US-Cuban Relations: How It All Got Started [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

by Ted Snider Posted onAugust 09, 2021

Although Fidel Castro would eventually become a Soviet allied communist, and although the US ultimatum to Cuba would eventually take the form of the often repeated mantra that there were only two non-negotiable demands, that Cuba cut ties with the Soviet Union, and that they stop supporting leftist movements in the hemisphere, that’s not how it started. The "virus" that could "spread contagion" was not communism.

Castro Was Not a Communist

In the beginning of the Cuban revolution, as Noam Chomsky has said, the US obsession with Castro was not a fear of communism. CIA expert John Prados says that it is important to note that in 1959 – when the US had already decided that Castro was incompatible with US goals – "Fidel Castro had not become a communist." Chomsky says that US plans for regime change in Cuba "were drawn up and implemented before there was any significant Russian connection." "When Fidel Castro’s guerilla forces overthrew the Batista dictatorship in January 1959," Vincent Bevins says in The Jakarta Method, "his movement was neither openly communist nor aligned with the Soviet Union." And so it stayed for an important period of time. "Castro showed no special affinity for the Soviet Union during his first years in office," according to William LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh in Back Channel to Cuba.

That was also the view of the State Department. In an April 1959 assessment, the State Department reported that "With regard to his position on communism and the cold war struggle, Castro cautiously indicated that Cuba would remain in the western camp."

When the US literally set its sights on Castro, it was not because he was a Soviet satellite in the western hemisphere because he was not. It was also not because he was a communist in America’s backyard. LeoGrande and Kornbluh say that "U.S. officials suspected that Castro was dangerously radical even if he was not a communist." The US ambassador to Cuba, Philip W. Bonsal, categorized Castro’s policies as "reformist, nationalistic, and somewhat socialistic and neutralist." The CIA agreed. Prados reports that in November 1959, the CIA told the senate judiciary subcommittee that "Neither the Cuban communists nor the CIA consider Castro a communist."

The CIA would go even further in its assessment. At the first actual CIA meeting with Castro, the CIA’s Gerry Droller, who operated under the pseudonym Frank Bender, expressed concern about the Cuban Communist Party. Castro assured him that the communists were a minority and that he could handle them. LeoGrande and Kornbluh report that after a three hour conversation, Droller reported that "Castro is not only not a communist, but he is a strong anti-communist fighter."

More:
https://original.antiwar.com/ted_snider/2021/08/08/us-cuban-relations-how-it-all-got-started/