Paul Rigby Wrote:All change - Cuba has oil!

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/oil-discovery-could-put-cuba/story.aspx?guid=%7BCEFFF0B7-7F17-4005-B1D9-1F9A958950F7%7D&dist=msr_1

Now we really will see some serious thought given to invasion.

Paul

Charles Drago Wrote:...
The forces that were burning assassination teams hunting Castro benefited from Castro's survival in power....

Adele Edisen Wrote:Paul and Others,

For whatever it's worth, I remember sales of shares being sold in New Orleans to a company which claimed oil had been found in Cuba - on land or in the sea, I don't know. I saw the stock certificates that belonged to someone I knew who had purchased shares. This was while Castro was fighting the Batista forces before he gained charge of Cuba in 1959.

Wasn't George H.W. Bush and his Zapata Oil (exploration?) Company operating in the Caribbean at the time (the late 1950s), possibly near Cuba?

Adele

Myra Bronstein Wrote:Very cryptic. How did they benefit Charles?

And why would they continue to send supposed assassination teams with poison pills, and invasion teams (e.g., Little Bay of Pigs,http://littlebayofpigs.com/) if they didn't want Castro dead?

Charles Drago Wrote:The benefits accrued to those elements of the military-industrial complex -- and the politicians who serviced them -- for whom the presence of a hemispheric bogeyman underscored their usefulness, generated economic profit, and preserved the Cold War fictive construct.

The staged attempts at invasion and assassination kept the low level muscle in line insofar as they catered to their appetites for vengeance and a return to power in a "liberated" Cuba.

Charles Drago Wrote:The benefits accrued to those elements of the military-industrial complex -- and the politicians who serviced them -- for whom the presence of a hemispheric bogeyman underscored their usefulness, generated economic profit, and preserved the Cold War fictive construct.

The staged attempts at invasion and assassination kept the low level muscle in line insofar as they catered to their appetites for vengeance and a return to power in a "liberated" Cuba.

Quote:Between ‘Arrogant CIA’s’ publication on October 2 and the Agency coup in Saigon on November 1, Starnes twice more launched savage attacks on the organisation. America had been here before, insisted Starnes, and the lessons were plain. But the Castro precedent he instanced was a very different story from the fairy tale version propagated at the time by the New Left (1), and mainstream historians ever since. Starnes refused to forget an inconvenient fact: Castro was armed, financed, and propagandised for, by the CIA. And, not content with installing him in Havana, the Agency had then covered Castro’s back for sufficient time to permit the “revolution’s” turn to the left, the turn that sucked the Soviet Union in, and brought the Cold War to within ninety miles of America’s shores – the very object of the exercise for the CIA, and the nation’s military-industrial complex. It was the perfect rejoinder to Eisenhower’s heroic labours for détente.

Sections of the US elite had supported ostensibly “revolutionary” insurrections throughout the nineteenth century. Between 1840 and 1852, “American filibusterers, devoted to the slave system, aided Cuban risings against Spain. President Fillmore issued a proclamation forbidding the organization” of such “expeditions on American soil and ordered the civil, naval, and military authorities at the ports of New York and New Orleans to prevent” them from sailing (2). Kennedy was to face the same difficulty in 1962-63 with the support of Cuban exile raiders by, most notably, Henry Luce and his Time-Life empire.

The United States government later adopted the tactic officially, supporting or fomenting “revolutions” in Hawaii, Panama, and Nicaragua (3). On the eve of the First World War, the US, in the war-by-proxy against Britain, the waning world hegemon for Standard Oil to control Mexican oil, organised the Madero revolt against Diaz; and later backed Pancho Villa against Huerta (4). The propaganda campaign for Villa saw him lionised in Hollywood. The father of William F. Buckley, the CIA officer who founded the National Review, was involved in an attempt to overthrow the Mexican government – again, for reasons of petropolitik – in the late 1920s.

In the immediate post-war period, genuine Cuban leftists, mostly notably in the trade unions, were systematically murdered or driven into exile. The campaign was exposed at the time .In November 1946, Hoy, the then paper of the Cuban Confederation of Labour (CTC), ran a photostat of two letters, the second of which, from Francesco Aguire to the AFL’s man in Chile, Bernardo Ibanez, dealt with the splitting of Latin American trade unions and a planned campaign to assassinate “anti-Yankee” labour leaders. “Some of Cuba’s outstanding labour leaders were assassinated in that period and a plot to kill Lazaro Pena, the head of the CTC, was uncovered” (5). The result, in Cuba, as elsewhere, was to create opportunities for the production and insertion of simulacrums of genuine leftists. Into this breach stepped a Jesuit-educated Catholic rightist called Fidel Castro. In January 1948, a Communist leader of the sugar workers, Jesus Larrondo, was shot dead by an army captain in Manzanillo. Among the mourners at the ensuing funeral was, on cue, the enduringly unmolested Fidel (6).

A “hidden hand” recurs so frequently in Castro’s rise to power as to render mainstream accounts silly. In April 1948, Castro participated in a pseudo-Communist revolt in Colombia launched in ostensible response to the CIA-orchestrated assassination of the Liberal presidential candidate, Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. According to a conservative Colombian paper, Castro and the rest of the Cuban delegation were quietly evacuated from the country by the Cuban embassy.

Among the US Embassy staff in Bogota at the time was Roy Rubottom (7), who subsequently reappeared in the Sierra Maestra bringing succour to Castro in 1957. Rubottom was instrumental in organising a briefing for a newly arrived US Ambassador at the hands of Herbert L. Matthews, the leading, though by no means sole (8), propagandist for Castro in the pages of the New York Times. One veteran of Central American politics – and at least one CIA coup attempt, in 1954, opposed by the then US Ambassador (9) – went so far as to describe Castro as a “fabrication” of the US press, which had “sold him to Latin America” (10). Matthews had earlier in his career displayed his commitment to freedom and liberty by acting as a staunch champion of Mussolini in his onslaught against Ethiopia (11). His subsequent championship of the democratically elected Spanish government in the war against Franco looks feigned, and born of an ulterior motive, presumably espionage. The Agency’s effective control of both right and left-wing Castro publicists is neatly conveyed by two figures, Hal Hendrix, and Jules Dubois. The latter was an asset (12), while the former gives every evidence of being a career intelligence officer (13).

Captured in the aftermath of the militarily stupid, but profile-raising coup attempt of July 1953, Castro was not executed on the spot because he fell into the hands of “a humane officer who ignored orders to summarily execute prisoners” (14). The same Batista regime that ordered the summary execution of the prisoners then acted in character by “unexpectedly” (15) releasing Castro into exile a mere fifteen months later (16).

In 1956, in response to pressure from Batista, and as prelude to deportation back to Cuba, the Mexican government ordered the arrest of Castro and his 26 July Movement. Again the “hidden hand” – the CIA’s – intervened to safeguard Castro. “Details of the deal between Castro’s group and the Mexicans remain unclear,” wrote one British obituarist of a former Mexican secret police chief, Fernando Gutierrez Barrios, who reportedly brokered the deal, but what is clear is that the seemingly unlikely friendship between the interrogator from the fanatically anti-Communist DFS – which in the 1970s ran a murderous anti-leftist death squad, the Brigada Blanca - and Castro, endured: “Guttierez visited Havana on many occasions, and when Casto attended the 1988 inauguration of President Carlos Salinas, he was personally attended by his former jailer. The two men even travelled to Tuxpan, in Veracruz, for a memorial ceremony at the spot where the revolutionaries embarked for Cuba” (17). The same obituarist, writing this time of Arturo Durazo, the DFS member who oversaw the investigation of Castro and his group, wrote vaguely of “political pressure” for the group’s release (18). That Carlos Prio, the multimillionaire ex-President of Cuba and acknowledged financier of the 26th July Movement, wrote an open letter to the Mexican President in support of Castro is not at issue (19). What is, is the sufficiency of this source in securing Castro’s release.

With Castro and his motley band safely restored to Cuban soil in December 1956, CIA money soon flooded in. Between “October or November 1957 and the middle of 1958, the CIA delivered no less than fifty thousand dollars to a half-dozen or more key members of the 26th July Movement in Santiago.” The funds were “handled by Robert D. Wiecha, a CIA case officer …who served in Santiago from September 1957 to June 1959” (20). In mid-October 1958, a senior figure within the 26th July Movement wrote to Castro detailing the extent of the CIA support in the US Embassy in Havana, and quality of the information that support gave: “I have been in contact with people close to the embassy. These contacts have told me that people who are on our side – but who do not appear to – have had conversations with the ambassador himself. I think this is the best possible, since we are kept up-to-date about everything happening there and of all the possible U.S. plans…” (21). New York Times reporter Tad Szulc knew of this support in 1959, but disclosed it only in 1986 (22). In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, the CIA undertook a limited hang-out, conceding to a few, favoured mouthpieces that, yes, there had been some limited supply of arms in this period, but from an “ex-“CIA man, Sam Cummings, whose Interarmco was a private venture. Cummings had reportedly supplied the arms used by the Agency’s Guatemalan proxies to overthrow the Arbenz government in 1954 (23).

In his testimony before a Senate Sub-committee on 30 August 1960, Earl T. Smith, the US Ambassador to Cuba from June 1957 to January 1959, complained of precisely this overt, and unbending CIA support within the Embassy for Castro (24). He drew this conclusion from his bitter experience at the hands of the Agency: “There is no advantage to the United States in sending an Ambassador to a country if the CIA representatives there act on their own and take an opposite position” (25). Among Ambassador Smith’s guests at the Embassy’s December 1957 Christmas party was a Senator from Massachusetts, whom Smith introduced as the man “who may very well be our next President” (26). Among his interlocutors before the Senate Sub-committee was Senator Thomas Dodd, nominally a Democrat, but a stalwart of both the China Lobby and the LBJ “network.”

Castro has long been fond of boasting of the number of coup and assassination attempts he has allegedly survived (27). Almost as fond, indeed, as the CIA has been in confessing its many failures. On the 46th anniversary of his coming to power, readers of one British broadsheet were solemnly informed that the “Cuban Ministry of the Interior has investigated 637 assassination attempts” (28). And yet the same leader has always been renowned as one of the most accessible rulers in the world, and thus “an easy target for assassination. Yet,” mystifyingly, “no public attempt was ever made against him anywhere” (29).

The CIA had a variety of purposes in mind for revolutionary Cuba. A key intention was to use Cuba as the launch pad and pretext for a series of “revolutionary” movements throughout Latin America that would in turn “compel” CIA intervention in the unfortunate countries concerned (30). The Caribbean, Central and Latin America would thus be remade in the desired US image, the region’s reformist and nationalist governments alike destroyed in favour of murderous militarised oligarchies and US finance. Castro’s government was to arrest previously supportive CIA men engaged in precisely such activity – in this early instance, against the government of Nicaragua – no later than April 1959 (31). Sihanouk offered a typically shrewd Asian encapsulation: “All the efforts of the CIA were aimed at implanting an armed political opposition inside the country so that we would have to beg for American arms to keep order…” (32).

The Bay of Pigs operation was at once a self-sabotaged trap and a smokescreen: the real CIA action in late April 1961 was against De Gaulle. Even elements of the wretchedly timid and censored British press were stirred to a muted observation or two (33).

Charles Drago Wrote:Another point: Keep in mind the electoral significance of Florida and its Cuban/anti-Castro voters over the past 45 years.

Absent the Castro issue -- not so much.

As The Beard fades to black, note how the second generation of gusanos distance themselves from the political passions of their forebears and replace anti-Castro political motivations with contemporary economic and social agendas.

Alpha 66 is more like Alpha 86 today. Off to the nursing camps, amigos.

Paul Rigby Wrote:Very good summary. To put a little flesh on the bone, as some or other actress once remarked to a man of the cloth, I hasten to add the following, as more or less first posted on the Education Forum, but minus the footnotes.

Cuban Smoke

Quote:Mr. Amery (Conservative: Brighton, Pavilion):

I have often criticised the CIA. I criticised the help which it gave to Nasser and to Fidel Castro in his early days.

Mr. Martin Flannery (Labour: Sheffield, Hillsbrough):

The right hon. Gentleman must be joking.

Mr. Amery:

I am not joking. The CIA gave real support to Castro in the early days. I have also criticised the part that it played, no doubt inadvertently, in the recent coup in Cyprus. But, whatever mistake our friends and allies may sometimes make, we must not forget that we owe the CIA an enormous debt. Anyone who has worked in a defence or foreign affairs department in Government will know how much we owe to the CIA for our existing security. The CIA has been the principal eye of NATO and it has often stopped situations from developing which could have been much to our detriment, and on occasions it has even succeeded in reversing them.

I greatly regret that our American friends should now indulge in this orgy of masochism over the CIA. I am sorry that the hon. Member for Harlow should be taking the pleasure of a voyeur while it all goes on.