Cold War Rivals: Cuba and the United States

T.S. Eliot’s famous vision: “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper” seemed to be all wrong on November 9, 1989. On that wintry day, the world created by the four decades-old Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union exploded with a huge bang: the destruction of the massive Berlin Wall, a Communist-built barrier to prevent the people of Eastern Germany from crossing into the free world.

Within a few months, the Communist Union of 15 Soviet Socialist Republics and its eight Moscow-controlled European satellites began disintegrating into 24 independent countries that had two things in common: a profound relief to be rid of their Communist satraps, and the ability to join the more liberal and prosperous world.

Only one country in the former Soviet orbit didn’t join the family of pro-western nations. Cuba, one of the Caribbean nations that during the 1900s suffered under brutal rightist despots with close economic and political ties to the United States, remained a Communist dictatorship. The reason for the survival of this vestige of the Cold War was the forceful leadership of a notable 20th Century revolutionary and Latin American strongman: Fidel Castro.

Castro’s Revolution

Castro was an unlikely person to make Cuba a prominent — and impoverished — pawn of the Soviet crusade against the free world. He had no visceral hatred of the United States, and as described by Tad Szulc, a New York Times correspondent who followed Castro’s career for almost 20 years, he greatly admired President John F. Kennedy. The son of a wealthy land owner, Jesuit-educated, and a lawyer, Castro initially had one main goal: it was to overthrow General Fulgencio Batista, a typical Caribbean tyrant who took control of the island in 1940 and, with the support of American government, criminals and corporations, turned it into an El Dorado of corruption, gambling, prostitution and illegal drug business.

Outraged by the regime’s iniquity and the poverty of ordinary Cubans, Castro and a small band of his followers set out in 1953 to topple Batista through guerrilla warfare. After six years of enormously difficult and heroic fighting — and eventually, with indirect support from the U.S., which in 1958 imposed an arms embargo against the Cuban government — the young revolutionary and his rapidly growing supporters generated crippling strikes, demonstrations, and Cuban army desertions that eventually stripped Batista of all power.

At 3:00 a.m. on January 1, 1959, Batista fled, with $300 million in cash, to the protection of an equally rapacious Rafael Trujillo, the despotic boss of the Dominican Republic. The same day, Castro and his ragtag guerrilleros descended from the Escambray Mountains into an enthusiastic welcome in Havana, the capital of Cuba.

The U.S. immediately recognized the revolutionary government and in the spring of 1959, Castro paid a three-day visit to New York and Washington, where he had a nearly four-hour meeting with Vice President Richard Nixon.

From Allies to Enemies

Afterwards, he dramatically changed his course. By the end of the summer, the CIA reported the arrival of two colonels of KGB, the Soviet top security agency, in Havana. They were followed by dozens of Spanish-speaking military advisors who had fought with the Soviet army during WWII, and by Soviet-trained Communist veterans of the Spanish Civil War.

As official Washington saw it, this was a most alarming development, and it was taking place during one of the coldest periods of the Cold War. Two years after the pugnacious Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev publicly put the Western nations on notice that “we will bury you!”, Castro invited droves of Soviet security and military advisers to Cuba. On top of it, he made scores of decisions that, he must have known, would antagonize the U.S.

By the end of its first year in power, Castro’s government seized Cuban and foreign privately-owned land, nationalized hundreds of companies and subsidiaries of U.S. corporations, and levied prohibitively high taxes on American imports. Most disappointing was the establishment of a one-party regime that — although focused on improving the life of millions of Cubans — was no more free and democratic than its predecessor. In fact, it was just as brutal: one of its first acts was the execution of 500 Batista supporters.

With the Cuban-Soviet ties growing rapidly stronger and more public, President Dwight D. Eisenhower first tried to show Castro that provoking Uncle Sam was not without a cost. He temporarily embargoed American exports to Cuba except for food and medical supplies. When Castro responded by signing a trade treaty with Moscow, Eisenhower raised the ante. Faced with the prospect of the establishment of a Soviet-dominated Communist regime mere 90 miles from the coast of Florida, he made two major decisions:

In March, 1960, Eisenhower authorized the CIA to begin preparing an invasion of Cuba by training anti-Castro refugees who had fled to the U.S.

And on January 3, 1961, a few weeks before the inauguration of his successor, John F. Kennedy, President Eisenhower cut all diplomatic relations with Cuba.

President Kennedy, who was no more willing to tolerate a Soviet-allied Cuba than was Eisenhower, took the next long step, which turned out to be one of the great blunders of Cold War: he gave the CIA a go-ahead to launch the invasion.

The Bay of Pigs Invasion

The attack on the Cuban Island’s Bay of Pigs, launched by 1,400 Cuban exiles on April 17, 1961, was a boondoggle of historic proportions. The invasion’s pilots, who were supposed to destroy Castro’s small air force, found the airports empty. The landing, which was to be secret, took place near a Cuban radio station that reported on the fighting, blow by blow, from the very beginning.

Coral reefs near the beach sank some of the exiles’ ships; paratroopers landed in the wrong place, and the main invasion force ran out of ammunition. Without a U.S. air support, which President Kennedy refused to authorize, and with 114 of them killed, the exiles surrendered after less than a day of fighting. Over 1,100 were taken prisoner, to be released after the U.S. paid a humiliating ransom in food, medicines and trucks.

President Kennedy acknowledged his responsibility for the debacle and Fidel Castro’s brother, Raúl, agreed. “Kennedy vacillated,” he said. “If… he had decided to invade us, he could have [drowned] the island in a sea of blood…. Luckily for us, he vacillated.” 

But the president did not remain indecisive after Fidel Castro announced in December 1961 that Cuba’s new Communist party under his leadership would no longer be a “secret” and have “a Marxist-Leninist program adjusted to the precise conditions of our country.”

The CIA received an OK to launch several attempts on Castro’s life, which was another White House decision that flopped. But a permanent embargo on U.S. trade with Cuba that Kennedy issued in February 1962 was devastatingly effective. Deprived of the U.S. market for Cuban sugar and without imports of American food, electronics and spare parts, the island — despite expensive aid from Moscow — become an economic basket case in just two years.

Castro was concerned about Cuba’s fast-rising debt to Moscow and the empty shelves in Cuban stores, but what bothered him more than the shortages was his fear that the U.S. will launch another invasion to make up for the Bay of Pigs debacle.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

In his book Fidel, a “critical portrait” of the Cuban leader, Szulc quotes Castro saying that negotiations with the Soviet Union for “the strengthening of our armed forces and dispatch of strategic missiles to our country” took place already in June 1962, well before the Kennedy embargo of American exports took full effect.

The result of these secret talks was Khrushchev’s decision that was far more reckless than any mistake made by Kennedy. In the fall of 1962, Soviet troops began placing in Cuba medium-range nuclear missiles capable of reaching American cities as far as Washington — a nightmare that Eisenhower and Kennedy had tried to prevent through the hapless invasion at the Bay of Pigs.

The discovery of the Soviet crews and atomic weapons by a U.S. spy plane triggered on October 15, 1962 the most dangerous episode of the Cold War: a 13-day face-off during which the world was appallingly close to nuclear warfare.

What came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis plunged the top leaders in Washington and Moscow into sleepless round of nerve-wracking third-party contacts and negotiations during which, as the U.S. Secretary of State famously said, “We’re eyeball to eyeball, and I think that the other guy just blinked.” The upshot was the Soviet removal of the atomic weapons from Cuba and, eventually, improved communications and other steps that significantly eased the Soviet-U.S. tensions.

The only participant of the crisis that did not celebrate its outcome was Castro. Furious at the Soviet retreat without even consulting him, he continued to support Moscow, but he focused on building up his reputation as a revolutionary leader. At home, he expanded Cuban health care and education while introducing state-run economy, tightening the press censorship and suppressing his opponents.

Abroad, he sought to gain international stature by aiding leftist revolutionaries in Latin America and Africa, and by presiding from 1979 till 1983 over the so-called Non-Aligned Movement of Third World nations. After the Soviet empire fell apart, Castro adopted another losing cause — a campaign against the economic globalization — but his health began to fail and in 2006 he transferred his leadership to his brother Raúl, who took over the presidency of Cuba in 2008.

The “Cuban Thaw”

With the island no longer a potential security threat, the U.S. began easing its restrictive policies:

In 2001, it resumed supplying Cuba with food.

In 2003, Washington established a commission to “explore ways the U.S. can help hasten and ease a democratic transition in Cuba.”

In 2009, the U.S. began lifting the ban on travel to Cuba.

In 2015, the two countries resumed their diplomatic relations; and

In 2016, President Barack Obama became the first U.S. chief executive to visit Cuba since President Calvin Coolidge in 1928.

Despite the Cuba-U.S. conflict almost coming to nuclear warfare in the 1960s, roughly 50 years later, President Obama was watching baseball and starring on local media alongside President Raúl Castro — who was a confidant and deputy to Fidel for decades.

Thus the final “end of the world” created by the Soviet-U.S. Cold War came very much the way the great English poet imagined: not with a bang, but a whimper. Ex-president Fidel Castro’s vision for a smooth Cuban “transition: to socialism [and] to communism” isolated from the U.S. now seemed a distant dream. In 2015, then in his late 80s, Fidel Castro released a letter on the U.S.-Cuba diplomatic thaw. In it, he states: “I don't trust the policy of the US, nor have I exchanged a word with them, but this does not mean I reject a peaceful solution to conflicts.”

The Cuban dictator's life and career encapsulated the rise and fall of the Marxist doctrine in Latin America. He died in November, 2016, just six months after President Obama's historic visit to his country.