential guard. Later that year, the MLN candidate won the Presidential elections with 51% of the vote in elections that were widely viewed as fraudulent. General Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes came in second and used the military to annul the election. He was officially elected during a second vote held in 1958, though it is worth remembering that much of the country’s indigenous population remained disenfranchised and political organizations such as the PGT remained illegal.

The MLN was no longer in power. However, as Greg Grandin notes, the party responded to its temporary loss of formal power by undergoing a transformation and militarization that predates the pan-Latin American leftist guerilla phenomena inspired by Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution.

Following the 1957 assassination of Castillo Armas by his bodyguard, the anti-Communist students who had led the fight against Arbenz increasingly found themselves estranged from power. The MLN continued to engage in politics, using its ties to the military, countryside, and elite to influence successive governments… Yet after the 1958 election of Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, who represented the less inflamed wing of the counterrevolutionary coalition, to the presidency, the MLN returned to its insurgent roots. At the same time, it abandoned its efforts to fashion itself as an agent of progressive liberal democracy, instead transforming into a brute defender of the agrarian oligarchy.

The MLN turned to the countryside. Just months after the Cuban Revolution and well before any group on the left had made such a move, MLN member Raúl Estuardo  Lorenzana, who would later found Guatemala’s first death squad, organized in February 1959 a short-lived guerilla foco called Acción Nacionalista to overthrow the government. While this effort failed, the MLN effectively built a social base that linked planters, provincial military officers, and paramilitary organizations led by a military commissioner. Prior to 1954, there existed about one commissioner for each of Guatemala’s three hundred municipalities, mostly enforcing military conscription and exercising loose surveillance. By 1966 the number had grown to nine thousand. Fortified by new legal powers, commissioners aligned military and planter interests. They doubled as spies and plantation security, worked closely with regional army officers, and organized peasants into vigilante groups, most prominently in the eastern part of the country… where the memory of the Agrarian reform remained strong.(Grandin, pg. 87-88)

Grandin notes that the infrastructure and networks built by the MLN were, in some regions, a de facto state within a state. Quoting a rural worker: “[the commissioners] had all the people tied up. We had to carry MLN membership cards in order to avoid problems. It was worth more than our citizenship papers.” (Grandin, pg. 88)

In the span of a decade, the anti-communist movement, encompassing both moderate anti-communists and right-wing proto-fascists, had built the infrastructure and international support network for a surveillance state. The network later formed the basis for the death squads. In the words of MLN leader Sandoval Alarcon, the future Guatemalan Vice President whose political career began as a student in the CEUA, they had successfully created “the party of organized violence”. (Grandin, pg. 159)

For their part, the Latin American and Guatemalan left-wing was undergoing a period of self-criticism and a gradual shift towards a more hardened assessment of how to defend a revolution. As mentioned in prior episodes, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro had learned from the Guatemalan experience, the former having witnessed firsthand the lack of fight put up by the Arbenz regime in its final months. But similar conclusions were reached by other intellectuals and revolutionaries throughout the hemisphere, Marxist and non-Marxist alike. Many identified “people’s militias” as a key ingredient for defending a revolution from the combined forces of yankee imperialism and local economic elites. Other criticisms pointed towards Arbenz’s trust of the army and Guatemalan bourgeoisie, who took advantage of his naivete.

The PGT, the Guatemalan Communist Party, adopted increasingly militant anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist language in it’s 1955 autocritica, though it stopped short of calling for armed rebellion. The party had been key in designing and implementing land reform during the Arbenz presidency. The coalition between the indigenous labor activist network on the ground, the relatively small, but politically effective Guatemalan Communist Party, and the wider Arbencista political coalition, which had included social democratic bourgeois politicians, had been made possible by demonstrations of good faith collaboration by each part of the movement. Arbenz was not a communist, but he had gone further than Juan Jose Arévalo, by including them among his advisors. The PGT were more than willing to work as a junior partner within a broad coalition. In Grandin’s words: “party leaders embraced a terminal but still potent popular-front vision in which the United States was part of the democratic, modern world, and socialism, when it came, would be a natural evolution of that world.” (Grandin, pg. 89)

After the coup, the party struggled to fully commit itself to the harsh realities of post-Arbenz Latin America. Despite adopting a more militant posture, the organization was slow to take up arms, neither for self-defense nor guerilla activity. In fact, PGT leaders who had survived the purges of the 50’s were now resisting pressure from newer members, often more militant, who joined the movement after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Older PGT leaders were highly educated intellectuals. Even after the party endorsed “all forms of struggle” in 1960, which Grandin notes as being understood as a subtle endorsement of a Cuban style insurgency, the party’s actions were far behind it’s words. Grandin quotes a founder of the PGT to describe the dilemma: “As Guerra Borges puts it, it was unclear how ‘a vice-minister of education who taught Rousseau and grew emotional listening to Mozart… could turn himself into a military commander.” (Grandin, pg. 91)

Even as the world was changing around them, the PGT refused to give up on the idea of utilizing formal levels of liberal democracy and political participation in bourgeois politics. The party even endorsed Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes for President against the MLN in hopes that victory would “allow democratic forces to advance”. (Grandin, pg. 91)

At the close of the decade, the Guatemalan revolution was in bad shape. The counter-revolution, while not immune to infighting within its respective camps, was firmly in power, whether the formal power of Fuentes’s military backed regime, or the organizational and insurgent power of the MLN. Attempting to more successfully implement the Armas strategy of repressing communism while retaining a modicum of constitutional freedoms, Ydigoras Fuentes had campaigned as a moderate, appealing to middle class voters. However, the backroom deal used to secure the presidency and the untenable position of trying to solve the problems of Guatemala (while repressing attempts to restore the most popular aspects of the Revolution) eroded support for the general’s agenda. During an interview with El Estudiante in 1958, Ydigoras Fuentes was asked to elaborate on his campaign promise to implement land reform. The general responded by attacking Arbenz, claiming that the beneficiaries of his land reform law consisted of “irresponsible indios and drunks… no one can simply give them something for free and… moreover, not everyone in the world has been born to be a land owner.” Vrana quotes the newspapers header for the last section of the interview: “Negative Answers to Everything Suggested” (Vrana, pg. 102)

By the following year, civic opposition to the regime revived itself, having relaxed slightly since the assassination of Armas. Public demonstrations began to show signs of a new militancy that would define the Guatemalan resistance movement of the 60’s. Occurrences during the annual Huelga de Dolores event in 1959 gave a hint of what was to come. Vrana writes: 

...the theatrical revue took a different approach to humiliating the president. The evening opened with a single disembodied voice booming through the theatre’s huge speakers. The voice praised Fidel Castro’s successful liberation movement and his busy beard, both evidence of his virility. It ridiculed Raul Lorenzana, an advocate for counterinsurgent violence and future founder of the Mano Blanca death squad (who could not grow a beard.) (Vrana, pg. 111)

The specter of Cuba was looming over Guatemalan politics. For over half a decade, the Guatemalan middle class had applied pressure to the Armas and Ydigoras regimes, with limited success. However, a growing consciousness of the rural campesino population was leading to the realization that the future of Guatemala would hinge upon the rural question and require the participation of the indigenous peasantry. By the time of the army officers revolt the following year, the influence of the Cuban Revolution’s guerilla revolutionaries would forever change the politics of Guatemalan nationalism and revolutionary thought.

Chapter 2: Cuba’s Revolution From Above

After years of fighting, the combined forces of urban and rural resistance to the Batista regime, including strikes, sabotage, terrorism and guerilla warfare, had finally brought the mercenary army to its knees, its will to fight broken. Shortler after midnight on New years Day, 1959, Fulgencio Batista, once a hero of the 1933 Revolution whose sergeant’s rebellion overthrew the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado, robbed the treasury and boarded a flight for The Dominican Republic. 

The struggle against Batista involved a wide coalition, but most factions lacked a strong base of mass support. Political organizations and individuals associated with the 1933 revolutionary movement had largely discredited themselves in the eyes of the Cuban masses. The clear winner of the anti–Batista struggle was Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement, who had built a social base in the Sierra Maestra mountains and cities of the llano, before they triumphantly captured city after city in the rest of the island in the final weeks of the war against Batista. When the bearded 26th of July guerillas arrived in Havana on January 3, Fidel Castro had secured his position as the kingmaker of the Cuban Revolution.

In its initial months, the direction of the Cuban Revolution was unclear. Factional differences aside, the 26th of July movement lacked a clear, succinct program for the country outside of anti-imperialist nationalism, economic and political rights, and justice for Batista regime criminals. Moreover, the United States was watching developments closely, trying to ascertain whether Castro would protect American capital interests and power in Cuba, as many nominally anti-imperialist Cuban leaders had done in revolutions past.

In Cuba, the political standing of nearly all parties, organizations and politicians was weak. The fundamental weakness of Cuban politics had not improved since the 1933 revolutionary period. Since Machado’s fall in that year, the revolutionary generation of middle class and university educated leaders had discredited themselves over the course of the previous 26 years. Castro was the only political force in Cuba with clear, unambiguous popular support from the vast majority of the island. Despite concerns about Castro’s vague politics, the US had little choice but recognizing the new government, at least for the time being. Aviva Chomsky writes:

One of the reasons that U.S. businesses had argued for recognition of Castro, and that the U.S. government went along., was that they could not ignore the overwhelming popular mobilization behind the Revolution. U.S. officials, the Ambassador explained, “had no enthusiasm for Castro, only a determination to be in the best possible position to deal effectively on behalf of American interests with the new ruler whose people appeared united in idolizing him.”

The task, then, was to try to guide - or manipulate - the new government into compliance with U.S. business and economic development goals. (Chomsky, pg. 58)

To assuage American fears, and also to buy time, Castro appointed moderates and anti-communists, including his own rivals, to key posts in the inaugural revolutionary government. The motivation for this move can be attributed, in part, to a sincere openness to reconciliation and cooperation with the United States, if the U.S. was willing to treat Cuba as an equal. However, Castro had learned from the mistakes of Arbenz and quietly appointed 26th of July commanders and sympathizers to key posts within the defeated Cuban army. Cuba would not be Guatemala.

Carlos Franqui witnessed the sudden collapse and submission of the Cuban Army when he entered Havana on January 4, 1959

...the bearded rebels with Camilo, no more than five hundred of them, and on the other hand, twenty thousand army soldiers- generals, colonels, majors, captains, corporals, sergeants, and privates. When they saw us walk by, they stood at attention. It was enough to make you burst out laughing. (Anderson, pg. 362)

The previous day, on January 3, 1959, Che Guevara arrived at the 18th century Spanish colonial fortress located on the eastern side of the bay in Havana, Cuba. On orders from Fidel, Guevara was to take over command of the La Cabaña garrison from the recently surrendered Cuban armed forces. Two days earlier, Fulgencio Batista and a small number of close associates had suddenly and quietly fled the country. 

Guevara addressed the garrison soldiers, who only days earlier would have considered Guevara an enemy commander. The 3,000 strong garrison received their new commander in formation. In Jon Lee Anderson’s words, he addressed them as a “neocolonial army” and bluntly told them “They could teach his rebel troops how to march… but the guerillas could teach them how to fight.” (Anderson, pg. 359)

Anderson describes Guevara’s attitude as patronizing. Guevara was notorious for his honest appraisals and biting observations. But in this case, he wasn’t wrong. The Cuban army had undergone two major transformations since it’s inception as a mixed race liberation army. After Spain lost control of Cuba, the US occupied the island and proceeded to disband the independence army, which was largely black and mixed race. The United States forced the newly independent nation to codify the Platt amendment into it’s constitution, granting the US the right to re-occupy Cuba at will. The US further entrenched its influence on the Republic of Cuba by creating a new segregated army with a white officer corps. This segregated army, largely staffed by wealthy Cuban landowners and elites, was at least nominally beholden to the Cuban constitution. This would change the Sergeant’s revolt of 1933, which replaced traditional military leadership with a younger generation of upwardly mobile non-commissioned officers, led by the mixed race sergeant Fulgencio Batista. The new army leadership was more concerned with social mobility, wealth and political power than upholding any constitution. To that end, the Batista era army enthusiastically received it’s training and anti-communist indoctrination at US military schools.

tThe Cuban Army was the textbook definition of a neocolonial army. Castro’s mission in the coming months would be to purge the army and police, and safeguard Cuba from counter-revolutionary forces, with Che and the Communist Party playing key roles in reorganizing Cuba. Anderson writes: 

...The ranks of the “old” army and police forces were weeded out, their officers either sidelined or purged. Colonel Ramón Barquín was made chief of the military academies; Major Quevedo, one of several career officers who had defected to the rebels after the failed summer offensive, became head of army logistics. Others were shipped off to gilded exile as military attachés in foreign countries… loyal July 26 men had been installed as military governors in all of Cuba’s provinces.

It was soon evident that the real seat of revolutionary power lay not in the ornate presidential palace in Old Havana but wherever Fidel happened to be at the same time…

…Over the coming months [Fidel’s villa] became the setting for nightly meetings between Fidel, his closest comrades, and Communist Party leaders. The purpose of the meetings was to secretly meld the PSP and the July 26 Movement into a single revolutionary party. (Anderson, pg. 367)

For the time being, the mood in Cuba was jubilant, but the future of the Cuban Revolution was anything but secure. The first task of the triumphant revolution would be to honor the promise of justice. Similar to 1933, the news of Batista’s flight gave way to spontaneous acts of violence and revenge against the deeply unpopular regime, which, not counting combat deaths, had murdered 20,000 Cubans and tortured tens of thousands more. Those responsible for death and torture, and who were unable to flee the country, were now fugitives. Police and army officers, as well as judges and politicians linked to the abuses, were fleeing for their lives. Mobs were attacking casinos and private property linked to the regime. The 26th of July Movement hastily organized militias to restore order and end random acts of violence. Justice would be swift and revolutionary, but it would follow a process.

As the new military commander of La Cabaña, Che was now responsible for overseeing revolutionary trials, sentencing and punishment. To Americans, this period of the revolution is perhaps among the most controversial chapters, with allegations of show trials and bloodlust. However, historical records and accounts generally agree that the executions were not only popular, they were in demand. Anderson writes:

...Throughout January, suspected war criminals were being captured and brought to La Cabaña daily… deputies or rank-and-file chivatos or police torturers. Nevertheless, the old walls of the fort rang out nightly with the fusillades of the firing squads… (Anderson, pg. 370)

The process for revolutionary justice was ad hoc and urgent, with some trials concluding within a single day. Anderson quotes Miguel Angel Duque de Estrada, one of Che’s key lieutenants in the trials, as counting 55 executions in 100 days. Estrada adds that despite the swiftness of justice, the tribunals were careful not to reach guilty verdicts without sufficient evidence nor to apply death sentences without merit. Orlando Borrego, who served as tribunal president, states that Che insisted on measures to prevent unfair verdicts. For example, an accuser could not pass judgment on the accused. Borrego and Guevara intervened when prosecutors recommended death sentences too liberally. Hundreds were tried and executed in the span of months, but rather than the bloodbath of red terror and show trials described by right-wing Cubans, the historical record indicates that the trials were the fulfillment of near unanimous public demand. There were occasional arbitrary executions committed, such as a mass execution of dozens of soldiers by Raul Castro after the capture of the city of Santiago, but these incidents were rare. In reality, the majority of trials and executions were held in public, often with victims in attendance, and often met with loud, uproarious enthusiasm from audiences who demanded punishment harsher than what the tribunals had dealt.. Anderson  writes:

Most were sentenced in conditions like those described by Borrego. They were aboveboard, if summary, affairs, with defense lawyers, witnesses, prosecutors, and an attending public…

There was little overt public opposition to the workings of revolutionary justice. On the contrary, Batista’s thugs had committed some sickening crimes and the Cuban public was in a lynching mood. Newspapers were full of morbid revelations and gruesome photographs of the horrors and brutalities that had taken place under Batista…

The tribunals were attracting mounting criticism abroad, with American congressmen decrying them as a bloodbath. Indignant over the accusations, in late January Fidel had decided to hold some high-profile public trials… in Havana’s sports stadium. The plan backfired, however. Attending foreign reporters were nauseated by the spectacle of jeering crowds and hysterical cries for blood…

Che warned his judges to be scrupulous about weighing the evidence in each case so as not to give the revolution’s enemies additional ammunition, but the trials had to continue if Cuba’s revolution was to be secure. He never tired of telling his Cuban comrades that Arbenz had fallen in Guatemala because he had not purged his armed forces of disloyal elements. Cuba could not afford to repeat Arbenz’s mistake. (Anderson, pg. 373)

Meanwhile, the disagreements and tensions that had bubbled and simmered during the war against Batista were beginning to surface. While a number of organizations had contributed to the successful war against Batista, the 26th of July Movement had emerged from the war with overwhelming popular support, related i n part to the immense popularity of Fidel Castro. The Revolutionary Directorate, the  urban, largely middle class militant group most famous for it’s failed assault on the Presidential Palace, was anti-communist and deeply suspicious of Fidel’s close ties to communists.

During the guerilla war, the Directorate established a guerrilla organization in the Escambray mountains. The Directorate guerillas suffered from territorialism between rival commanders. A splinter group formed, known as The Second National Front of the Escambray. In the late stage of the war against Batista, Che Guevara led a column of 26th of July guerillas on an arduous journey to the Escambray mountains to establish an alliance with the Directorate guerillas. Negotiations were painful, as the Directorate and Second National Front forces refused to take part in joint-operations against Batista. Forces associated with the Escambray guerillas were known for engaging in extortion and theft against the civilian population, but also against each other. At one point, a shipment of boots headed for Che’s guerillas was seized by the Second National Front , an infuriating piece of news given that the guerillas had just traveled for weeks through mud and ditches in enemy territory in order to link up with the guerillas in the Escambray.

Now that Batista was gone, the Directory correctly assessed that they were to be left out from key positions in the coming revolutionary government. Members of the Directorate had arrived in Havana prior to the 26th July guerillas and proceeded to steal weapons from the military, which they then used to seize the Presidential Palace and other parts of the city. Che warned against against rash moves, eventually negotiating for the Directorate to exit the palace, but without surrendering their newly acquired arms. The combined guerilla forces had placed themselves under the 26th of July command structure. Now, they hoped to reassert their independence by carrying out armed action unilaterally. The move, however, proved to be a public relations disaster, recalling the violent days of political violence by university students in the years leading up to Batista’s coup. Samuel Farber writes: 

…most Cubans reacted with great hostility  toward this action of the Directorio. The specter of political gangsterism in the university was raised in the minds of the Cuban people even though that phenomenon had ceased to exist at least seven years before… (Farber, pg. 204)

Jon Lee Anderson adds:

“...Fidel gave a long speech, broadcast live on television, stressing the need for law and order and revolutionary unity. In the new Cuba, there was room for only one revolutionary force; there could be no private armies. His words were a warning to the Directorio, whose fighters had vacated the palace, but still occupied the grounds of the university and were reported to be stockpiling arms… before Fidel had finished speaking, the Directorio relayed word that it would hand over its weapons. Fidel’s display of force majeure had won out.” (Anderson, pg. 365)

For the time being, factional violence had been avoided, but the fundamental antagonism underlying the alliance between the 26th of July and the Directorate remained. Within the 26th of July movement itself, there remained unresolved antagonisms between the anti-communist and communist sympathizing members. Samuel Farber notes that the 26th of July movement had always been more about support for Fidel more than a specific political program. Farber writes: 

…the 26th of July Movement was an amorphous group of followers more than an organization, properly speaking… Moderate cabinet ministers were in office while Castro found it convenient for them to be there and were quietly and noiselessly replaced when they interfered with Castro’s policies… The only real political structure was Fidel Castro himself…

Farber quotes C. Wright Mills’ description of Fidel as synonymous with the revolution at this early stage:

While Mill’s assessment of Castro’s power may sound exaggerated, it is not. Often sociological conditions maximize the power of given individuals in certain historic situations; such a set of conditions characterized Cuban society in 1959… In Cuba, the social and political weaknesses of the middle and working classes, and the lack of a strong oligarchy, combined with the concrete events and developments of the fifties to complete the process of discrediting and disintegrating  he pre-Castro parties. This combination of an absence of political organization and a strong leadership produced an unusual situation in which the Cuban revolutionary leadership was free from most of teh controls usually present in Latin American societies to restrict the freedom of action of officeholders, even those who are “revolutionary”...

While there was no significant political organization in the Cuba of 1959, there was a significant political tradition of radical and democratic populism which was revived in the aftermath of revolutionary victory…

…in 1959, Castro could not have formed a Communist-type party but could have formed only a party of a much broader nature because of the wide diversity of views within the revolutionary ranks at that time. In such a situation it was far more advantageous for Castro to be a maximum leader who could manipulate and suppress various divergent viewpoints until an appropriate level of uniformity was achieved. (Farber, pg. 212-214)

One of the most significant differences between the revolutionary periods of 1959 and 1933, was the lack of independent working class militancy and organization. As Samuel Farber notes, rural workers formed Soviet style workers councils during the 1933 revolution. Rank and file members of Cuba’s labor federation, the CTC, demonstrated independent militancy during that revolutionary period. However, in the 26 years since 1933, the labor policies of various political parties did little to develop and empower rank and file workers. The CTC had been purged of militants and the bureaucracy filled with anti-communists. Even the communists themselves had dropped the ball, as the PSP had adopted a collaborationist, popular front strategy for much of that period. Che Guevara had revived the marxist tradition of political education during the guerilla war, but an entire generation had passed during which labor militancy and independent class consciousness were discouraged.

TThe working class actions of 1933 had more in common with the revolutionary situations of Russia 1917 or Spain during the 1930’s. In those examples, working class parties, soviets and labor unions were beholden to working class demands and political action. This dynamic created a close relationship between the revolutionary leadership and the rank and file themselves. Revolutionary parties and leaders were limited in their ability to deviate from the interests of their constituents, even under conditions of civil war, due to the independent organizing power of workers. Revolutionary leaders, even as power centralized, were dependent on the support of the masses for their legitimacy. 

As Samuel Farber argues, Cuba in 1959 didn’t resemble a full social revolution. Rather, what existed was a power vacuum where no class or sector of society, had the organizational strength or power to take lead, as a class, of a revolutionary situation. Recalling the Marxist theory of Bonapartism, the working class was not sufficiently organized or powerful enough to take control over the direction of the revolution in 1959. The power vacuum created a situation where an authoritarian leader could take advantage of the weak political system by making strategic alliances with a class or political sector. In 1933, Batista had emerged as that leader and forged an alliance with the upper class and military in order to halt the revolutionary process in its tracks. Now Castro was stepping into the power vacuum, where he would instead opt to form an alliance with the working class and rural poor in order to consolidate power and carry out a revolution from above.

Chapter 3: Defending the Cuban Revolution

In the early months of 1959, the revolutionary government passed a number of measures designed to bring relief to the long suffering working class and guajiro Cubans. By appointing moderate and anti-Communist figureheads rather than taking power directly, Castro was able to exercise his power as kingmaker. Castro appointed moderates to led the government, President Manuel Urrutia and Prime Minister José Miró Cardona, both anti-communist lawyers, the latter of which had once been Castro’s law school professor. The new government announced an immediate end to vice tourism, focusing on brothels, the national lottery and casinos, prompting resistance from sex workers, waitstaff, performers and others affected by the sudden closure of their industries (Gott, pg. 170).

In February, unemployed workers began demonstrating against the closures. Vice tourism developed as a direct result of neocolonialism and neither the moderates nor revolutionaries wanted to preserve the industry. However, immediate closure without a relief plan devastated urban workers. Castro intervened by demanding the transition occur gradually, reopening the shuttered businesses while providing new employment and training opportunities to workers over a period of time before their industries were completely eliminated. 

Castro met with the cabinet ministers to insist they adopt his plan, as well as other populist measures. The ministers were not happy with Castro’s plan to cut salaries for top level government ministers, but they relented. (Gott, pg. 170)

The outcome of this disagreement demonstrated in whom the real power lay. Castro had the loyalty of the Rebel Army and support from the vast majority of regular Cubans. He would not back down from his demands. Miró Cardona resigned from the Prime Minister’s post and Urrutia appointed Fidel Castro as his replacement. The cabinet also approved the lowering of age requirements for officeholders, paving the way for the young Fidel and Che to take formal positions in government.

The revolutionary government continued to address the immediate needs of the Cuban population, passing new laws and creating new ministries to oversee the implementation of reforms, including a Ministry of Social Welfare and a Ministry of Housing. In March of 1959, Castro ordered housing rental prices cut in half. The rent control measure was popular with the majority of Cubans, including middle class Cubans who benefitted from the rent reduction. Landlords, a significant portion of the Cuban bourgeoisie, were livid. However, this event did little to upset the Americans, who were largely unaffected. The order was an example of a popular move that would have resulted in more backlash during previous eras in Cuban politics, where bourgeois political parties could prevent popular measures from being implemented, or if Castro had moved too quickly, too soon, and had directly antagonized the Americans.

By May, however, Castro was prepared to take more radical actions. Throughout the guerilla war, Fidel and his inner circle, largely middle class and urban, had come to know the conditions of rural workers and peasants firsthand. The 1940 Constitution had included language setting the stage for land reform, though it was never implemented. Prior to winning the war against Batista, Fidel, with help from Che Guevara and the Communist Party, had implemented rural land reforms in liberated regions of the Sierra Maestra. While keeping details quiet until the last minute, Castro prepared to announce a national land reform decree with shades of the Guatemalan agrarian reform law.

Farm ownership was restricted to 3,333 acres. Excess land was expropriated and compensated to the owner in government bonds. Much like the Guatemalan law, landowners were compensated according to the value they themselves had declared on their taxes. The law directly affected a number of U.S. corporate interests, with 30 of 34 U.S. owned sugar mills voicing their protests to the U.S. ambassador (Chomsky, pg. 59). Farber describes the response of the US and Cuban bourgeoisie:

United States capital had never involved itself in any significant manner in Cuba’s housing industry…After the end of the executions in February 1959, the North American press lost interest in Cuban affairs, a situation that was reversed with the passing of the Agrarian Reform Law in May of 1959.

After the rent-reduction law was passed, Castro continued to reassure and encourage Cuban capitalists by asserting that the products of Cuban industries did contribute to national growth as distinct from the parasitic investors on the housing market. At the same time everybody was talking about hte coming agrarian reform, but nobody really knew what it would be like…

The radical agrarian Reform Law enacted in May 1959, although by no means Communist… marked a turning point in the relationship between Castro and his domestic opposition, as well as between Castro and the United States imperialist system… (Farber, pg. 217)

US Ambassador Phillip Bonsal met with the Cuban Minister of State, stating the American belief “in private enterprise as basis for economic development…” and “the constructive role of American companies in Cuban economy.” (Chomsky, pg. 59)

Aviva Chomsky writes that the minister refused to back down, insisting on the right to self-determination in Cuban affairs. Development of any country required the ability to transform the system of landholding and “unless large-scale landholding is abolished… Cuba will continue to suffer economic stagnation and an increasing rate of unemployment”. The Minister added that Cuba did not reject foreign investment in the country. Rather, Cuba wanted investment to benefit all Cubans and asked for participation from American capital interests in developing the country: “The purpose of… Agrarian Reform, is to increase productivity, encourage investments, raise the standard of living, and eliminate unemployment, which fully ensures the supplying of Cuban products to American consumers.” (Chomsky, pg. 59)

In April, Castro embarked on a US trip in order to make his case to the American government, and failing that, directly to the American people themselves. He spoke at the annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and made a television appearance on Meet The Press. Snubbed by Eisenhower, who opted for a golfing holiday in Georgia, Castro met with Vice President Richard Nixon, who insulted Castro by suggesting the Cubans adopt pro-business policies adopted by Puerto Rico, which the United States had euphemistically referred to as a “territory” despite its history as a direct colony. Castro responded by reminding Nixon that the Platt Amendment no longer applied and Cuba would exercise sovereignty accordingly. Reporting to the President, Nixon later described Castro as either a communist or a dupe of the communists. (Anderson, pg. 395-6)

Even at this stage, half a year after the fall of Batista, Cuba was not yet destined to become a one-party Marxist-Leninist state and Castro still held out hope for coexistence and cooperation between the United States and a free Cuba. In fact, Che had argued against compensation for land seizures and was calling for a rapid industrialization program that included tariffs and nationalizations. (Anderson, pg. 374) Castro declined to take such measures for the moment, but the US was not impressed. Chomsky writes:

Washington was not convinced. After a meeting with several large U.S. landholders on June 24th, the U.S. Secretary of State cabled the ambassador that “you should make every effort [to] persuade [the Government of Cuba to] avoid precipitate action in carrying out Agrarian Reform Law in its application [to] American properties.” Another official concluded bluntly: “With the signature of the Agrarian Reform Law, it seems clear that our original hope was a vain one; Castro’s Government is not the kind worth saving.” (Chomsky, pg. 60)

Bonsal was tasked with sniffing out communist influence on the Castro government and doing what he could to frustrate the goals of the Cubans. However, Bonsal recognized that reality was not necessarily advantageous to the US’s position. The ambassador carried out his government's wishes, but found that opposition to Castro was practically nonexistent outside of large landholders and former Batista government criminals. Moreover, he found little evidence for communist influence in government or military affairs. It seems that even while arguing the merits of U.S. influence on Cuban affairs, Bonsal didn’t entirely believe his own statements. Chomsky writes:

…even Bonsal understood that U.S. economic control in Latin America had not necessarily been beneficial to the people there. “The Castro regime seems to have sprung from a deep and wide-spread dissatisfaction with social and economic conditions as they have been heretofore in Cuba and to respond to an overwhelming demand for change and reform,” he wrote. “The universal support it had received from the humble and the lower middle classes is a witness to the strength of this compulsion… If we turn our back on them we risk pushing them into the arms of the Communists.” (Chomsky, pg. 61)

Wealthy and middle class Cubans, for their part, began the first wave of leaving the country for the United States. Land reform, rent reductions, tariffs and striking workers spooked capitalists and petit bourgeois Cubans, who preferred to wait out the storm in Miami until the US restored order and stability for capital interests. British Journalist and Historian of Latin America Richard Gott writes:

Infighting within the cabinet was a reflection of the growing hostility to the direction of the revolution from the country’s former political and social elite. In voicing their criticisms of the land reform, Cuba’s old political class, many members of which were themselves large landowners or beneficiaries of the old economic system, began to behave in the same way as their forebears had done in the course of the previous 60 years. So deeply ingrained was their memory of the Cuba of the Platt Amendment, that had enabled them to call for US help whenever threatened by social forces other than their own, that they assumed that the United States could again be summoned up to protest on their behalf. (Gott, pg. 172)

The Cuban capitalist and petit bourgeois classes had another cause for allying with the United States. The majority of the country was black and disproportionately poor, and the direction of the Revolution appeared to be radicalizing. The leadership of the revolutionary movement was mostly white and light skinned, and had up to this point offered few specifics to address anti-black racism in Cuba.

Gott writes that the guerilla movement had attracted relatively few black fighters in contrast to the independence wars of the 19th century. This is not to say that there was no black representation at all, but in a majority black country, it was noteworthy. Historical precedent had not gone well for black Cuban soldiers of the past, who had been purged from the Cuban Army under American pressure, and, a decade later, massacred by the neo-colonial army and white volunteers.

Cuban national discourse had been dominated by an ideology of “one Cuban people” that sought to downplay racial differences, even while institutions such as segregation remained secure in Cuba during the first 60 years of independence. In March of 1959, this hypocrisy was raised as a major issue after a number of 26th of July members were denied entry into whites-only social clubs. Harry Villegas, known as “Pombo”, was Che Guevara’s bodyguard and later a General who would lead Cuban troops in Combat against Apartheid South Africa. After being refused entry, Pombo and other members of Che’s entourage retrieved their rifles and took control of the club. Guevara chastised the men for their actions, but it was clear that something had to be done. Gott writes:

Castro’s Revolution was made by white radicals, many of them the children of recent migrants from Spain. A hundred years earlier such people would have joined the voluntarios and fought for Spain against black Cuba. In the 1950s they were in the vanguard of revolutionary change. Yet blacks were not prominent in the leadership of the revolutionary war… 

Black reluctance to join the rebel cause in large numbers had several causes. One was the lack of a political programme specifically aimed at blacks. Castro’s July 26 Movement made no great effort to attract a black constituency… [Castro] only came to realize its importance after the revolutionary triumph. The Communist Party was the only party that went out of its way to encourage black membership…

Many blacks, of course, supported Castro, and took part in the revolutionary war and the urban resistance. Yet just as in 1898, many of them felt bleakly disappointed on the morrow of victory, and Pombo, initially, was one of them. Castro, ever alert to the popular mood, soon got the message…

Before the month was over, Castro dedicated a major speech to the Revolution’s new campaign against anti-black racism in Cuba. Formal segregation was abolished immediately and all businesses were now required to open its doors to all Cubans. He further called for an end to discrimination in education and employment. 

The speech marked a turning point for black Cubans.. The end of segregation occurred at a time when Jim Crow still reigned in the Southern United States. Decades old cultural and intellectual links between black Cubans and black Americans meant that the two populations were aware of each other’s struggles. The changes about to occur in Cuba resonated deeply with black Americans, and Cuba would earn a positive reputation among the rapidly decolonizing nations of Africa and Asia.

However, the consolidation of cultural institutions in the following years would see pre-existing organizations for black struggle and culture shut down and replaced by revolutionary institutions. In the words of Frank Guridy: “While the Cuban Revolution was a powerful boost to African American and Afro-Cuban aspirations for freedom and equality in the 1960s, it overshadowed a rich history of social, political, and cultural relationships between these communities before the emergence of Fidel Castro.” (Guridy, pg. 3)

While the Revolution would fall short on key measures regarding anti-black racism, it nonetheless represented a serious threat to white supremacy in Cuba. Gott writes:

Teresa Casuso, an erstwhile friend of Castro who later went into exile, described in a memoir how ‘Employing the Negroes as a tactical weapon’ became an important part of Fidel’s overall strategy in Cuba, where he sought to represent himself as the friend and protector of the oppressed - that is, the Negro and the peasant’. The old elite could not forgive Castro, she wrote, for launching ‘these repressed, long-suffering groups into a crusade of spite and hate’. (Gott, pg. 174)

Cuba in 1959 was starting to resemble Guatemala during Arbenz’s term as President. Both the American government and the Cuban upper classes were turning against the Revolution, which had committed the dual sins of implementing both popular reforms and empowering non-whites. Like in Guatemala, they complained about communists and authoritarianism. While Castro was undoubtedly consolidating power and outmaneuvering his opponents to do so, neither Arbenz nor the Guatemalan Labor Party had received the benefit of the doubt for acting in good faith.

In June, after the signing of the Agarian Reform Bill, Fidel sent Che on a diplomatic trip abroad. The trip was intended to establish diplomatic relations with other independent nations, and to secure new markets for Cuban sugar should the United States attempt to punish Cuba for its reforms. On his itinerary were several newly independent states that would soon form the non-aligned movement. These “third world nations” were former colonies of Europe and North America who considered themselves neutral when it came to US-Soviet international relations. Destinations included India, Indonesia, Egypt, Yugoslavia, Ceylon and Japan. Alfredo Menéndez, a member of Che’s delegation described the context for the trip: “The strategy of the revolution was to open relations with the greatest possible number of countries. That was the objective of the trip. It had a political and an economic objective, that is to say, to not let the revolution become isolated. This was a constant of Che’s… He always told me that the [Cuban] revolution had to go out fighting in the international arena.” (Anderson, pg. 404)

On his trip, Che was not entirely impressed with the leadership of these supposedly independent nations. He described India’s Nehru as an amiable grandfather who was unwilling to take necessary radical action to break feudal institutions. He insulted Indonesia's Sukarno after being subjected to a pompous tour of the leader’s private art collection, though the Argentine ambassador and interpreter quickly changed the subject. In Japan, Che refused to visit the “Tomb of the Unknown Soldier”, stating: “No way I’ll go! That was an imperialist army that killed millions of Asians… Where I will go is to Hiroshima, where the Americans killed 100,000 Japanese.”

While the delegation achieved diplomatic success and established trade relationships with several post-colonial nations, a major trade deal remained elusive. Japan declined Che’s proposal to increase Cuba’s share of Japan’s substantial sugar imports, accepting payment in yen, which would then be used by Cuba to purchase Japanese products. According to Menéndez, the Japanese admitted, after some prodding by the blunt Che, that they were under American pressure not to cut any deals with the Cubans. (Anderson, pg. 410-11)

Outside of public view, however, the Cuban delegation was conducting a secret sugar sale to the Soviet Union. Anderson writes:

“According to Alfredo Menéndez, the PSP sugar expert who traveled with Che, the last sugar sale to Moscow, in 1956, had been permitted only after Washington gave the go-ahead. If that was true, it underscored the cruel reality of Cuba’s role as a virtual economic vassal state to the North Americans. Since the United States was the world’s largest sugar consumer, it had enormous leverage over not just the Cuban economy but its politics and foriegn policy as well…

Menéndez was to be the point man in negotiations that he hoped would fulfill what he called “an old aspiration of the Popular Socialist Party,” to  break free of Cuba’s dependency on the United States once and for all. “In 1959,” he said, “Cuba had the capacity to produce 7 million tons of sugar. The U.S. bought a little under 3 million tons, although it had the capacity to buy more… And so we wanted to change the market. The first objective, that of selling sugar to the Soviet Union, was with a view to expanding our markets. Not only with the Soviet Union, but with the rest of the socialist countries. It was a strategy.” (Anderson, pg. 408) 

Castro first publicly offered to increase Cuba’s sugar exports to the US from 3 to 8 million tons. The Americans predictably declined the offer. Over the course of Che’s nearly 3 months abroad, the delegation secretly met with Soviet officials to negotiate a one-time sale of 500,000 tons of sugar. It was the beginning of what would become a major trade relationship between Cuba and the Soviet Union. In the age of the Cold War, the simple act of selling sugar would’ve caused a major diplomatic incident had it gone public. Regardless, Cuban and American relations would soon take a nosedive. 

Back in Cuba, the implementation of land reform was prompting protests not only from plantation and cattle ranch owners, but increasingly from moderate allies of Castro. Resignations and firings increased in frequency, with positions filled by Castro loyalists. Huber Matos, the 26th of July attorney who had helped to craft the legal and administrative structure of rebel rule during the war in the Sierra Maestra, was among the revolutionaries who were now siding with landlords to condemn communist infiltration of government and armed forces. Then came the defection of Cuban Air Force Chief Pedro Luis Días Lanz, who appeared before the U.S. Senate and provided testimony of said infiltration. His proof, in the words of historian Lillian Guerra: “...he said that the PSP had taken complete control of literacy and cultural training to the Ejército Rebelde, a program that relied heavily on watching U.S.-made movies followed by a PSP-guided discussion technique called cine-debate.” (pg. 80, 10.5149/9780807837368_guerra.7)

To this day, opponents of the Cuban Revolution denounce the highly successful literacy campaigns of the early revolutionary period, which admittedly served the dual purpose of indoctrinating rural Cubans, in addition to teaching literacy. But again, these accusations failed to disturb the majority of Cubans. In less than a generation, the literacy rate shot from 70% to nearly 100%.

Perhaps this disconnection from the lived experience of most Cubans explains the major miscalculation of Manuel Urrutia, who took to the television for a national address to denounce Diaz Lanz as a traitor, but also declare himself an ardent anti-communist, hoping to force Fidel’s hand. In response, Castro broadcast his own speech before a crowd of thousands, denouncing Urrutia’s speech for breaking “revolutionary unity” and implying possible collusion between the President and the traitor Diaz Lanz. Suddenly, Castro announced his resignation as Prime Minister, prompting angry protests against Urrutia and for Castro’s reinstatement. The popular outrage compelled Urrutia to resign, realizing he had underestimated popular sentiment, and leave the country for Venezuela. On July 26th, 1959, Castro announced that he would return to his post. Calculated move or not, he correctly judged that the Cuban people would support him over Urrutia, anti-communists be damned. (Anderson, pg. 414-15)

For better or worse, the Cuban Revolution would become more aggressive in pre-empting counter-revolutionary plots, confirmed and suspected. There was no lack of very real threats, not only from the Americans, but from the elites of Latin America across the region.. Anderson describes the political climate in the second half of 1959, including a failed invasion plot by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo: 

“Counterrevolution” became a catchphrase for the activities of those who, like Urrutia, had sought to “sabotage” revolutionary “unity”. In fact, the first threats of counterrevolutionary activity had begun to appear. In addition to the force being trained in the Dominican Republic, exile groups were openly organizing paramilitary forces in Miami. After several bombs exploded and assassination plot was uncovered in Havana, Fidel pushed through a constitutional amendmement making counterevolution a crime subject to the death penalty.

In August, Trujillo’s Anticommunist Legion was finally mobilized for an invasion of Cuba, but Fidel had prepared a surprise for them. He orchestrated a ruse with the complicity of the former Second Front commanders Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo and the American William Morgan, who tricked Trujillo into believing they were ready to lead an anti-Castro uprising (before too long, they would be doing precisely that, but for now they were cooperating with Fidel). [They] radioed the Dominican Republic to say their forces had seized the Cuban city of Trinidad, which was the signal for the Anticommunist Legion to invade. When their transport plane, flown by Batista’s pilot, touched down in the countryside near Trinidad, Fidel and his soldiers were ready and waiting. (Anderson, pg. 415) 

Menoyo and Morgan were committed anti-communists who had clashed with Che Guevara during the merging of the guerilla factions towards the end of the war against Batista. American historians tend to frame the leaders of the Second Front as committed to democracy, only turning on Castro in response to the authoritarian direction of the revolution.

However, questions remain as to whether they truly set up a trap for the Anticommunist league, or whether they realized that Cuban intelligence knew of the plot and sold out Trujillo to save their own skin. Morgan, among the few American citizens who fought in the guerilla war against Batista, has been the subject of renewed interest in recent years by American authors and documentary producers seeking to rehash the “revolution betrayed” narrative of the Cuban Revolution through an American perspective.

In Yankee Commandante, Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss reveal that Morgan was approached by Frank Nelson, a shady Miami businessman with ties to the CIA and mafia, on behalf of Rafael Trujillo sometime in late February or early March 1959. It was here that Nelson offered Morgan one million dollars to kill Castro. William, according to Sallah and Weiss, was well aware of Trujillo’s history. Trujillo was a violent racist and known rapist. He had used sheer naked force throughout his career, openly mowing down striking plantation workers and political opponents. He was perhaps most notorious for a 1937 massacre of thousands of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic. He had also supported Batista to very end of the guerilla war, supplying many of the arms and ammunition to the army that Morgan had himself fought against.

This is how Sallah and Weiss describe Morgan’s reaction to the offer:

Only Trujillo could make someone like Batista appear benign. But among the conservative element in the United States, Trujillo could do no wrong. A virulent anti-Communist, he was America’s antidote to Communism in the islands. Still startled, Morgan told Nelson that he would think about it. They would talk again, and Morgan would give him an answer. In the mountains, Morgan knew the identity of his enemy. Now he realized for the first time that he was venturing into a world where the lines had blurred and the dangers were growing. (Sallah and Weiss, pg. 273-5)

The authors go to pains to justify Morgan’s waffling, describing an atmosphere of political intrigue and “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” decisions. Rather than immediately report the meeting to Cuban intelligence, Morgan sat on the offer for weeks until a March meeting of anti-communists organized by Menoyo and the Second National Front. Also present was Pedro Díaz Lanz, the air force commander who would defect to the United States four months later. It was here that Morgan disclosed his meeting with Nelson and Trujillo’s offer of $1 million to kill Castro.

Lanz put him at ease. He would support the Second Front on whatever action it took, but it was probably better to be transparent. “My personal opinion is that you should tell Fidel. If they find out otherwise, they will break your back.”

…Ultimately the decision was up to Morgan. He wasn’t going to murder Castro. That was never an option. But neither was telling Castro. Now he was having second thoughts. Maybe revealing the plot would help the Second Front.

Going to Castro was a risk. No one knew how he would react. But if meeting with Fidel would buy protection for the Second Front, Morgan had no choice. (Sallah and Weiss, pg. 279-80)

 This is typical of American accounts of the Cuban Revolution, such as histories of the Bay of Pigs invasion which rebrand virulently right-wing anti-communists into patriots fighting against communist dictatorship. The framing reeks of American exceptionalism, where imperialism is described as “mistakes” or the result of good intentions gone wrong. If Morgan sat on information suggesting Trujillo was organizing an assassination plot against the most popular single figure of the entire revolution, withholding that information provided cover for an ongoing assassination operation for weeks during a volatile period in early revolutionary history until, as Sallah and Weiss themselves write, he realized that “revealing the plot would help the Second Front”. A long and detailed New Yorker article by David Grann further details Morgan’s flirtation with the Trujillo operation:

It was Nelson’s turn to look around the room nervously. In a hushed voice, he said, “My friend is ready to pay you well if you help him.” He paused. “A million dollars.”  The conversation continued in Miami, where Morgan met in a secure hotel room with Nelson’s “friend.” It was the Dominican Republic’s consul there, who was serving as yet another go-between, in order to conceal the true identity of the plotters…

In the hotel room in Miami, Trujillo’s consul was joined by Batista’s former chief of police. (Batista, still in the Dominican Republic, was helping to bankroll the operation.)...

As they tried to persuade Morgan, they, too, probed for his soft spot. “I understand that you and your people have been treated badly,” Nelson had said in his pitch. “Besides, a million dollars is always a million dollars.” (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/05/28/the-yankee-comandante)

According to this account, not only had Morgan sat on the information, but he’d traveled to Miami to meet with the conspirators AFTER the initial offer from Nelson, but before divulging the information to the Second Front. The dates and chronology are unclear, as neither the New Yorker article or the Sallah and Weiss book offer much in the way of dates and footnotes, the latter’s sources for the Trujillo plot listed only Second Front members, FBI documents and Morgan’s wife. However, according to Fabián Escalante, a founding member of revolutionary Cuba’s intelligence department, himself responsible for monitoring Morgan and other suspected counter-revolutionaries, provides clearer timelines for the events described by more sympathetic sources. He describes the initial contact occurring “during the first days of March”, followed by a Miami meeting with the larger conspiracy on April 15, with a second Miami trip a week later. It was not until after these trips and conversations that Morgan and Menoyo divulged the plot to Castro, which likely occurred at the end of April. (Escalante, pg. 19-22)

This timeline strongly contradicts the account of another Morgan biography by Aran Shetterly, author of “The Americano”, who simply writes of the initial contact: “As soon as Nelson left, Morgan hunted down Menoyo to tell him about the encounter. Menoyo made an urgent appointment with Fidel.” (Shetterly, pg. 292)

It’s possible Morgan was indeed naive and indecisive, but these accounts differ significantly from the more detailed Escalante timeline. Escalante offers more damning details regarding Morgan’s drunkenness and initial enthusiasm for the plot, and it seems highly unlikely that Cuban intelligence hadn’t been tipped off by Morgan’s multiple trips to Miami and was monitoring his contacts, but it’s important to regard the words of any intelligence service with suspicion. Still, Escalante’s account offers more details, and a clearer timeline of events, in which Morgan waited nearly two months to disclose his involvement in an assasination plot against Castro. 

Even a CIA report suggests that Morgan was far more keen on the offer than sympathetic biographers portray. While admittedly describing the source as a “soldier of fortune type” whose reliability is subject to question, the raw intelligence backs up Escalante’s account more than that of that of Shetterly or Sallah and Weiss: 

In my opinion the Aug 59 “invasion” of Cuba was a staged affair and the alleged heroics of Major William Morgan and Major Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo strictly phony. I believe that, contrary to the “facts” as widely publicized, Morgan and Gutiérrez probably actually were engaged in a conspiracy against Castro, and I further believe that both of them will shortly experience either fatal “accidents” or be assassinated…” (Record Number 124-90136-10126,​ https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=138045#relPageId=2&tab=rif) 

The final plan called for an armed insurgency by the Second National Front focused on the Escambray mountains, followed by a wave of assassinations and bombings throughout the island meant to destablize Cuba before Trujillo would call for the Organization of American States to organize an “intervention” to “pacify the Cuban upheavel”. Finally, defections in the air force and military would allow key airfields to receive thousands of anti-communist mercenaries airlifted from the Dominican Republic. (Escalante, pg. 22-23)

With Morgan and Menoyo playing along, Cuban intelligence and military loyal to Fidel lured the counter-revolutionaries into a trap. They sent the signal to Trujillo’s Foreign Legion that the Trinidad Airport was secured. Escalante writes:

At approximately 7:00 in the evening a C-47 transport plane flew over the airport. Minutes later it landed quickly and stopped in the middle of the runway without shutting down its motors. When the door of the plan opened, out stepped the familiar pudgy figure of Father Velazco, who was immediately greeted by shouts of “Viva Trujillo!” Soldiers disguised as peasants created the illusion of popular support. The priest, moved, saluted from the staircase to several officials who applauded him. A short distance away, the scene of machine guns and artillery shells gave the impression that a fierce combat had taken place the night before. (Escalante, pg. 27)

Father Velazco seemed convinced that all was according to plan and reported back to Trujillo. Trujillo approved the next stage of the plan, but for whatever reason, was slow to commit the entirety of the foreign legion. Escalante posits that the disinformation may have been too effective, convincing Trujillo that he need not commit the entire force for an effort that was already succeeding. Regardless, another planeload of conspirators, weapons and documents were en route from the Dominican Republic. Escalante continues:

It was evident that the foreign legion was not coming. Therefore, the revolutionary leadership decided to end the game after capturing the aircraft… At around 8:00pm another C-47 flew over Trinidad. Aboard was Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Soto Rodriguez, pilot of the plan in which Batista had fled from Cuba… The special envoy sent by Trujillo… was Luis Del Pozo, son of the mayor of Havana during the Batista dictatorship…

Fifteen minutes later the plane landed. The party descended and, to the astonishment of everyone present, Del Pozo warmly embraced Gutiérrez Menoyo. They were old friends. “I come as Trujillo’s personal envoy,” Luis Del Pozo announced…

After a brief conversation, everyone headed toward the airport installation. It was the signal. The militia who were unloading the boxes of arms and ammunition sprang into action. The mercenaries found themselves staring into gun barrels. The copilot opened fire and a gun battle ensued which lasted more than 10 minutes. Two revolutionaries and two legionnaires were killed. The others were arrested…

On August 14, Fidel Castro appeared before the national television cameras and revealed the entire saga of the international conspiracy. ON that occasion, he remarked, “Trujillo is a freelance gangster, supported by the OAS.”

Thus ended the Trujillo conspiracy, the first major attempt to overthrow the Cuban revolution, which had all the classic characteristics of a CIA operation: internal insurrection, destabilization and mercenary invasion linked to an OAS maneuver with the complicity of the traditional allies of the United States in order to lend legitimacy to a military intervention with the “altruistic purpose” of pacifying the island. (Escalante, pg. 28-29)

While the Cubans had not captured thousands of anti-communist mercenaries as they’d hoped, the operation was a major success. Morgan and Menoyo were touted by Castro as double agents who had helped smash a counter-revolutionary conspiracy, though by the following years both would firmly engage in clandestine and armed struggle against the revolution. 

Escalante implies that the Trujillo operation was organized by the CIA. Though this does not necessarily hold up to scrutiny (the Latin American right-wing is perfectly capable of hatching and funding their own half-baked regime change conspiracies), the Second National Front would soon work directly with the CIA to launch an insurgency in the Escambray mountains. For propaganda purposes they were now heroes of the revolution. But in reality, it seems more likely that both had been flirting with counter-revolutionary conspiracy almost immediately after Batista fled Cuba.

Meanwhile, a large number of anti-communist Cuban militants were licking their wounds in Miami and Santo Domingo. Among them was the nephew of a former Batista Minister who had joined Trujillo’s Foreign Legion. He would soon join the CIA sponsored Brigade 2506 in Guatemala. Felix Rodgríguez would not have the opportunity to take part in Trujillo’s August 1959 invasion plot, but like many of the anti-communist Cubans of his generation, his career of anti-communist violence was only beginning.

By the fall of 1959, the Cuban Revolution was rapidly militarizing and preparing for a total break from American imperialism. Revolutionary Unity became Castro’s slogan for the process, which would see a hastening purge of anti-communists from Cuban political life. In the context of Cuban and Latin American history, anti-communism had repeatedly served as a pretext for purges of both reformists and revolutionaries, democratic political norms be damned. Anti-communism had the benefit of being a vague, malleable ideology which could easily shift from a democratic political atmosphere to that of dictatorship. This gave anti-communists an immense advantage when waging a counter-revolutionary campaign, particularly when in conjunction with the United States.

Militarization of the Cuban Revolution was intended to protect Castro as he prepared to radicalize the revolutionary process in ways that would bring forth the wrath of not only the Americans, but the entire Latin American bourgeoisie. While President Arbenz had played by the rules and lost miserably, Castro and the Cuban Revolution would survive decades of sabotage, assassination plots, and terrorist bombings by casting a wide net and taking no chances when it came to displays of anti-communism, even if expressed by those who had participated in the fight against Batista.

Huber Matos had been a 26th of July Movement supporter since the very beginning of the guerilla war, providing logistical and material support from Costa Rica before flying into the country to join the fight directly in March 1958. He was given command over a column and participated in the assault on Santiago at the end of the war. After the guerilla war, he was appointed military commander of Camagüey, the largest province in Cuba. However, Matos was among the growing number of anti-communists who were now publicly voicing their opposition to the direction of the revolution and demanding a purge of communists from the government.

Camagüey was of critical importance. In Anderson’s words: “Situated as he was in the wealthy, conservative heartland, Matos posed a real threat” (Anderson, pg. 416). In October of 1959, Matos resigned his post in protest of Raul Castro’s promotion to the head of the armed forces. An angry Fidel ordered the arrest of Matos. Fidel then publicly accused Matos and 15 of his subordinates of plotting an armed uprising.

According to Fabian Escalante, Matos had offered his support for a military revolt in order to leverage Castro into purging Communists. In early September, Matos, along with other anti-communist members of the government (including Humberto Sori-Morin and Manuel Artime, who would both participate in the CIA Bay of Pigs operation less than two years later), attended a party with First Secretary of the U.S. embassy, Edward C. Wilson. Escalante writes:

Sorí Marín, Matos and Artime retired to a back room in the house. They sat there comfortably and the conversation continued. Matos described the situation in the country as "unbearable-" "If we don't isolate the communists from the government and the command of troops, it will be the end of us. You’ve already seen how Fidel liquidated Urrutia and his new ministers in order to impose the Agrarian Reform Law, which is more communist than the one the Russians implemented,” he concluded. 

“We shouldn’t act precipitously,” responded Sorí Marín. “The Americans have asked us for a little patience. Fidel still has     significant popular support and many people are excited about the social measures taken by the government. We should think carefully about what we’re going to do. Artime has done magnificent political work in southern Oriente and there are other military commands that we can count on, when the moment arrives…  I’m only worried about whether the people will go out into the streets to defend Fidel and this will turn into a bloodbath…

Artime took advantage of the occasion suggesting, “We have to make our  decision before the Americans. The appropriate thing to do is launch a rebel movement and give the United States sufficient motivation to assume a belligerent position toward Castro… Then nobody can dispute our strength and we will be the ones selected to form the new government…”

(Escalante, pg. 34-35)

Again, it’s important to remember that Escalante is not writing as a historian, but rather a Cuban counterintelligence veteran writing down his version of the shadow war between the CIA and the early Cuban Revolution. 

In contrast, conservative historian Hugh Thomas described the episode as a passive challenge to Castro, the move of a principled anti-communist who could not bring himself to join in on the overtly anti-democratic, right-wing plots being discussed by other more genuinely counter-revolutionary figures in Cuban politics.

“The courage of Matos was admirable, though his passivity well expresses the weakness of the liberal opponents of the new course. They could not bring themselves to desert the Revolution; therefore, they could not desert Castro since Castro was the Revolution.” (Thomas, pg. 1,710)

Most English language accounts of the Huber Matos affair align with the Thomas Hugh narrative, though they offer few details to parse through. Thomas admits that many of those tried and given long sentences were genuinely involved in counter-revolutionary plots, either against the Revolution or in order to protect Batista era war criminals. (Thomas, pg. 1,730) But the evidence used in court to prove the specific accusation of treason was flimsy, mostly consisting of anti-communist statements and the transfer of a large amount of money from Manuel Urrutia to Matos, which the latter claimed to be for normal expenses. Thomas writes:

Possibly Matos had indeed done his best after midsummer to slow down the process of agrarian reform in Camagüey… and doubtless he was indeed an anti-Communist in touch with others of similar views in the leadership of the Revolutionary Government. Perhaps too Matos had attempted to appoint non-Communist officials in Camagüey but that was not a crime. Matos’s speech in his own defence at the end of the trial… was not published in the revolutionary newspaper. (Thomas, pg. 1,710)

 Given the context of anti-communist politics, an abundance of legitimate terror threats, acts of sabotage and counter-revolutionary plotting, it seems likely that Castro could not tolerate a popular anti-communist military commander situated in a wealthy province located in the heart of Cuba. In the weeks prior and after Matos’s resignation, there had been a number of air incursions and weapons supply drops piloted by anti-communist Cubans based in Miami. In some cases, the aircraft targeted sugar mills with bombs and, just days after his arrest, even strafed a passenger train in Las Villas. Of course, Matos had not yet taken up arms and had tendered his resignation, but surrounded by loyal anti-communist officers and supported by the wealthy cattle ranchers of Camagüey, Castro opted not to take chances. If Matos had tendered his resignation merely as an act of protest, it seems unlikely that he would’ve stayed out of the fight had destabilization efforts successfully sparked mass defections from Castro.

Nevertheless, the Matos affair remains one of the most controversial episodes in the early revolutionary process. Over the course of the Revolution’s militarization, some former Castro allies would be sent to the firing squad after taking up arms. Others were given lengthy prison sentences, or given the chance to leave Cuba ahead of a purge. The majority of these cases reflect genuine guilt or collusion with counter-revolutionary plots. Matos was spared the death penalty and sentenced to 20 years in prison, which he served before relocating to Miami. Of the aftermath Thomas writes:

The month of December 1959 therefore marks a critical stage in the revolutionary development of Cuba, when the government made plain that its enemies would not secure a fair trial. Every visitor to Cuba meantime testified that Castro’s popularity seemed in no way diminished among the majority of the population and, since North American democracy had itself degenerated into a popularity contest, this left Castro’s critics with little to argue about. For the Cuban masses, Castro still represented not only hope, however, but achievement. The cooperatives on the land were exciting novelties. Some land was being distributed. The cuts in rents, telephone and electricity rates had increased purchasing power, and as yet the ensuing inflation had not at all caught up with wages. The tariffs against imports from the US and the cuts in the travel allowance had hit the rich, not the poor. There had not been much change in rural unemployment, but free education and health for all was evidently now within reach, reducing the need for essential outlays by those who could least afford them. The law rumbled on ineffectively but at least, for the first time in Cuban history, not corruptly. The unfairness of treatment to counter-revolutionaries or suspected counter-revolutionaries seemed to the majority either justifiable, in an emergency, or perhaps a fair quid pro quo for generations of negligence, unthinking or conscious. (Thomas, pg. 1,731-32)

Castro supporters used procedural maneuvering, bolstered by genuine mass support, in order to win student union elections at the University of Havana, historically a center of armed middle class political violence, as Castro knew from his university days. At the University of Santiago, the second most important institution of higher learning, Che declared an end to autonomy for public universities. The state would now design the curriculum and attempt to train the specialists needed to modernize the country via central planning. They would train fewer lawyers, but more agronomists, teachers and industrial engineers. At the University of Las Villas, Che declared an end to an educational system designed to benefit the white middle class. Anderson quotes Che:

“The University… must paint itself black, mulatto, worker and peasant.” If it didn’t, he warned, the people would break down its doors “and paint the University the colors they like”. (Anderson, pg. 427)

In December and January, revolutionaries carried out a purge of anti-communists from the CTC, Cuba’s labor federation. Historically, labor had been the traditional base of support for the PSP. In 1947, the United States pressured the ruling Autentico party to purge the unions, a task which had fallen on Eusebio Mujal who employed Autentico affiliated gunmen to murder communists throughout the course of his 12 year tenure as the head of the CTC. (https://coldwaramericas.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/the20cold20war20and20organised20labour20in20batistas20cuba.pdf)

Now the tables had turned. Utilizing bureaucratic procedure rather than armed violence, and riding overwhelming popular support for Fidel, purge committees stacked with PSP members voted to expel anti-communists from key positions in labor, replacing them with Communists. Hugh Thomas writes:

This technique had been followed by Communist parties with equal success in Eastern Europe, and was the main contribution by the Cuban Communists to the establishment of totalitarian government in Cuba… (Thomas, pg. 1,736)

One wonders if the PSP were conducting themselves  in a less totalitarian manner than the anti-communists who had been straight up murdering communists since 1947, a practice which began under nominal democratic rule, a full five years prior to Batista’s second dictatorship.

Perhaps recalling the role of Latin American newspapers who had worked with the United Fruit Company and the CIA to spread disinformation about Guatemala, Castro followed with a purge of Cuba’s media. Right wing outlets were shut down, while others saw their editors replaced with individuals more sympathetic to the revolution. Anderson writes:

The newspaper takeovers were aided by the printers’ and journalists’ unions, which were in the hands of Fidelistas and were functioning as pro-government strike forces in the surviving private media outlets… Even in the Union of Graphic Artists, there was purging to be done; the Communist actress Violeta Casals… became the head of the union after her predecessor was accused of being a counterrevolutionary and fled the country. (Anderson. Pg. 434)

With the intensification of counter-revolutionary violence and foreign interference,  the revolution was taking a path vastly different than that of Guatemala’s Ten Years of Spring. The Cuban Revolution was top-down, with less popular mobilization and participation from the masses, and yet popular support hadn’t protected Arbenz from enemies in plain sight. Cuba’s Revolution would alienate the bourgeois and petit bourgeois classes with Castro’s theatrics and penchant for erring on the side of ruthlessness, but neither had moderation and legalism been able to win over anti-communists in Guatemala.

Could Arbenz’s Presidency have been saved by using more repression? Possibly. That Arbenz failed to enact emergency measures in time to protect the Guatemalan Revolution was not lost on the Cuban Revolutionaries. Both Castro and Arbenz had a popular mandate for the social reforms they implemented, but Castro was willing to alienate and disenfranchise the middle class minority in order to protect and enact those reforms.

In the eyes of Che and other revolutionaries, the alienation of moderate middle class Cubans was regretful, but necessary to secure Cuba’s independence and protect the gains of the Revolution. Jon Lee Anderson describes a tense meeting between Che and architect Nicolás Quintana in January 1960. Anderson writes: 

A close friend of his, a member of the Juventud Católica, the youth branch of the militantly anticommunist Acción Católica, had just been shot by a firing squad for distributing anticommunist leaflets.

Quintana went to see Che to complain. It was to be a shattering encounter. “Che told me, ‘Look, revolutions are ugly but necessary, and part of the revolutionary process is justice at the service of future justice,’ ” Quintana recalled. “I will never forget that phrase. I replied that that was Thomas More’s Utopia. I said that we had been fucked by that tale for a long time, for believing that we would achieve something not now, but in the future. Che looked at me for a while and said: ‘So. You don’t believe in the future of the revolution.’ I told him I didn’t believe in anything that was based upon an injustice.”

“Even if that justice is cleansing?” Che asked.

Quintana replied: “For those who die, I don’t believe you can talk of cleansing injustice.”

Che’s response was immediate: “You have to leave Cuba. You have three choices. You leave Cuba and there’s no problem from me; or thirty years [in prison], in the near future; or the firing squad.”

Dumbstruck and horrified, Quintana sat frozen in his chair.

“You are doing very strange things,” Che said.

“I didn’t say anything,” Quintana recalled, “but I knew what he was referring to. What surprised me was that he already knew, that really surprised me.”

Quintana belonged to a group of professionals who had formed an organization they called Trabajo VOluntario (Voluntary Work). It was ostensibly dedicated to carrying out civic works, but the group’s real purpose was to organize an anti-Castro opposition…

After Che’s warning, Quintana realized he was not going to be doing very much at all, and, within a few weeks, he fled the island.” (Anderson. Pg. 436)

Chapter 4: Yanqui Terror

1960 saw the already tanking US-Cuban relationship take a nosedive. In January, Cuba nationalized large cattle plantations and the last of the privately owned sugar plantations in the country. Vice-President Nixon threatened to cut the US sugar quota, to which Castro responded by nationalizing the last large landholdings still remaining in private hands. 

In February, Soviet Ambassador Anastas Miyokan arrived in Cuba for a Soviet trade fair. Over the course of three weeks, hundreds of thousands of Cubans attended the fair to view models of Soviet homes, workplaces, recreation centers and even a replica of the famed Sputnik satellite. The event coincided with an announcement that the Soviet Union had agreed to purchase 500,000 tons of sugar that year, with a pledge to subsequently purchase a million tons each following year. Cuba would receive payment in the form of Soviet consumer goods and oil. Low interest credit was also available to finance Cuba’s industrialization plans. 

Fidel had struggled to secure arms from the US, the UK and other countries, but his ongoing talks with the Soviet Union had so far avoided the topic of requesting weaponry. The ongoing CIA bombing campaign continued unabated, with regular nighttime raids launching from airstrips located in the United States. With plantations burning across the country, the Soviets noted surprise that Castro had not yet asked for military aid. 

On March 4th, 1960, a ship carrying weapons purchased for Cuba’s self-defense docked in Havana Bay. Fidel had managed to purchase a limited amount of weaponry from Belgium and Italy, despite pressure from the United States. Shortly after docking, however, the French freighter La Coubre suddenly exploded. Che, Fidel, Raul and several other revolutionaries rushed to the harbor only to witness a second explosion from a mere 300 hundred feet away. With debris falling from the sky, Raul forced an enraged Fidel to evacuate. Che rushed toward the ship, refusing to seek safety and asserting that after the second explosion, it was unlikely there would be a third. It’s possible that Che suspected what had happened immediately. A likely sabotage operation at the hands of the Central Intelligence Agency.  Anderson writes:

It was carnage. Up to 100 people had been killed-mostly stevadores, sailors and soldiers-and several hundred others had been injured… The next day, he and Che linked arms at the head of a funeral cortege… Later, while Fidel gave a speech-in which he invoked a new battle cry, Patria o muerte!...

Not long after the La Coubre incident, Fidel asked Alexandr Alexiev to meet with him… “For the first time” Alexiev said, “Fidel spoke of arms. He said that after the explosion, the American intervention might be inevitable, imminent. ‘We have to arm the people,’ he said”… (Anderson, pg. 442-443)

At the funeral for the blast victims, Castro invoked the memory of the U.S.S. Maine, whose mysterious explosion allowed war hawks to push for the United States to declare war on Spain and occupy Cuba. It was here that he first uttered the words that would become an official slogan of the revolutionary government: Patria o muerte! (Homeland or Death!) (https://www.marxists.org/history/cuba/archive/castro/1960/03/05-mar-1960.htm)

The United States vigorously denied responsibility for the explosion, but the Cubans were not convinced. To this day, no definitive proof exists linking the CIA. The results of an internal investigation by the French company that owned the ship were kept from the public and the records passed on to a private foundation after the company was dissolved. The existence of the files was made public in 1995, though the file itself was prohibited from publication for a period of 150 years. (https://cuba-solidarity.org.uk/news/article/1995/cia-attack-on-la-coubre-files-restricted-for-150-years)

Whatever questions remained as to responsibility, The La Coubre incident compelled Castro to prepare for an inevitable invasion by the United States. Khrushchev received a formal request for arms and immediately dispatched a military delegation to Havana. Fidel, Che and Raul led the Cuban side of the talks. They requested antiaircraft weapons, tanks, planes; exactly the type of hardware required to fend off an all out invasion. On May 8, diplomatic relations were formally reestablished between Cuba and the USSR. Soon, Soviet military advisors and shipments of equipment would begin to arrive in Cuba. 

Up to this point, the United States’s attitude toward Cuba was characterized by divergent perspectives of the State Department, hostile but open to talks with preconditions, and the Central Intelligence Agency, which independently ran sabotage operations and assassination plots against Cuba. Within a week of the La Coubre explosion, several more attacks were launched by counter-revolutionary forces, including an air hijacking and shooting attack on a pro-Revolution journalist in Florida. (Escalante, pg. 160) While talks between Cuba and the Americans would resume via backchannels on and off again throughout the 60’s, the relationship between the two countries would remain ice cold.

In March, mere weeks after the La Coubre incident, US President Eisenhower approved a CIA plan to arm and train anti-communist Cubans for a Guatemala-style invasion and disinformation campaign against the Cuban Revolution. CIA Director Allen Dulles had, in fact, already signed off on agency efforts to topple the revolution and install a US-friendly government. As in Guatemala, coup plots organized by local or regional actors such as Trujillo had failed on several occasions, prompting the United States to go beyond support for counter-revolutionary operations and take a more active, leading role in organizing plots.

In January, Tracy Barnes, head of the CIA’s Cuba Task Force, had assembled a team consisting of several veterans of the Arbenz coup operations. During Operation Success, the CIA plot against Arbenz, Barnes worked as a CIA case officer organizing logistics and hiring agents and assets to work on the ground. Several members of the new Cuba Task Force were previously hired by Barnes for Operation Success, including Howard Hunt and David Atlee Phillips. Hunt, who would later be convicted for his part in the Watergate scandal, had been hired by Barnes to lead the CIA’s disinformation and propaganda efforts in Guatemala. Among Hunt’s efforts included funding and organizing a “Congress Against Soviet Intervention in Latin America”, as well as planting hundreds of false articles for publication in newspapers throughout Latin America. (Schlesinger and Kinzer. Pg. 166) Barnes and Hunt would later hire Phillips, a former actor, to produce the radio broadcasts that disseminated false information in the weeks before Arbenz’s resignation. (S and K, pg. 167)

The working group quickly identified a key obstacle to their goal: Fidel Castro’s popularity and the massive popular support for the Cuban Revolution. Compounding this challenge was the lack of a serious anti-communist leader that could unite the splintered anti-Castro forces. Howard Hunt strengthened existing ties with Batista allies and other counter-revolutionaries who had fled to Miami. Tracey Barnes and Frank Bender (the alias of CIA agent Gerry Droller) focused their recruitment efforts on anti-Communists who had opposed Batista. (Escalante, pg. 43) Several Cubans were identified as possible replacements for Castro in a post-coup situation, including Tony Varona, former President of the Cuban Senate, as well as defectors Manuel Artime and Pedro Diaz Lanz. As no single faction or figurehead seemed capable of representing a legitimate anti-communist government in exile, the agency instead opted for a compromise. Former Batista allies would take charge over military affairs and Batista opponents would take over political operations. Though his position would be contested by rivals scheming their rise in a post-coup Cuba, Tony Varona’s business and mafia contacts in the US and Cuba earned him the spot of future leader. (Escalante, pg. 46)

A day after the La Coubre explosion, the Cuba Task Force disseminated its proposed outline for the operation:                    

a. The creation of a responsible and unified Cuban opposition to the Castro regime located outside of Cuba.                    

b. The development of means for mass communication to the Cuban people as a part of a powerful propaganda offensive.                    

c. The creation and development of a covert intelligence and action organization within cuba which *would be responsive to the orders and directions of the exile opposition.

d. The development of a paramilitary force outside of Cuba for future guerrilla action. (Escalante, pg. 45)

On March 17, 1960, Eisenhower approved the plan, now known as Operation 40. By April, the CIA was organizing a network of safehouses and staging areas for recruits to launch operations. By May, David Atlee Phillips was operating a radio station broadcasting disinformation into Cuba from abroad, 24 hours a day. (Escalante, pg. 47) In June, the first anti-communist Cuban recruits arrived for training in Florida. However, in order to create distance and plausible deniability, the CIA requested permission from Guatemalan President Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes to establish a training camp in Guatemala. In Cuba, a number of underground organizations were coalescing around various factions of the anti-Communist movement. One of these organizations was the Movimiento de Rescate  la Revolución. The MRR was directed from Miami by Manuel Artime. The network recruited former July 26th fighters and enjoyed a network of support from Havana. The MRR, along with other rival anti-communist networks, worked directly with the CIA to escalate their operations against Castro. (Anderson, pg. 449-450)

The membership of these networks leaned wealthier and whiter than the average Cuban. The growing community of anti-Castro Cubans lamented the loss of the island to communism. Nearly 60,000 had abandoned Cuba by spring of 1960. Many assumed the United States would intervene as they had in Cuba and other Latin America republics many times before. 

Most Cubans, however, supported Castro and his direction of the Revolution. In just over a year, Havana had practically transformed from a city of segregation, vice and inequality to a hotbed of revolutionary enthusiasm and social transformation. The hotels were no longer the domain of the American gangster and “yanqui” tourists; they were replaced with international trade delegations, revolutionaries, artists and intellectuals from abroad. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir arrived in February of 1960. Days after the La Coubre explosion, the two walked the streets of Havana where de Beauvoir described a fund-raising campaign organized in support of the revolution:

“Young women stood selling fruit juice and snacks to raise money for the State… Well-known performers danced or sangin the squares to swell the fund; pretty girls in their carnival fancy dresses, led by a band, went through the streets making collections. ‘It’s the honeymoon of the Revolution,’ Sartre said to me. No machinery, no bureaucracy, but a direct contact between leaders and people, and a mass of seething and slightly confused hopes. It wouldn’t last forever, but it was a comforting sight. For the first time in our lives, were witnessing happiness that had been attained by violence.” (Anderson, pg. 447)

While popular support for the Castro government remained high for the next several years, the leadership began signaling that the hardened nature of the revolution would continue and that collective hardship would be required in order to achieve full independence. On March 23rd, Che gave a speech titled “Political Sovereignty and Economic Independence”, where he laid out the situation. Despite the successful seizure of political power, Cuba could not be fully independent until it achieved economic independence. Progress had been made via the nationalization of land and business interests, as well as populist economic measures such as rent and price controls but, in Anderson’s words, “the island’s oil, mineral, and chemical wealth was still in the Americans’ hands.” (Anderson, pg. 447) He emphasized the radical nature of the revolution and the necessity of “destroying the roots of evil” in Cuba. He informed Cubans that workers of the CTC were contributing 4% of their paychecks to support industrialization of the country. Anderson writes:

“Lately, Che had been driving home the point that Cuba was no longer just Cuba. It was the revolution, and the revolution was the people; going one step further, the people, Cuba, and the revolution were Fidel. It was time to get on board the new ship of state, or get off. Just as the men of the Granma had put aside their individual lives, read to die if necessary in the war against Batista, so now did all Cubans have to sacrifice for the common aim of total independence. The enemy might well retaliate, he warned. And when the counterrevolutionary soldiers came-paid for perhaps by those same monopolies whose interests  were being affected-Cuba would be defended not by a handful of men but by millions. All of Cuba was now a Sierra Maestra, and together, Che said, quoting Fidel, “we will all be saved or we will sink.” (Anderson, pg. 447)

The following month, Che published Guerra de Guerillas, or Guerilla Warfare, a field manual for conducting guerilla operations. Adapting his experiences fighting Batista’s forces in the Sierra Maestra, Che outlined his theories:

1. Popular forces can win a war against the army.
2. It is not necessary to wait for the conditions to be right to begin the revolution; the insurrectional foco [guerilla group] can create them.
3. In underdeveloped Latin America, the armed struggle should be fought mostly in the countryside. (Anderson, pg. 448)

Che further elaborated on specifics, such as building tank traps and setting up salt production facilities whenever guerillas were located near the sea. He emphasized positive working relationships with local peasants. Individual acts of terror, a common characteristic of Cuba’s violent political history, were rejected; executions were reserved for situations involving egregious cruelty or treason. Anderson elaborates:

A small band of men and women living in the wilderness and struggling against all odds, fighting and dying together on behalf of the poor and the downtrodden-this was Che’s idealized foco. It was an almost biblical notion. Over the coming years the foco theory was to be tested again and again, not least by Che himself, and the efforts almost always ended catastrophically. The very success of Cuba’s revolutionary experience worked against most future attempts to replicate it. Governments in the region were forewarned and forearmed, and in the coming years, with direct U.S. military and intelligence support, they demonstrated a grimly successful determination to quash Cuban-style insurgencies at the embryonic foco stage. (Anderson, pg. 449)

Che’s writings on guerilla warfare would be studied by guerillas and counter-insurgency forces alike in the coming decades. For now, however, the Cuban revolutionaries had closely studied Guatemala and other US-backed regime change efforts throughout the world. Cuban intelligence proved highly effective at penetrating anti-communist cells and plots, both in Miami and in Cuba itself. A month after Eisenhower approved a covert war on Cuba, Castro became aware of the CIA’s recruitment activities and publicly condemned the United States. Responding to Fidel’s statement that Cuba was not another Guatemala, Midguel Ydigoras Fuentes accused Cuba of planning a guerilla invasion of Guatemala, a statement without foundation in reality. Diplomatic relations between the two countries were broken on April 25.

On May 1st, the May Day celebration in Havana became a show of force, with armed militia fighters, many recently armed and trained, parading through the Plaza de la Revolución. Here, Fidel officially stated what many had suspected. There would be no elections since there was already so much popular support for the revolution. As Jon Lee Anderson describes it, the crowd cheered and repeated the phrase: “Revolución Sí, Elecciones No!” (Anderson, pg. 450)

The Revolution was estimated to have 50,000 in it’s armed forces, plus another 50,000 citizen militia members. In the weeks after the May Day rally, revolutionary forces shut down the last opposition newspapers in the country. In September, Fidel announced the creation of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, a network of civilian neighborhood organizations designed to ensure the implementation of revolutionary measures and safeguard their communities from counter-revolutionary forces. Denounced as vigilantes by its detractors, the CDRs would become an important pillar of support for the Cuban Revolution and play an important role in preventing the anti-communists from gaining a solid foothold in Cuba. Nonetheless, anti-communist guerillas armed by the CIA would continue to operate in remote regions of Cuba, though never achieving mass popular support that Fidel’s guerillas achieved during the war against Batista. Anderson writes: 

In early October, a group of armed Cubans and an American were captured in Oriente after a gun battle with government troops, and a few days later Cuban soldiers captured a cache of weapons and ammunition dropped by a CIA plane in the Escambray mountains. There were now as many as a thousand rebels in the Escambray, sustained by CIA airdrops of arms and supplies. They were being helped on the ground by the American expatriate mercenary William Morgan and one of his old comrades, the ex Second Front warlord Jesus Carreras. Having learned well the lesson of his own ordeal in the Sierra Maestra, Fidel ordered the army and the militias to carry out a mass evacuation of the area’s peasantry to isolate the rebels from sources of food and intelligence. Before long, most of the rebels, among them Morgan and Carreras, had been either wiped out or captured and shot by firing squad, although the Escambray would remain a focus of counter-revolutionary activity for several more years. (Anderson, pg. 461)

In the United States and Mexico, Frank Bender and Howard Hunt were aggressively searching for and meeting with representatives of the 184 different Cuban anti-communist organizations in existence. (Rasenberger, pg. 190) The anti-communist movement was plagued with bickering between rival factions. The CIA agents flaunted cash and promises of support from an unnamed “powerful company”. The anti-communist cubans were not fooled by the cover and took to referring to the agents as members of the “Cuban Invasion Authority” (Rasenberger, pg. 203).

Despite difficulties managing bickering factions, the CIA ultimately forced a merger between Manuel Artime’s MRR and the Tony Varona faction, creating the Frente Democrático Revolucionario. Jim Rasenberger, author of The Beautiful Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America's Doomed Invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs, writes:

Frente was to be a “front” in the political sense, as a unified opposition, but also in the covert sense, as a facade for the CIA. The agency would operate behind the scenes, paying the bills and pulling the strings, as Frente drummed up Cuban support and pretended to lead a legitimate homegrown rebellion. (Rasenberger, pg. 201)

With these reorganizations under the CIA’s management, the Cuban  anti-communist movement followed a similar path to that of Guatemalan anti-Communists during the Arbenz era. There too, the anti-communists had initially operated independently, resulting in infighting and dozens of failed plots against Arévalo and later Arbenz. There too, anti-communists resented the loss of independence and increased influence of the CIA on the direction of their movement, but embraced the Americans nonetheless, hoping, perhaps, that Cuba would, in fact, become another Guatemala.

By May, the first volunteers were moved by speedboat in the middle of the night to an island off the coast of Florida. Here, the recruits were subject to psychological and idealogical testing, along with basic military training. They were later moved to a US military base in the Panama Canal zone. There, 150 of the first recruits trained for two more months before relocating to Retalhuleu, Guatemala. More recruits would arrive, following a similar screening and training process as the initial batch, but despite a pool of nearly nearly 100,000 exiles arriving in Florida, the number of viable volunteer fighters remained low. Jim Rasenberger writes: 

The men’s second surprise, after realizing they were in Guatemala, was discovering how few others were there with them. In Miami, Frente officers gave recruits the impression that hordes of exiles were already at the camp. That turned out to be an exaggeration. “When I got there,” recalled Máximo Cruz, who arrived in August, “I realized they did not have thousands of people. There were probably three or four hundred.” Cruz was disappointed. “But I said, ‘Well, I’m here.’ (Rasenberger, pg. 229)

The Cubans training in Guatemala were designated “Brigade 2506”, named after the serial number of a deceased recruit who perished during a training accident, the first casualty of their mission to topple Castro. Their presence became an irksome reminder of Guatemala’s colonial status as a client of the United States. Ydigoras Fuentes had invited the CIA and anti-communist Cubans without consulting the military high command. Now the Americans were regularly flying foreign fighters in and out of a major airstrip constructed in the middle of the country. The Guatemalan army contained some left-wing elements, but Ydigoras Fuentes alienated officers of all political backgrounds through rampant nepotism, the promotion of incompetent loyalists and rising corruption.

These factors led to the military revolt on November 13, 1960. Demanding Ydigoras’ resignation, 120 officers commanding 3,000 soldiers seized positions in Zacapa and the eastern region of the country. Michael McClintock writes:

True to the traditional style of their revolt, a military coup in defence of institutional military interests, the officers refused to bring civilian supporters into the fray, and according to one account turned away a group of 800 peasants who appeared at the gates of the Zacapa base requesting arms to support the revolt.

At the time, the participants apparently saw their action in entirely non-ideological terms. Many of these leaders were graduates of US counter-insurgency courses, including the two who became most famous, Lieutenant Luis Turcios Lima and Marco Antonio Yon Sosa, who subsequently became the driving force in Guatemala’s later Guerilla movement… Yon Sosa, who had been trained at Fort Gulick in the Canal Zone, said later that “At the time [they] had no distinct ideology. That is why we talked with people on the right and left - anyone who was in agreement with toppling the Ydigoras government. (McClintock, pg. 59-60)

In August of 1960, Richard Bissell, Director of Plans at the CIA, met with the Director of Security Sheffield Edwards to discuss plans to assassinate Castro. In what is considered one of the more bizarre and embarrassing chapters of the covert war against Castro, the CIA was about to contract the hit to the mafia. 

While exact details regarding who initiated the plan are hazy, Bissell later wrote that while he merely signed off on the plan and moved it up the chain of command, he supported it and the plan was adopted. Before month’s end, the agency made initial contacts with the Mafia via Robert Maheu, a former FBI agent working as an independent contractor on retainer for the CIA. He met with Johnny Rosseli of the Chicago Outfit, the crime organization formerly run by Al Capone, now run by Sam Giancana. Rosseli represented Giancana’s extensive business interests, both legitimate and illegal, in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Rasenberger writes:

At the Brown Derby, Rosselli initially laughed at Maheu—“Me? You want me to get involved with Uncle Sam?”—but quickly warmed to the idea of a mob hit on Castro. A man thought by the FBI to be personally guilty of at least thirteen murders, Rosselli was not opposed to violence on principle, and in this case, Maheu told him, he’d be helping his country. This appealed to Rosselli. He may have had ice in his veins, but his blood ran red, white, and blue. He just needed some assurance this was on the level—not some phony setup by the feds. Maheu promised to introduce him to someone from the CIA who could confirm the deal’s authenticity. Rosselli agreed to cooperate. And so began one of the stranger episodes in the history of the CIA. (Rasenberger, pg. 207)

The following month, Rosselli met with CIA operative James O’Connell, who offered $150,000 for the hit. Rosselli declined the payment, calling himself a patriot and agreeing to assassinate Castro for free. 

The operation was coming together, though serious concerns remained regarding the viability of the anti-communist forces on the island, both due to factional fighting and incompetence. The revolutionaries had been effective at infiltrating cells and intercepting boatloads of weapons and personnel into the island. Brigade pilots stationed in Guatemala were attempting air missions to resupply anti-communist forces in Cuba, but the drops often missed their landing zones and proved ineffective. Voices such as that of Director of Plans Richard Bissell came to the realization that the plan for a guerilla uprising would not be enough to spark a general uprising against Castro, neither in the military or Cuban society as a whole. 

In October, retired Air Force Major Henry Aderholt met with Brigadier General of the Alabama Air National Guard, Brigadier General George Reid Doster. Aderholt was working for the CIA and invited the General to join a plot against Castro, requesting the use of the 117th Tactical Reconnaissance Wing, a unit of pilots with experience flying B-26 bombers. General Doster replied: ““You’re finally going after that commie son of a bitch… Mister, you’ve got yourself an air force.” (Rasenberger, pg. 241)

That same month, the CIA secured an agreement with Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, who had previously participated in the coup against Arbenz, to offer airfields for the American B-26 pilots to operate from. With an airstrip in Guatemala for Brigade 2506, and an airbase for the Alabama National Guard pilots in Nicaragua, the scope of the plan was changing. Rather than infiltrating and gradually growing the insurgency within Cuba, the CIA had adopted a new strategy: an amphibious invasion of Cuba.

Chapter 5: The Bay of Pigs

The fall of 1960 was election season in the United States, with Cuba a topic of high priority for the campaigns of Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. On October 20, one day prior to the final televised debate, newspapers reported that Kennedy had publicly advocated for military action, including support for anti-communist Cuban militants, stating: “...these fighters for freedom have had virtually no support from our government”. (Rasenberger, pg. 230)

The news infuriated Nixon, who was aware that CIA director Allen Dulles had briefed Kennedy in July and again met with the candidate as recently as September. It remains unclear if Dulles had, in fact, disclosed the existence of the CIA operation against Castro.

In anycase, Kennedy had caught Nixon in a trap. Knowing full well that the administration was engaged in a shadow war against Cuba, Nixon was unable to defend himself from the attack without compromising the operation. Addressing the Kennedy campaign’s statement during the debate, Nixon stated:

“I think that Senator Kennedy’s policies and recommendations for the handling of the Castro regime are probably the most dangerously irresponsible recommendations that he’s made during the course of this campaign.… I do know this: that if we were to follow that recommendation, that we would lose all of our friends in Latin America, we would probably be condemned in the United Nations, and we would not accomplish our objective. I know something else. It would be an open invitation for Mr. Khrushchev to come “in, to come into Latin America and to engage us in what would be a civil war, and possibly even worse than that.” (Rasenberger, pg. 232-233)

Whether Kennedy had prior knowledge of the operation or how he received such knowledge remains unknown. The result was twofold: 1) deep embarrassment for Nixon in the final weeks of his campaign, contributing to his loss 2) A victorious President-elect Kennedy was now publicly committed to a hardline policy against Fidel Castro.

On January 28, 1961, barely a week into his presidency, Kennedy and his top advisors were briefed on the CIA’s Cuba operation by Allen Dulles and Tracy Barnes. The plan was to establish a beachhead to last for two weeks to 30 days. During this time, the United States would organize a military occupation of Cuba via the Organization of American States. (Rasenberger, pg. 276)

Kennedy requested an analysis of the plan by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A week later, on February 2, Kennedy received the report. Rasenberger quotes Arthur Schlesinger, historian and advisor to Kennedy, and his assessment of the Joint Chiefs Report as a “peculiar and ambiguous document”. Rasenberger goes on to quote the report’s absurdly unclear conclusion:

“In summary, evaluation of the current plan results in a favorable assessment,” the report concluded. “[T]he Joint Chiefs of Staff consider that timely execution of this plan has a fair chance of ultimate success and, even if it does not achieve immediately the full results desired, could contribute to the eventual overthrow of the Castro regime.”

The use of that innocuous word “fair” to describe the operation’s chances had been inserted at the direction of General Earle Wheeler, Gray’s immediate superior. Wheeler believed the evaluation had to include some kind of overall, easy-to-grasp assessment. It turned out to be the most misunderstood word in the entire report, a one-syllable triumph of bureaucratic equivocation over clarity. Just what did “fair” mean? Gray later offered that, in his opinion, it meant the operation had about a 30 percent chance of success —that is, a 70 percent chance of failure.…” (Rasenberger, pg. 279-80) 

Over the coming weeks, a number of Kennedy advisors would inform him of their concerns over the plan. Thomas Mann, a State Department official working of his own volition, penned a memo outlining his criticism of the plan. Rasenberger writes:

Mann attacked what he took to be the operation’s underlying assumption, as stipulated in the JCS report. An operation pitting an army of fifteen hundred against an army of two hundred thousand made sense only if a mass uprising against Castro occurred; and the kind of mass uprising required was unlikely. (pg. 306)

At the end of January, factional disputes prompted hundreds of Brigade volunteers to resign, accusing the United States of favoring the pro-Batista faction. The splinter was brief, but reflected growing frustrations within the shaky anti-communist coalition. On March 11, Richard Bissel reported to Kennedy and his advisors that the Brigade volunteers were growing impatient. His report stated: ““It will be infeasible to hold all these forces together beyond early April…Their motivation for action is high but their morale cannot be maintained if their commitment to action is long delayed.” (Rasenburger, pg. 314) Bissel further cited a follow up report from the Joint Chiefs of Staff urging immediate action. He glossed over the less optimistic sections of the report, including the concerns of a Lieutenant Colonel who estimated the Brigade Airforce’s chances of a successful surprise attack on Cuba’s air force at a mere 15%. 

Bissel described alternate scenarios and contingency plans. The main thrust of the plan was to shock Cuba and Castro similarly to the way Castillo Armas’s invasion shocked Guatemala and Arbenz. With Cuba’s air force destroyed by brigade bombers, brigade infantry would establish a beachhead in Cuba. Uprisings throughout the country would allow the anti-communist coalition’s political leaders to fly into Cuba and invite the United States to intervene. Bissell did not mention that the CIA’s board of estimates had warned him a day before that Castro was firmly in control of Cuba and the armed forces.

Kennedy and his advisors remained concerned about the visibility and scope of US involvement of what they would portray as a purely Cuban initiative. Bissell offered a contingency that may have swayed Kennedy off the fence. If the initial invasion goals failed or were only partially achieved, the brigade would enter the Escambray mountains and wage a prolonged insurgency against the government. Kennedy agreed to go forward with the plan, but with modifications: “It sounds like D-Day. You have to reduce the noise level of this thing.” (Rasenburger, 321)

Kennedy instructed Bissell to return with a quieter plan. Over the next several days, the CIA attempted to modify the plan according to Kennedy’s wishes. Rather than a spectacular daytime assault, the invasion would take place at night and conclude by dawn. The beachhead landing location was also changed to Bahía Giron, or The Bay of Pigs. The location was more remote and less densely populated, theoretically harder for Cuban militia and armed forces to defend, but also much further away from the Escambray Mountains. Bissell, however, failed to inform Kennedy that the new location effectively removed the fallback option of retreating to the mountains. (Rasenberger, pg. 328)

Not discussed in these meetings was the involvement of the American mafia. Thus far, the alliance between the CIA and organized crime had failed to assassinate Castro. The previous October, Sam Giancana requested the CIA’s assistance to determine whether his girlfriend, the popular singer Phyllis McGuire of the McGuire Sisters, was engaged in a romantic affair with comedian Dan Rowan. Perhaps concerned with Giancana’s habit of openly discussing his deal to assassinate Castro, the CIA planted a listening device in Rowan’s hotel room. The bug was discovered, but the FBI dropped its investigation at the request of the CIA. (Rasenberger, pg. 331)

In March of 1961, one month before the Bay of Pigs invasion would begin, the CIA provided Johnny Rosseli and Sam Giancana with Botulinum toxin pills, delivered via Robert Maheu. The pills were designed to dissolve in water. The Botulinum would slowly kill Castro a few days after ingestion, by which point the assassin would be gone.

Tony Varona agreed to use his contacts in Havana to carry out the hit. For $10,000, a waiter at a restaurant frequented by Castro would carry out the poisoning. (Rasenberger, pg. 333) The money and pills exchanged hands, but the hit was never carried out. According to Fabian Escalante, the CIA had sequestered the political leadership of the Cuban anti-communists in the lead up to the invasion, in order to prevent intelligence leaks to Cuba’s intelligence agency, the G-2. The CIA relayed the order to Robert Maheu, who relayed the order to Santo Trafficante, who was unable to relay the message to Tony Varona, due to his sudden relocation to the CIA safehouse, leaving him unable to contact Havana. (Escalante, pg. 85)

In the months leading up to the invasion, Cuban intelligence, army and militia members continued to fight against counter-revolutionary forces within Cuba, as well as infiltration teams of anti-communist Cubans working with the CIA. These efforts successfully intercepted weapons deliveries, halted assassination attempts on revolutionary leaders and arrested anti-communist militants. Cuban intelligence agents were able to infiltrate plots with great success, in part due to the poor operational security of the US based anti-communist Cuban organizations, as well as the mass participation of Cubans in the CDRs, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. The sprawling community network provided eyes and ears throughout the island, providing the G-2 intelligence with the information needed to defend the country.  

Not all plots were foiled in time, however. In one particularly cruel act, anti-communist forces set off a bomb at a girl’s school in Havana. The explosion injured nine, including a nine year old girl who lost an eye. (Shetterly, pg. 465)

In the Escambray mountains, the Cuban military and popular militia waged a counter-insurgenncy campaign against anti-communist guerillas supplied by the CIA. Felix Rodriguez was among the Brigade fighters trained in Guatemala who was selected for advance infiltration teams to enter Cuba and coordinate with existing anti-communist cells. The selected Brigade members were moved to a separate training camp in Guatemala where they received specialized training in espionage, assassination and sabotage from Eastern European anti-communist militants. Accompanied by a Ukrainian and Romanian crew, Rodriguez and his team were given the task of assassinating Castro with a high precision sniper’s rifle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cBa8QS7M7U, 3:58) , but the plan was discarded after failing three separate attempts to rendezvous off the coast of Cuba. Finally, the advance infiltration teams snuck onto the island in mid-February. They began to receive and distribute weapons throughout the Escambray and Las Villas regions with the goal of creating a central chokepoint to isolate revolutionary forces on either side of Cuba. (Anderson, pg. 478)

The backbone of the Escambray insurgency were former members of the Second Front, though by this point several of their most prominent members had been arrested or forced to flee the country. Among the captured was the American and former Second Front commander William Morgan.

Morgan had aligned with Castro during the early revolution, but had soured on the revolution due to land reform and nationalizations of private property. Despite the popularity of the measures, socialist policies were too much for El Americano to bear. By June of 1960, Morgan was working with his former Second Front colleagues to overthrow Castro. By summer’s end, Second Front veterans had taken to the Escambray mountains, their former stronghold during the struggle against Batista, to take up arms against Castro. In Cienfuegos, supporters of the anti-communist guerillas raised money and obtained supplies for the counter-revolutionary struggle. The local Catholic Church took part in the fundraising campaign, and in at least one instance, a cache of dynamite was found in a local church. (Shetterly, pg. 442)

William Morgan continued to support the Cuban Revolution in public, while secretly funneling weapons to his anti-communist comrades. The revolutionary government had recently established a bullfrog hatchery started by William Morgan. Shetterly writes: 

By mid to late September, Morgan had begun moving arms into the Escambray. He used the Jeeps issued to him for his river repopulation work for INRA. The weapons, for the most part, had been secreted away by the men of the Second Front after the fight against Batista. Others were left over from the Trujillo affair and had been shipped to Cuba a year earlier from the United States and the Dominican Republic. Now Morgan and his men packed the guns into fifty-gallon metal drums, drove them into the mountains, and buried them near his frog farm on the Hanabanilla River for later use.

As the plan expanded, Morgan brought in more men. Menoyo counseled the American to choose only the men he trusted most, but Morgan allowed “the government to provide him with bodyguards, perhaps thinking that by using state bodyguards he would appear to be fully supportive of the government. Maybe he even thought that he could convince the men that his way was the better way. One of his bodyguards was a young man named Cecilio Castro (no relation of Fidel’s), a new member of the nascent Cuban Intelligence Service, or G-2. (Shetterly, pg. 446-447)

In October, before they could flee for the Escambray mountains, Morgan and his associates were arrested. From the fall through the spring of 61, the Cuban army and popular militias combed through the mountains hunting for guerillas. In March of 1961, Morgan and Jesus Carreras were executed for their part in the Escambray insurgency. While the “Struggle Against Bandits”, as Castro described it, would continue on sporadically for the next several years, the Cuban revolutionary forces had greatly reduced the capacity of the Escambray guerillas to threaten the government. 

Weeks later, on April 4, President Kennedy convened a meeting of advisors, the joint chiefs, the CIA, and U.S. Senator William Fulbright. Richard Bissell laid out the final plan. When asked what contingencies were in place if the Brigade failed to establish a beachhead, Bissell responded: 

“It’s unlikely, but we have a contingency plan.” He turned to Hawkins, who handed him a document. Bissell pointed at the Bay of Pigs on a map. 

“If they can’t hold on here, they’ll move into the mountains here”—he pointed to the Escambrays—“and form guerrilla units which we can resupply by air. That’s the worst that can happen.” (Rasenberger, pg. 362)

Despite a widespread unease with the chances for operational success, the skeptics in the room supported the notion that the window for action against Castro was closing. Only senator Fulbright, who had no prior knowledge of the operation until this meeting, voiced open opposition during the session. 

Over the next few days, several US navy vessels, including the aircraft carrier the USS Essex, conducted unusual drills in the straits of Florida, located outside of their normal patrol routes in the Atlantic. Days earlier, sailors on the Essex noted a large quantity of 250-pound bombs, unknown personnel and hundreds of caskets being loaded onto the ship. Adding to the intrigue, Skyhawk fighters descended from the sky to land on the aircraft carrier. The presence of heavily armed marines further raised suspicions that the crew would be engaged in a major operation. (Rasenberger, pg. 407) Rasenberger writes: 

“Nothing made so indelible an impression on the men as what happened soon after. The ships came to a stop and several men were lowered over the sides to paint over the numbers on the bow, as a bosun hung a piece of gray canvas over the ship’s name on the fantail. Then, most remarkably, the U.S. flag was lowered from the mast. “You tell people that happened,” said Bruce King years later, “and they say, ‘Oh, no, the United States did not do that.’ But they did.” (Rasenberger, pg. 408)

On April 13, brigade fighters and their CIA associates flew into Nicaragua to prepare for D-day. Marine Lieutenant Colonel Jack Hawkins, upon conducting his final review of the Brigade troops, cabled his assessment to Jacob Esterline of the CIA. Rasenberger writes:

“These officers are young, vigorous, intelligent and motivated with a fanatical urge to begin battle for which most of them have been preparing in the rugged conditions of training camps for almost a year,” he wrote. “Without exception, they have utmost confidence in their ability to win.… I share their confidence.” The brigade ground forces were “more heavily armed and better equipped in some respects than U.S. infantry units.” (Rasenberger, pg 422)

The Cuban revolutionary leadership was aware that an invasion was imminent, due in part to the fact that many anti-communist Cubans in Miami were openly talking about an imminent invasion, as well as news in the press. Though newspapers such as the New York Times withheld details regarding the imminence of the operation, most reports made no secret of the plot’s existence. Castro nervously awaited the attack from his command post in Havana, assigning Raul Castro and Che Guevara to take command of defense in the east and west respectively. Militia and soldiers patrolled possible landing sites throughout the coastline. 

While Fidel was reportedly nervous and smoking heavily in the days before the invasion, Guevara felt more confident in their position. The revolutionary army had expanded and armed itself with Soviet weaponry, in addition to some high quality U.S. military equipment leftover from the Batista era. The regular armed forces were backed by large numbers of popular militia and G-2 intelligence efforts were bolstered by the enthusiastic participation of civilians in the CDRs, effectively creating a massive intelligence network. Guevara was so confident of their chances for victory, he told the Soviet ambassador of his belief that the CIA and counter-revolutionaries would call off the attack. (Rasenberger, pg. 423)

Days later, the Brigade airforce began bombing Cuba. Anderson writes: 

…in the predawn darkness of April 15, Sofia, the Guevaras’ nanny, awoke to the frightening nonise of diving airplanes and exploding bombs. She ran into the hall and called to Che. Still shirtless, he emerged from his bedroom. “The bastards have finally attacked us,” he said.

From a window they watched the flashes and explosions; planes were bombing the airfield at nearby Campamento Libertad. Che’s escolta were running around wildly, yelling and waving pistols. Che shouted out the window, “I’ll shoot the first man who fires!” and they calmed down. Within a few minutes he had driven off with them. They went to Pinar del Rio, his secret battle station for the invasion. (Anderson, pg 483)

The eight B-26 bombers were flown by the pilots of Brigade 2506. CIA intelligence gave them their targets: three airfields housing the Cuban airforce of thirty-six aircraft, half of which were operational. By destroying all or most of these aircraft, the Brigade infantry would be free to establish a beachhead at the Bay of Pigs.

While the brigade bombers would have the element of suprise, they could not destroy all their targets in a single pass. After a few passes, anti-aircraft batteries would activate and any Cuban aircraft not yet destroyed would be in the air. B-26 bombers were slow and typically protected by formidable rear guns. The CIA, however, had removed the tail gun turrets to reduce fuel consumption. 

The pilots were skilled and well-trained, but they had never experienced real combat. The previous fall, they had dropped bombs on defenseless Guatemalan soldiers who lacked anti-aircraft or air support. But again, Cuba would not be Guatemala. 

The bombers were divided into three groups, Gorilla, Linda, and Puma, each targeting a different airfield. The first two groups completed their sortie with little damage, but Puma encountered anti-aircraft fire from newly installed four barrel guns from Czechoslovakia. All three bombers were hit. One was relatively unscathed and able to return to base. Another was forced to make an emergency landing, while the third crashed, killing both pilots.

Meanwhile, a ninth aircraft separate from the three groups made it’s way towards Miami. Though it had taken off from Nicaragua as well, it’s mission was not that of combat, but deception. Prior to flight, the plane had been repainted in Cuban colors and riddled with bullets. The pilot, Mario Zuniga, had reluctantly accepted the mission on condition that he be allowed to return to take part in combat. The CIA had instructed Zuniga to radio Miami International Airport to request an emergency landing. Upon arrival, he was taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Naturalization. Rasenberger writes:

Almost certainly, INS had been contacted by the CIA and already knew why Zuniga was there, but they played gamely along. While refusing to divulge the name of the pilot, the INS soon released his statement: “I am one of the twelve B-26 pilots who remained in the Castro air force after the defection of Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz and the purges that followed,” the statement began. “Three of my fellow pilots and I have planned for months how we could escape from Castro’s Cuba.” That morning, after becoming concerned that their plot was about to be revealed, the conspirators had decided to act. At 6:00 A.M., Zuniga’s statement claimed, he had taken off from San Antonio de los Baños and flown over to Libertad, where he and the other pilots dropped bombs and strafed planes with machine guns, taking on fire from ground artillery. As he returned to strafe his own airfield at San Antonio, his co conspirators attacked other Cuban airfields. (Rasenberger, pg 440)

Zuniga’s performance failed to convince those present. Journalists who inspected the aircraft noticed that the guns had not been fired, as the tape protecting the barrels from dust remained intact. In addition, The plane’s nose was made of a different material and the guns mounted differently from those of the Cuban airforce. (Rasenberger, pg. 442)

At an emergency session of the United States General Assembly later that day, the Cuban Ambassador, Raul Roa, accused the United States of orchestrating the bombings and subsequent ruse in advance of an invasion. David Atlee Phillips, who had proposed and planned the fake defection, watched the proceedings as U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevens vigorously denied the charges. Phillips, an admirer of Stevens, felt guilty at the realization that the Ambassador had been misled. (Rasenberger, pg. 463)

That evening, fourteen hundred brigade infantry sailed towards Cuba. The ships departed from different locations in order to avoid notice, set to rendezvous shortly before the invasion would begin. Brigade morale had been boosted by news of the successful air raids early that morning. By the next morning, however, the CIA received the first U-2 spy plane images of Cuba’s airfields. Of the 18 operational aircraft, almost half remained airworthy, including the most advanced and dangerous aircraft. They hoped subsequent raids could destroy the remaining planes. However, follow-up raids were canceled until the morning of April 17, the day of the landing. The delay unnerved the brigade pilots, who nonetheless assured themselves the operation would still succeed. Rasenberger quotes a brigade pilot officer:

“He particularly recalled a comment one of the Americans had made to him on the evening of April 14 as they watched the brigade ships steam away from Puerto Cabezas. “We’re gonna have Cuban pilots who don’t speak Spanish and who have blond hair and blue eyes taking care of us,” the adviser told Ferrer. “We can’t lose.” (Rasenberger, pg. 476)

CIA case officer Grayson Lynch accompanyied the invasion force and recalled feeling a “sudden sinking sensation” upon learning that the follow-up raids were canceled for “political considerations”. Rasenberger continues:

His last assignment had been in the jungles of Laos as captain in the 77th Special Forces Group. It was exactly this extensive combat experience that made Lynch so concerned now. He knew the golden rule of amphibious landings: to control the beach, you must first control the air. Canceling follow-up strikes made no sense.

Lynch kept his concerns to himself. And like the Cubans serving alongside him, he believed in the power, the goodness, of his country. “Until April 1961,” he wrote, “the United States had never lost a war, and above all had never deserted a friend.” (Rasenberger, pg. 477)

 The lull in airstrikes gave Cuban intelligence and the military the time they needed to prepare for the coming invasion. Additional soldiers and militia were mobilized and thousands of suspected counter-revolutionaries were arrested and detained for the duration of the crisis. On the evening of April 16, Fidel Castro made a fiery speech at the funeral of the Cubans killed during the air raids, comparing the attack to Pearl Harbor. He warmed Cubans to prepare for an imminent invasion backed by “Yankee planes, Yankee bombs, and Yankee weapons.” Most importantly, Castro unequivocally stated the direction of the Cuban Revolution, declaring: “This is what they cannot forgive: the fact that we are here right under their very noses. And that we have carried out a socialist revolution right under the nose of the United States!”

Castro concluded his remarks by invoking the iconic slogan coined in the aftermath of the Le Coubre explosion: Patria o Muerte!

Kennedy and his advisors were feeling the heat from the press, as questions mounted regarding the peculiar details of the supposed “defection” from Cuba. Zuniga’s name had been withheld from the press, citing concerns for the pilot’s family, despite the fact that the Cuban air force would have quickly figured out if their own pilots had gone missing. If not, they undoubtedly would have recognized his face in the photo published in the news. Chaos compounded the ongoing miscommunication going on behind the scenes, as Adlai Stevens was informed that he had been lied to. More advisors complained to Kennedy, who at the last minute decided to cancel the April 17 morning air raid. The brigade invasion force of 1,400 infantry, five tanks, 24 trucks and 11 construction vehicles would need to complete their landing and secure a beachhead before dawn, or else they’d be totally exposed to Cuban air power. 

The landing would occur at three separate beaches on the Bay of Pigs. The area was beautiful, but remote. Construction for beach resorts had recently started, but the area was still sparsely populated. There were three narrow roads that joined the area to the rest of Cuba. The brigade would secure the roads with their heavy weapons and vehicles, creating a deadly choke point, what the CIA hoped would be a meat grinder for Castro’s troops. What was to happen next remained as vague as it had been months earlier: With the beachhead and roads secure, anti-Castro Cubans would rise up around the country and throw Cuba into chaos. The U.S. Navy was prepared to distribute 30,000 rifles to a spontaneous uprising that was unlikely to happen. Once the objectives were achieved, the provisional government would arrive and call for US intervention. But without air superiority, the beachhead could not be fully secure, even if they successfully completed the landing by dawn. To complicate matters further, the shallow waters housed coral reef, natural barriers that would likely trap the ships before reaching shore. Brigade members had warned about possible reef in aerial photographs taken a few days before the landing, but the CIA assured them they were mistaken.

An advance team of frogmen, infantry equipped with scuba gear, encountered the reef. Worse, the supposedly vacant landing zones were “lit up like Coney island”. (Rasenberger, pg. 518) The beaches were filled with construction workers having a lively celebration. Finally, one of their signal flares malfunctioned and ignited, revealing their position. A Cuban jeep arrived to investigate. One of the frogmen, the American Grayston Lynch, opened fire on the Cubans and radioed the the brigade ship Blagar for fire support. The element of surprise had been lost. Rasenberger writes:

The frogmen were still preparing the beach when three trucks, headlights off, approached. Lynch and the others took cover. A couple of dozen militiamen jumped from the trucks. They were local residents, charcoal makers who earned their livings from the swamps. Like tens of thousands of Cubans, they had been called up to their militias to prepare for war—and war is what they now got. The frogmen opened fire; the militia returned it. The Blagar, just three or four hundred yards offshore, swung broadside to the beach and joined in with its .50-caliber guns. The air came alive with bullets passing in the night. Tracer fire flashed over the beach, visible to the men on the ships thousands of yards out at sea, where they were preparing for the landing. In ten minutes the blazing guns of the Blagar cleared the beach. The militia retreated into the darkness. (Rasenberger, pg. 521)

As the rest of the landing ships approached the shore, they became lodged in the reef. Rather than a Normandy style landing directly on the beaches, the ships were stuck 75 ft away from the shore, forcing the brigade infantry to stumble awkwardly through 75 ft of water and reef. While the militia were in retreat, the brigade began the impossible task of unloading the rest of their heavy equipment. It was 1am and dawn was just hours away. 

Castro didn’t receive word of the attack until 2:30am, as the nearest phone line to Playa Giron was an hour away. He called José Ramón Fernández, an Army captain, and ordered him to take command of 900 highly skilled militia cadets, most of whom had just completed their training, and proceed directly to the invasion site. At 3:30am Captain Enrique Carreras was sleeping in the cockpit of his aircraft when he was awoken and told  that Castro was on the phone. Rasnberger writes:

“Castro seemed to understand instantly what the enemy was attempting to accomplish. He could not let the brigade establish a beachhead; a beachhead was a foot in the door—a door through which Americans would gladly enter. The key to stopping the invasion in its tracks was not the infantry—which could be dealt with later—but the ships. A student of military history, Castro understood that without ships, there could be no supplies, and without supplies, there could be no sustained beachhead.

To Captain Carreras, he gave explicit instructions: “Chico, you must sink those ships for me,” he said. “Don’t let those ships go.” Carreras promised to do his best” (Rasenberger, pg. 537)

Meanwhile, Radio Swan, the CIA’s radio station run by David Atlee Phillips, broadcast appeals to Cubans to rise up, take arms, and seize major roads and rail lines. Similar broadcasts had sowed confusion and anxiety during the Guatemala coup, but Phillips would not experience repeat success in Cuba.

As dawn arrived, the brigade were bogged down at all three beaches and engaged in fierce fire fights with Cuban militia. CIA case officer Rip Robertson, another veteran of the Guatemala coup plot, was embedded with the brigade.. Robertson accompanied the most inexperienced of the brigade troops, whose experienced commander was also losing his nerve and hesitating to give the order to leave the transport ship, prompting Robertson to shout “Look mister, it’s your war and your country, not mine… If you’re too scared to land and fight, then stay here and rot.” (Rasenberger, pg. 547)

Shortly after, a Cuban B-26 appeared in the sky. The brigade troops mistook it for an ally, until the aircraft unleashed its machine-guns on the brigade landing craft. More Cuban airforce planes followed. One of the fighters, a Sea Fury piloted by Captain Enrique Carreras, fired its rockets at the U.S.S. Houston, scoring a direct hit on the ship’s hull. Another rocket struck the stern and disabled the rudder. The Houston, which was carrying an additional 200 brigade troops, was on fire and taking on water. And it was only 6:30am.

In order to avoid sinking, the Houston lodged itself into a sand bar 400 hundred yards from the shore. The majority of the crew and infantry made it to shore, but they were now over 5 miles away from their intended landing site. After encountering Cuban militia, they retreated and hid for the next three days. 

Things were going better for the brigade troops at Playa Giron, where most of the heavy equipment arrived on land by 8:30am. The Cuban air force planes, however, continued to wreak havoc on the brigade. Anti-aircraft weapons provided some cover, but the brigade found it difficult to differentiate between Brigade and Cuban air forces. Both were flying B-26s, excellent craft for attacking ground targets, but less useful for dogfights. This proved advantageous to the Cuban air force, who could focus on hitting brigade ships and infantry. Both air forces were working in shifts, returning home to rearm and refuel, then immediately flying back to the battlefield.

The CIA hoped to establish an airstrip in Cuba to resupply and refuel their aircraft more quickly, but this depended on the delivery of a massive amount of fuel. The Rio Escondido was the largest of the brigade supply ships, carrying two hundred barrels of airplane fuel, ammunition for 10 days, and massive amounts of food, radios and other supplies. Just before 9:30am, Enrique Carreras returned to battle and targeted the Rio Escondido with his Sea Fury. Rasenberger writes: 

Carreras came out of the sun from the east. He leveled to three hundred feet, firing all four of his wing-mounted rockets. The first three overshot and hit the sea. The fourth hit the forward deck, not far from where the barrels of aviation fuel were held—and where twenty tons of incendiaries were stacked. The captain ordered the crew to abandon ship. Men scrambled into boats, or they jumped into the water and swam.

And then, all at once, the Río Escondido exploded: a vast, fiery eruption sending debris hundreds of feet into the air and shock waves shuddering across the water. Sixteen miles away, at Red Beach, Rip Robertson heard the explosion, then saw the mushroom cloud rising. He radioed Grayston Lynch. “What the hell was that?” When Lynch told him the Río Escondido had just exploded, Robertson’s first reaction was almost relief. “For a moment, I thought Fidel had the A-bomb.” (Rasenberger, pg. 557-558)

Local militia harassed the brigade equipped only with small arms. Their efforts delayed the landing and by 10am, the war on the ground intensified. The brigade expected Cuban reinforcements would reach Playa Giron first. Brigade paratroopers landed 20 miles southeast and took up positions in the town of San Blas. Here, they could halt reinforcements from linking up with militia at Playa Giron. 

At Playa Larga, the brigade moved inland to link up with paratroopers holding the town of Palpité. However, the brigade pilots had panicked upon encountering the Cuban air force and dropped the paratroopers over a swamp far, from their drop zone. Their radios, weapons and ammunition were sinking into the swamp, leaving the paratroopers ineffective and unable to secure the town. The brigade received word that the militia trucks were approaching Playa Larga instead of Playa Giron, bypassing the paratrooper choke point at San Blas. The brigade halted their advance on Palpité, took up ambush positions, and opened fire on the militia convoy. The chokepoint worked and the brigade held the road, but it wouldn’t matter. The remaining supply ships were pulling out and headed for the open ocean, along with their cargo of ammunition, equipment and supplies.

By mid-afternoon, revolutionary forces attempted to take the road, sending hundreds of militia armed with rifles and mortars, traveling on the sides of the road to escort the trucks. The brigade was outnumbered, but deeply entrenched and backed by their own mortars, bazookas and tanks. The brigade was also equipped with white phosphorus shells, a particularly gruesome substance that ignites at extremely high temperatures and is extremely difficult to put out. After 20 minutes of intense fighting, Brigade aircraft appeared in the sky and attacked Cuban militia. The B-26s unleashed their machine-guns and dropped their bombs, inflicting heavy casualties. The Cuban airforce arrived and opened fire, ultimating taking down another two aircraft. 

The battle subsided until the evening, when the militia fired over 200 rounds of artillery on brigade positions. After midnight, the artillery stopped and Cuban army tanks began lumbering down the road. All hell broke loose as revolutionary forces attempted to break the chokepoint, taking heavy losses from brigade bazooka and tank fire. The fighting raged for hours. At 3:30am, the brigade began firing white phosphorus mortar shells indiscriminately, setting everything and everyone in its path ablaze. One brigade commander compared the sound of burning men screaming in pain to the sounds of hell. (Rasenberger, pg. 587)

The battle lasted through dawn, when the revolutionary armed forces began to withdraw. They had taken massive casualties, but the brigade were close to the breaking point. After taking in the situation, the brigade pulled back and retreated to the beach.

The brigade was low on supplies and food. Some wanted to dig in and wait for resupply. One suggested heading for the Escambray mountains. Had the landings occurred at the original landing site at Trinidad, that may have been feasible. But the Escambray mountains were nearly 80 miles away from Bahia Giron. 

A day and a half since the landing and few of the CIA’s objectives were completed. A third of the brigade infantry were ineffective due to mishaps, and the rest were cut off from supplies. Cuba's best aircraft were still intact and the brigade failed to establish an airstrip for resupply. Brigade pilots, exhausted from nonstop 500 hundred mile flights, were losing morale. On the afternoon of the 18th, the CIA flight instructors took over combat duties from the exhausted and demoralized pilots. Agency contractors Connie Seigrist and Doug Price joined the remaining brigade pilots to drop napalm over revolutionary armed forces.

The revolutionary armed forces of Cuba were temporarily halted, but continued their push down the road and towards Playa Larga that evening. Brigade officers radioed for supplies and air cover. Admiral Burke asked Kennedy for authorization to use American air and naval power to take out Cuba’s air force and tanks. Under pressure, Kennedy eventually approved limited air cover to support the B-26s. American jets would escort the brigade B-26s for exactly one hour, from 6:30am to 7:30am. This window would allow brigade ships to land, unload their remaining supplies and evacuate wounded. 

In the early morning hours of the 19th, six brigade B-26s took off from Nicaragua. The pilots and crew included eight Americans, a mixture of CIA contractors and Alabama Air National Guard. They arrived at the rendezvous point expecting to join six US air force jet fighters. Instead, they were intercepted by the Cuban air force. Someone had screwed up. American air support arrived an hour late due to a time zone error. The brigade lost another two aircraft. Though the exact individuals responsible for the error remain unclear, Rasenberger leans towards the US Navy, citing the burning of ships logs by the Captain of the U.S.S. Essex. (Rasenberger, pg. 658)

    Within hours of the failed air mission, and with the brigade air force severely depleted, the Cuban armed forces began a final push to take the beaches. They secured San Blas at 10am, clearing the last choke point. U.S. Navy vessels were expecting orders to engage Cuban forces and rescue the brigade, who were frantically radioing for support. After 1pm, they received orders to begin evacuation. There was to be no engagement with Cuban armed forces except in self-defense. (Rasennberger, pg. 668, 671) 

By mid-afternoon, the brigade’s final defensive position collapsed. Nearly out of ammunition and severely exhausted, they destroyed whatever weapons and equipment they couldn’t carry and began a chaotic retreat. U.S. vessels approached the beaches, where they came under fire from Cuban tanks. No shells hit, but landed close to the ships. Narrowly averting an escalation into direct combat with Cuba, the US ships turned and retreated. The brigade was completely abandoned. Rasenberger writes: “They stood and watched the American ships go. A few of the men lifted their guns, pointed them at the stern of the departing ships, and pulled the triggers to register their displeasure. The ships, of course, were too far away. The bullets, like most at the Bay of Pigs, were fired in vain.” (Rasenberger, pg. 680)

Over the next few days, hundreds of scattered brigade members would attempt to link up with comrades or be rescued by the Americans. Many would die of wounds. Some were never heard from again. Those captured were gathered in a P.O.W. camp at Playa Giron and photographed by international journalists. 

Felix Rodriguez watched the failure of the invasion unfold from his safe house in Havana. He had spent the past several weeks preparing local anti-Communist assets to plunge the city into chaos during the invasion. According to his autobiography, Shadow Warrior, he listened to CIA broadcasts claiming that his comrades had taken the main highway leading to Havana. The reports were false. He then realized how badly the operation was going when his assets were rounded up one by one. Several found refuge at the residences of diplomats from bourgeois governments, but most were ultimately arrested by Cuban counter-intelligence. Rodriguez realized the uprising was a complete failure and sought refuge at the Venezuelan embassy. He eventually secured safe passage to Miami in the fall of that year, from which he immediately resumed terror operations against Cuba, smuggling assault rifles, explosives and anti-tank weaponry, supplied by the CIA. (Rodriguez and Weissman, pg. 87-92, 104-105), https://archive.org/details/shadowwarrior00rodr/page/92/mode/1up)

The battle of Playa Giron was lost, but the shadow war would continue for decades. 

The Bay of Pigs disaster was a major humiliation for the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency and President Kennedy. Of the 1,500 brigade infantry and paratroopers involved in the beachhead operation, 114 were killed and 1,200 captured. On April 20th, President Kennedy admitted US involvement in the catastrophe, but denied the extent to which the invasion was an American run operation. (Insert Kennedy Audio for duration of quote)

I have emphasized before that this was a struggle of Cuban patriots against a Cuban dictator. While we could not be expected to hide our sympathies, we made it repeatedly clear that the armed forces of this country would not intervene in any way.

Any unilateral American intervention, in the absence of an external attack upon ourselves or an ally, would have been contrary to our traditions and to our international obligations. But let the record show that our restraint is not inexhaustible. Should it ever appear that the inter-American doctrine of non-interference merely conceals or excuses a policy of nonaction-if the nations of this Hemisphere should fail to meet their commitments against outside Communist penetration-then I want it clearly understood that this Government will not hesitate in meeting its primary obligations which are to the security of our Nation! (https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/american-society-of-newspaper-editors-19610420)

The American public would largely accept Kennedy’s narrative. Publicly, he claimed sole responsibility for the invasion’s failure. Privately, he was frustrated at the poor advice he’d received from nearly everyone involved, most of all the CIA. Anonymous sources soon leaked the role of the CIA in overselling the invasion. (Rasenberger, pg. 714) Within a year, Richard Bissell and Allen Dulles were quietly ousted from their posts at the CIA. Many of the CIA case officers involved in the invasion blamed its failure on Kennedy’s timidness and concern for public perceptions. Howard Hunt would remain vocally anti-Kennedy until his death nearly a half-century later. Anti-Communist Cubans similarly regard Kennedy with virulent scorn.

In the immediate aftermath of the Bay of Pigs disaster Kennedy ordered two escalations in the Cold War. One was an order to create a Pentagon Task Force on Vietnam. According to Rasenberger, Vietnam had not yet become a major concern for US foreign policy. The direct consequence of the task force was the growing involvement of the United States in bolstering the anti-Communist government of South Vietnam. (Rasenberger, pg 707) The other order was to escalate the covert war against Castro, what would eventually become known as Operation Mongoose.

In Cuba, support for the revolution was strengthened by victory. Before the invasion, Castro and the revolution enjoyed mass popular support. After the invasion, Castro could boast that the Revolution’s resilience secured Cuba’s sovereignty. The American Empire, which had subverted Cuban independence after 1898, and again helped to roll back the gains of the 1933 revolution, had failed miserably. Equally important, the Cuban capitalist and petit bourgeois classes were irreparably weakened. Cuban intelligence and a mass network of working class informants and militants had thwarted the key component of the Bay of Pigs invasion. A mixture of popular support, mass recruitment, and robust counter-intelligence neutralized the networks that could have plunged the whole of Cuba into chaos at the critical moment of foreign invasion.

In the fall after the Bays of Pigs disaster,  Kennedy appointed John Bell ambassador to Guatemala with the goal of modernizing the country into a stable, prosperous,  bourgeois democracy. This was part of a larger initiative known as the “Alliance for Progress''. The “Alliance” ostensibly sought to modernize Guatemala and other Latin American countries along democratic, anti-commmunist lines. But just as Ydigoras Fuentes failed in his attempt to create a democratic, anti-communist republic, Kennnedy’s contradictory twin goals of democracy and anti-commmunism would result in an increasingly politicized military and, ultimately, the ascendence of fascist dictatorship in Guatemala.

Would the United States and the Cuban anti-communists have succeeded in toppling Castro had Kennedy more fully committed to providing air support? Possibly. The revolutionary militia and armed forces of Cuba took heavy casualties and likely would have sustained many more, had the Cuban air force been wiped out in the days before the beach landing.

If we examine Operation: PBSuccess, neither battlefield victory, nor Anti-communist incompetence, proved the decisive factor in toppling Jacobo Arbenz. Both the Guatemalan and Cuban Revolutions boasted widespread popular support. But Arbenz’s lack of resolve in the face of perpetual putschism, literally dozens of coup plots in less than a decade, left the entire revolutionary movement vulnerable. Guatemala 1954 wasn’t only a coup. It was the beginning of a violent purge that targeted communists, labor activists and indigenous plantation workers. 

While the middle class and student movements continued to challenge the counter-revolutionary regime through protest and civic engagement, left leaning military officers and, later, the Guatemalan Communist Party established armed guerilla organizations, in large part inspired by Che and Fidel. Marco Antonio Yon Sosa and Luis Augusto Turcios Lima fled Guatemala after the November 13 rebellion was crushed, but they would return to the country in 1962 under a new flag and name, both of which reflected inspiration from Castro’s 26th of July Movement. Movimiento Revolucionario 13 (Trece) Noviembre, or the Revolutionary Movement of November 13th.

For all the problems that would develop as a result of Castro’s consolidation of power, the Cuban government and Cuban people retained most of the gains of the Cuban Revolution after 1959. This could not be said of the independence struggles of 1898 or the revolutionary movement of 1933, where the keys to the country were twice handed to the United States, first by the national bourgeoisie, then later by the emerging Cuban petit bourgeoisie. Castro had learned not only from Guatemala, but Cuba’s own history of revolutions that surrendered to the American Empire.

In the coming decades, the world would erupt in a series of revolutions, uprisings, national liberation and independence struggles, each playing out according to local conditions and history. From Cuba to Guinea-Bissau to Palestine to Vietnam, revolutionaries were learning from and inspiring each other to wage struggle against oppressors.

Anti-communist and fascist political networks were strengthening their international ties, both in the right-wing dictatorships that openly embraced them and liberal democracies that simply looked the other way. The world revolutions were faced with a world counter-revolution. Both Cuba and Guatemala were about to be thrust into the front lines of the global struggle for national liberation. Both would become victims of some of the most ruthless counter-revolutionary violence of the 20th century.

On the next episode:

The United States continues the covert war against Cuba, while Guatemala erupts in 60’s radicalism and guerilla activity. As Cuba experiments with building socialism from above, Che Gueuvara leaves Cuba to foment revolution abroad. Amidst a growing worldwide wave of decolonization, Juan Jose Arevalo returns to Guatemala to run for president against Ydigoras Fuentes. And in the midst of the CIA shadow war, backchannel negotiations between Fidel and JFK are cut short by at least one mysterious assassin’s bullet.

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