The Invasion of Cuba: Never the Intention of JFK Hit Sponsors

[Adele Edisen]

All change - Cuba has oil!

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/oi...dist=msr_1

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

Paul

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]

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

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?

[Myra Bronstein]

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

Good point Adele. I don't know why I don't think of Cuba when I think of oil.

"Zapata Off-Shore concentrated its business in the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Central American coast in the late 1950s and early 1960s, according to Nicolas King's George Bush: A Biography. The US government began to auction off mineral rights to these areas in 1954. Drilling contracts in 1958 with the seven large US oil producers included wells 40 miles north of Isabela, Cuba (131 miles south of Miami), near the island Cay Sal. (Fidel Castro overthrew Cuba's Batista government in July 1959.) Zapata also won a contract with Kuwait. Bush was joined in Zapata by a fellow Yale Skull and Bones member, Robert Gow, in 1962. Zapata Offshore had four oil-drilling rigs operational by 1963: Scorpion (1956), Vinegaroon (1957), Sidewinder, and (in the Persian Gulf) Nola III.

By 1964, Zapata Off-Shore had a number of subsidiaries, including: Seacat-Zapata Offshore Company (Persia Gulf), Zapata de Mexico, Zapata International Corporation, Zapata Mining Corporation, Zavala Oil Company, Zapata Overseas Corporation, and a 41% share of Amata Gas Corporation."
http://www.answers.com/topic/zapata-corporation

[Jack White]

Scorpion...poisonous arthropod
Vinegaroon...poisonous giant spider
Sidewinder...poisonous rattlesnake
Bush...poisonous political snake

[Charles Drago]

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?

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.

[Myra Bronstein]

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.

Oh, yes, the bogeyman--the one indispensable entity. That does make sense. The same reason the alleged Bin Laden person is more useful allegedly shipping videos to the propagandameisters than he would be in custody.

[Charles Drago]

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]

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.

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

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).

Notes:

(1) For pretentious contemporaneous “New Left” nonsense in Britain entirely neglecting the CIA’s role in Castro’s rise to power, see anything on the subject by Stuart Hall, Norman Fruchter, Perry Anderson, and Robin Blackburn. If Anderson was the cleverest of this quartet of intellectual secret policemen, Blackburn was the most overtly spooky of the group. He worked assiduously to stoke the fires of student revolt in Britain and Europe in 1968, a year that considerably improved the Right’s position across the globe, not least in France, where, thanks to the CIA-MI6 orchestrated student and worker unrest, De Gaulle was at last toppled.

Blackburn was subsequently chosen to edit the pseudo-revelatory “memoirs” of “ex”-CIA man Phillip Agee, then “on the run” in Britain, wherein we learned that, yes, the CIA does some terrible things, but always with presidential approval. ( Philip Agee, as quoted by Claude Bourdet, in "The CIA Against Portugal," as found in Jean Pierre Faye (Ed.). Portugal: The Revolution In The Labyrinth (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1976), p. 194: "[T]he CIA is not a mysterious body with its own brand of politics: it is a tool in the hands of the President of the United States…") The latter was a point guaranteed to gladden the heart of Allen Dulles, who propagated the same lie in his ghost-written 1963 farrago, The Craft of Intelligence.

The New Left proceeded from the assumption – more accurately, the lie – that the Castro’s campaign had, in the words of a respected British chronicler of the spook-created movement, “erupted spontaneously, without external superpower involvement,” and that Castro “had worked with the revolutionary classes particular to Cuba – the peasantry in alliance with factions of the working and lower middle classes from the cities” (Michael Kenny. The First New Left: British Intellectuals After Stalin (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1995), p.179.) Drivel, every last word of it.

The New Left was heavily promoted in the early 1960s by the mainstream British media. Panorama, the BBC “investigative” programme long notorious for its control by British intelligence, even did a puff piece on the New Left’s meeting place in London.

(2) Scott Nearing & Joseph Freeman. Dollar Diplomacy: A Study in American Imperialism (NY: Monthly Review Press, 1969, reprint of book first published in 1925), pp. 239-240.

(3) Ibid., p. 267.

(4) Ibid., pp. 88-89.

(5) George Morris. CIA and American Labor: The Subversion of the AFL-CIO’s Foreign Policy (NY: International Publishers, 1967), pp. 64-65.

(6) Tad Szulc. Fidel: A Critical Portrait (London: Coronet Books, 1989), pp. 170-171.

(7) Homer Bigart. See Ibid., p.206. (Bigart article in the NYT, 23 March 1958.)

(8) The Ambassador was Robert Woodward. See Wise & Ross. The Invisible Government, pp. 119-120.

(9) See the Washington Post review of Anthony Depalma’s The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba, and Herbert L. Matthews of The New York Times, from the Amazon website:

http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Invented-F...1586483323

(10) Former Costa Rican President, Jose Figueres, in the course of an impromptu interview with American pressmen upon emerging from President Kennedy’s office. Figueres shrewdly drew a parallel with Senator Joe McCarthy. (Garnett D. Horner, “Latin Says U.S. Press ‘Fabricated’ Castro,” The Evening Star (Washington), 19 April 1961, p. B7.)

(11) Van Gosse. Where the Boys are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left (London: Verso, 1993), p. 117, citing an undated Time piece.

(12) John M. Crewdson and Joseph B. Treaster, “CIA Established Many Links to Journalists in US and Abroad,” The New York Times, 27 December 1977, p. 40.

(13) Crewdson & Treaster, Ibid., insist Hendrix was an asset, not a career agent. In the immediate aftermath of Dallas, Hendrix furnished journalists with the patsy’s Soviet “connections,” not a task to be left to a mere asset. See Seth Kantor for Hendrix’s role in the framing of Oswald.

(14) Ronan Bennett, “Fidel’s parting shot,” The Observer, 29 July 2001, Review, p. 2.

(15) Ibid.

(16) Tad Szulc, “Kennedy Bars U.S. Role,” New York Times, 12 April 1962, p.14.

(17) Philip Gunson, “Obituaries: Fernando Guttierez Barrios,” The Guardian, 2 November 2000, p. 24.

(18) Philip Gunson, “Obituaries: Arturo Durazo,” The Guardian, 14 August 2000, p. 18.

(19) Tad Szulc. Fidel: A Critical Portrait (London: Coronet Books, 1989), p. 398.

(20) Ibid., p. 469.

(21) Ibid, p. 471.

(22) Ibid., p. 745.

(23) Drew Pearson, “The Washington Merry-Go-Round: CIA Reportedly Gave Castro Arms,” The Washington Post, 23 May 1961, p.D11. Ray Cromley, “CIA Found Wanting In Cloak-Dagger Role,” The New York World-Telegram & Sun, 29 April 1961, p. 6: “CIA certainly did not correctly assess the character of Fidel Castro in the years he received US backing.” Cromley mentioned in the same article CIA support for Nasser.

(24) Earl T. Smith. The Fourth Floor: An Account of the Castro Communist Revolution (NY: Random House, 1962), p. 134-136.

(25) Ibid, p. 231.

(26) Ibid., p. 222.

(27) Jan McGirk, “Castro ‘honoured’ by murder plots,” The Independent, 28 July 1999, p. 13

(28) Ibid.

(29) Tad Szulc. Fidel, p. 543.

(30) Jack Raymond, “CIA Head Finds Cuba Is Training Latin Saboteurs,” The New York Times, 2 March 1963, p.1.

(31) Alan J. Weberman & Michael Canfield. Coup D’Etat in America: The CIA and the Assassination of John F, Kennedy (San Francisco: Quick American Archives, 1992), p. 135.

(32) Prince Norodom Sihanouk with Wifred Burchett. My War with the CIA (London: Pelican, 1974), p. 128.

(33) Charon, “London Diary,” The New Statesman, 5 May 1961, p. 699, offers a brief summary of British comments on the CIA’s support for the Challe putsch: an oblique reference by Nora Beloff in the pages of the Observer; and an overt reference in the first edition only of the Sunday Express. Only the Sunday Dispatch gave the story full play.

[Myra Bronstein]

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.

That's a very good point as well. For decades the Cuban vote was very distinct from the Latin American vote. However, many of them voted for Obama this time.

I wonder how much the Elio Gonzalez incident hurt the Democratic party. May have cost them Florida, put the vote within stealing range in 2000.

[Paul Rigby]

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

Out of the mouths of babes and elderly Tory imperialists...

Here's MI6 stalwart - and veteran CIA apologist - Julian Amery spilling the beans in the House of Commons in February 1976 on that now-forgotten Agency leg-up for Fidel. Note the anguished disbelief of the Labour MP Martin Flannery, for whom a childish Manicheanism had long since supplanted the study of history:

http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commo...05P0-00566

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.