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Life as a guerrilla
Once in Mexico, Castro
reunited with other exiles and founded the 26th
of July Movement. They went to the United
States, where they gathered funds from Cubans living in that country
and the United States especially from Carlos
Prío Socarrás the elected Cuban president who was deposed by Fulgencio
Batista in 1952. Regular and cordial contacts with the KGB agent Nikolai
Sergeevich Leonov in Mexico City did not result in weapon supply (Andrew
and Gordievsky, 1990). Medical doctor Ernesto
"Che" Guevara joined the group in Mexico. In Mexico the
group trained under Spanish
Civil War Veteran, Cuban born [23],
Alberto
Bayo Giraud, [24],
who had fled Francisco
Franco's victory to Mexico. On November
26, 1956
they returned to Cuba, sailing from Tuxpan
to Cuba on the 60-ft pleasure yacht Granma.
Two "traitors" are mentioned before the yacht sailed Evaristo
Venereo and Rafael
del Pino (the del Pino who had been with Castro in the Bogotazo,
[25])
The expeditionaries
landed in Los
Cayuelos near the eastern city of Manzanillo
on December
2, 1956.
They missed their scheduled arrival by two days. On November 30th, another
group of Castro's supporters, wearing olive green uniforms and the 26th of
July Movement's red & black insignias, staged a street revolt in
Santiago, organized by Frank
Pais. While some state that only between twelve and sixteen of the
original eighty-three men of the Granma group survived encounters with the
Cuban army, and fled to the Sierra
Maestra mountains, a careful breakdown of the events, indicate three
were killed at Alegría de Pío (Israel Cabrera, Humberto Lamotte and
Oscar Rodríguez; José Ponce Díaz was severely wounded [26]),
The rest dispersed. Of the 80 remaining 21 were captured and executed, 22
were held prisoner; of the remaining 37 about 20 escaped (7 rejoined the
rebels) and some 17-20 reached the high mountains (Cuban web sources e.g [27]
and Thomas, 898-900). These survivors were aided by a group that included Celia
Sanchez Manduley, Huber
Matos and bandit Cresencio
Perez's relatives. Some are now said to have been members of covert
branch of the communist party or "agrarian reformers" [28].
The survivors, who included Che
Guevara, Raúl
Castro, and Camilo
Cienfuegos, reformed into the José Martí column under Castro's
command. There were a number of purges usually carried out by Che
Guevara, even one expeditionary, “Gallego” Morán, was
declared a traitor and executed in Guantánamo [29]
Castro's movement gained popular support and grew to over eight hundred
men. In mid-1957 Castro gave Che Guevara command of a second column. A journalist,
Herbert
Matthews from the New
York Times, came to interview him in the Sierra Maestra, attracting
interest to his cause in the United States. This was followed up by the TV
television
crew of Andrew
Saint George [30]
said to be a CIA contact person. Castro's colorful command of the English
enabled him to appeal directly to a US audience. He then became viewed as
a revolutionary leader in the United States.
On May
24, 1958,
Batista launched seventeen battalions
(about 10,000 soldiers) against Castro and other anti-government groups in
Operation
Verano called "la Ofensiva" by the rebels (Alarcón Ramírez,1997).
Despite being heavily outnumbered, Castro's forces scored a series of
victories, in part aided by desertion from Batista's army. Whilst
subsequent pro-Castro Cuban sources emphasize Castro and his group's role
in these battles, other groups and leaders were involved, such as escopeteros
(poorly-armed irregulars). During the Battle
of Las Mercedes, Castro's small army came close to defeat but he
managed to pull his troops out by opening up negotiations with General
Cantillo while secretly pulling his soliders out of the trap.
When Operation Verano
ended, Castro ordered three columns under Guevara, Jaime Vega and Camilo
Cienfuegos to invade central Cuba where they were strongly supported
by elements of Column One, nominally directed by Universo
Sánchez and by veteran plains Escopeteros
such as the "Muchachos de Lara" who had long been operating in
the area. Castro's own column (Columna Uno) pushed past Bueycito out onto
the Cauto
Plains. Here they were now supported by Huber
Matos, Raul
Castro and others to the eastern most part of the province. On the
plains Castro's forces first surrounded Guisa and drove out their enemies,
and proceeded to take most of the towns that were taken by Calixto
Garcia in the 1895-1898 Cuban War of Independence.
In December 1958, Guevara
and Cienfuegos' columns joined with other anti-Batista forces already in
the central mountains, occupied several towns and began preperations for
an attack on Santa
Clara, Cuba, the capital of the Las
Villas province. Guevara's column derailed an armored train which
Batista had sent to aid his troops in the city while Cienfuegos won the Battle
of Yaguajay. Defeated on all sides, Batista's forces crumbled. The
provincial capital was captured after less than a day of fighting on
December 31, 1958.
On December 28, 1958
Castro met semi-secretly with Batista General Eulogio
Cantillo [31]
who arrived at Castro's headquarters in a helicopter. With the loss of
Santa Clara and expecting the betrayal of his own army, Batista and president-elect
Andrés
Rivero Agüero(see Carlos
Rivero Agüero) fled Cuba in the early hours of January
1, 1959,
initially to the Dominican
Republic and then to Francisco
Franco's Spain.
Early years in power
On January
1, 1959,
Castro's forces entered Havana
and on January
5 the liberal law professor
José
Miró Cardona created a new government with himself as prime
minister and Manuel
Urrutia Lleó as president. On January
8 Castro himself arrived in Havana and assumed the post of Commander-in-Chief
of the Armed Forces. In February, however, Miró resigned and Castro
assumed the role nearly a month later after initially rejecting the offer;
and in July, Urrutia resigned and was replaced by Osvaldo
Dorticós Torrado, a lawyer more sympathetic to Castro's ideology.
Initially the United
States was quick to recognize the new government. On April
15 Castro went on a famous twelve day unofficial tour of the US, where
he met Malcolm
X, Egyptian
President Gamal
Abdel Nasser and Indian
Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru while staying in a cheap hotel in Harlem
- an example of his tendency to 'mix with the people', as he later also
did in Panamá,
where he used the service entrance of the hotel more than the front door.
He subsequently visited the White
House and met with Vice
President Richard
Nixon. Sometime during this period Castro spoke for his first time to
members of the Council
of Foreign Relations.
Castro's economic
policies had caused some concerns in Washington
that Castro was a Communist
with an allegiance to the Soviet
Union. Supposedly, President Dwight
D. Eisenhower snubbed Castro, giving the excuse that he was playing golf,
and left Nixon to speak to him. Following the meeting, Nixon remarked that
Castro was "either incredibly naïve about Communism or under
Communist discipline — my guess is the former. " Castro spent
two days in Canada,
initiating a friendship with future Canadian Prime Minister Pierre
Trudeau.
Friction with the US soon
developed when, in May 1959, the new government began expropriating
US-owned property (much owned by US-owned corporations, such as the United
Fruit Company) in accordance with the First
Agrarian Reform Law. Compensation for the expropriated properties was
based on their declared property tax value, which, for many years, the
same companies had managed to keep artificially low. In June 1960,
Eisenhower reduced Cuba's sugar import quota by 700,000 tons, and in
response, Cuba nationalized
some $850 million worth of US property and businesses. The revolutionary
government consolidated control of the nation by nationalizing industry,
expropriating property owned by Cubans and non-Cubans alike,
collectivizing agriculture,
and enacting policies which it claimed would benefit the population. These
policies alienated many former supporters of the revolution among the
Cuban middle and upper-classes, who made up roughly half of the Cuban
population. Over one million Cubans later migrated to the US, forming a
vocal anti-Castro community in Miami,
Florida Cuban-American
lobby.
According to Andrew and
Gordievsky (1990) as early as July 1959 Castro's intelligence chief Ramiro
Valdés contacted the KGB in Mexico City, the USSR sent over one
hundred mostly Spanish speaking advisors; including Enrique
Lister Farjan to organize the Committees
for the Defense of the Revolution. In February 1960
Cuba signed an agreement to buy oil from the USSR. When the US-owned
refineries in Cuba refused to process the oil, they were expropriated, and
the United States broke off diplomatic relations with the Castro
government soon afterward. To the concern of the Eisenhower administration,
Cuba began to establish closer ties with the Soviet Union. A variety of
pacts were signed between Castro and Soviet
Premier Nikita
Khrushchev, allowing Cuba to receive large amounts of economic and
military aid from them.
Bay of Pigs
On April
15, 1961,
the day after Castro described his revolution as socialist,
four Cuban airfields were bombed by A-26s
bearing false Cuban markings. These bombing runs were the beginning stages
of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The United States staged an unsuccessful
attack on Cuba on 17
April 1961.
Assault Brigade 2506, a force of about 1,400 Cuban exiles, financed and
trained by the Central
Intelligence Agency, and commanded by Cuban Manuel Artime and CIA
operatives Grayston
Lynch and William
Robertson, landed perhaps a hundred miles south-east of Havana, at Playa
Girón on the Bay of Pigs. Under the leadership of Stephen Penney, the
CIA assumed that the invasion would spark a popular uprising against
Castro; the operation itself was expected by Castro, however, and in
anticipation the government rounded up perhaps 100,000 (Lynch reports
250,000) anti-Castro Cubans -at least 20,000 in Havana alone (Priestland,
2003), executed some and imprisoned the others under threat of death
should the invasion succeed. Led by Erneido Oliva, most of the 1,200 men
invasion force made it ashore; however, reserve ammunition in two US
supplied support ships, the Houston and the Río Escondido,
sunk by Cuban Air Force Sea
Fury propeller-driven aircraft and T-33
Jets, was lost. President Kennedy
was influenced by some State Department officials including Roy
Rubottom and especially his assistant William
Weiland who had been involved in Castro related matters since the Bogotazo
and in Cuban matters 1933 as assistant to Sumner
Welles. Kennedy withdrew support for the invasion at the last minute,
by canceling several bombing sorties that could have crippled the entire
Cuban Air Force. The cancellation also prevented US Marines waiting off
the coast from landing in support of the Cuban exiles. After three days of
ferocious fighting in which about 100 invaders and perhaps 2,000 militia,
perhaps 5000 according to Lynch, more died (most trapped in buses on the
causeways), the rest of the invaders were captured [32].
At least nine invaders were formally executed in connection with this
action, however, a number died of suffocation in an unventilated truck
trailer, while Castro attributed the defeat of the invasion to his
leadership.
In a nationally broadcast
speech on 1961-12-02,
Castro declared that he was a Marxist-Leninist
and that Cuba was going to adopt Communism.
On February
7, 1962,
the US imposed an embargo
against Cuba, which included a general travel ban for American
tourists.
October Crisis
Tensions between Castro
and US heightened during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, which nearly
brought the USSR and the US to direct confrontation. Khrushchev conceived
the idea of placing missiles in Cuba as a deterrent to a US invasion.
After consultations with his military advisors, he met with a Cuban
delegation led by Raúl Castro in July in order to work out the specifics.
It was agreed to deploy Soviet R-12
MRBMs on
Cuban soil; however, American Lockheed
U-2 reconnaissance discovered the construction of the missile
installations on 15
October 1962
before the weapons had actually been deployed. The US government viewed
the installation of Soviet nuclear weapons 90 miles south of Key
West as an aggressive act and a threat to US security. As a result,
the US publicly announced its discovery on 22
October 1962,
and implemented a quarantine
around Cuba that would actively intercept and search any vessels heading
for the island. Nikolai
Sergeevich Leonov, who would become General in KGB Intelligence
Directorate [33],
and Soviet KGB deputy station chief in Warsaw [34],
was the translator Castro used for contact with the Russians.
In a personal letter to
Khrushchev dated 27
October 1962,
Castro urged Khrushchev to launch a nuclear first strike against the
United States if Cuba were invaded, but Khrushchev rejected any first
strike response (pdf).
Soviet field commanders in Cuba were, however, authorized to use tactical
nuclear weapons if attacked by the United States. Khrushchev agreed to
remove the missiles in exchange for a US commitment not to invade Cuba and
an understanding that the US would remove American MRBMs
targeting the Soviet
Union from Turkey
and Italy,
a measure that the US never implemented.
Cuban Missile Crisis
In a televised speech on October
22, 1962,
American
President John
F. Kennedy publicly announced that the USSR
had begun to deploy medium and intermediate-range nuclear missiles in
Cuba, approximately 145 km (90 mi) from Florida.
Moreover, the president said, by their doing so the Soviets had
demonstrated that they had for many months been lying about their
intentions in that island nation. Kennedy then stated that the United
States was prepared to not only blockade Cuba but to ultimately do
whatever might be necessary to remove the missiles. Finally, he warned, a
Soviet attack on any target in the United States or Latin America would
result in what he called "a full retaliatory response on the Soviet
Union." In the days that followed Kennedy's address, Soviet ships
moved toward a line of U.S. naval vessels that had been set up as a
blockade to "quarantine" Cuba. The U.S. government's intention
was to force the Soviets to ship their missiles back to the Soviet Union.
By October 27, the superpowers seemed near to war. As the Soviet missile
sites reached completion, the American pilot of a U-2 spy plane was shot
down over Cuba and the pilot killed. Also during that time, President
Kennedy ordered 180,000 combat-ready troops deployed to the southeastern
United States to prepare to attack Cuba. On October 28, however, just
before 9:00 EST, Soviet chairman Nikita
Khrushchev announced in a broadcast over Radio Moscow that he would
accept Kennedy's pledge not to invade Cuba in return for a Soviet pledge
to remove the missiles from the island. Cuban leader Fidel Castro was
outraged at what he felt was a Soviet betrayal, but he reluctantly allowed
the missiles to be withdrawn. The stark reality of the Cuban Missile
Crisis only became clear decades later, the result of a joint U.S.-Russian-Cuban
research project (the Cuban Missile Crisis Project), which sponsored six
international conferences between 1987 and 2002 that included some of the
major players from both sides who had taken part in the confrontation.
As a result of these
conferences and continuing research, it is now clear that the key sources
of the crisis were the enormous, mutual misperceptions and
misunderstandings between Washington and Moscow and Havana. The Soviets,
for example, felt that they had to deploy the missiles to Cuba because
they believed (incorrectly, but understandably, following the abortive Bay
of Pigs invasion of April 1961) that a massive U.S. assault on Cuba was
imminent. On the other hand, the United States dismissed growing signs of
the possibility of a Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles to Cuba because
the Soviets had never before positioned such weapons outside the Soviet
Union, and because it was so obvious (to the United States, though not to
the Soviets) that such a move would be totally unacceptable in Washington.
In addition, the Soviets felt sure (though the Cubans tried several times
to persuade them that they were wrong) that the missiles could be
introduced into Cuba secretly, via a clandestine operation supplemented by
a systematic attempt to deceive the United States.
Thus the danger of the
confrontation in 1962 was more severe than U.S. leaders, from Kennedy on
down, believed at the time. Recent revelations from the Cuban Missile
Crisis Project have shown that any U.S. attack on Cuba would have also
been an attack on more than 40,000 Soviet citizens who were deployed
chiefly around the missile sites, which would have been the primary
targets. At the time, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) estimated
that fewer than 10,000 Soviets had arrived on the island.
Furthermore, by the last
weekend of October 1962, Castro had concluded that a U.S. air strike and
invasion of Cuba was all but inevitable. This led him to request of
Khrushchev, in a cable sent on October 27, that in the event of an
invasion, the Soviet leader launch an all-out nuclear strike against the
United States. If Cuba was to be destroyed, Castro urged the Soviets to
take the United States down with it. Cuba would thus be a martyr for the
socialist cause. Also by October 27, when the majority of President
Kennedy's military and civilian advisors were advocating an attack on
Cuba, the Soviets had already delivered 162 nuclear warheads to that
country. The CIA believed at the time that there were no warheads on the
island. During the last few days of the crisis, the Soviet field commander
ordered the warheads for the short-range, tactical weapons moved out of
storage and closer to their launchers. He did so without prior approval
from Moscow, and he likely would have ordered their use in the event of a
U.S. invasion. A further fact uncovered is that each Soviet submarine
escorting ships bound for Cuba carried one nuclear-tipped torpedo, which
could be used without consultation with Moscow. One such submarine,
certain that it was under attack from U.S. vessels and that war may have
already begun, came very close to launching its nuclear weapon against the
U.S. fleet blockading Cuba, an action that might well have led to a U.S.
nuclear response.
Thus the Cuban Missile
Crisis Project came to the conclusion that by the last weekend of October
1962, all the pieces were in place for Armageddon to occur. Some 250,000
Cuban troops and more than 40,000 Soviet troops armed with dozens of
tactical nuclear weapons would have met a U.S. invasion force (which would
not have been equipped with nuclear weapons), initiating nuclear war in
the (mistaken) assumption that the United States would have attacked with
nuclear weapons. Historians speculate that such an action would very
likely have ended in nuclear catastrophe. In the end, President Kennedy
rejected military advice for a full-scale surprise attack on Cuba and
instead delivered the public ultimatum to the USSR on October 22,
declaring the quarantine and demanding the withdrawal of all offensive
missiles. After nearly a week of unprecedented tension, the Khrushchev
government yielded. Kennedy, in return, agreed to refrain from attempting
an overthrow of Castro's government. Despite this concession, all sides
regarded the outcome as a substantial victory for the United States, and
Kennedy won a reputation as a formidable international statesman. The USSR,
for its part, began a long-term effort to strengthen its military
capability, but in the immediate future both nations sought to relax
hostilities.
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