Castro Si, Batista No!

Castro enters Havana, 1959

Over the years Latin America has been viewed as an awkward stepchild by those setting U.S. foreign policy.  This was particularly true during the Cold War when president’s made their reputations in foreign affairs dealing with their superpower rival, the Soviet Union.  The attitude toward South America of benign neglect was particularly true during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower.  While residing in the White House Eisenhower spent most of his time dedicated to preventing hostilities in an era that introduced nuclear armed ballistic missiles and brought visions of thermonuclear destruction to the popular imagination.  He gave little thought to the effect a sugar monopoly had on the economy of Cuba.  What was best for the Cubans should be decided by Cubans so long as the solution didn't involve introducing a pro-communist government into the Western Hemisphere.  In 1954 Jorge Arbenz, the elected president of Guatemala, was overthrown by the CIA because his rhetoric and policies provoked Washington’s fears of communism.

In the early morning hours of New Year’s Day, 1959, Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba with his family, ending his corrupt, tyrannical reign of the island nation.  He was driven from power by a young, charismatic leftist named Fidel Castro.  Castro’s movement gained widespread popularity because it promised to reform the economy, provide education and medicine for all, and establish democratic elections.  Despite the fact that Cuba was among the wealthiest nations in Latin America its largely rural population survived on an average annual income of about $90, lived in homes often with dirt floors, and very few of its peasant inhabitants had running water or electricity.  Nearly half the population was illiterate, a third suffered from intestinal parasites and one person in seven had tuberculosis.  The dominant sugar industry provided low wages and only seasonal employment.  Resentment was widespread that Americans owned 40 percent of the sugar plantations, 80 percent of Cuba’s utilities, 90 percent of its mining and most of its oil refineries.  Cubans generally believed wealthy Americans collaborated with Batista to keep him in power.  It’s little wonder then that Castro’s anti-American rhetoric was widely believed. 

Castro was careful to distance himself from Cuba’s communist party and he initially avoided open relations with the Soviet Union.  This is because he feared a Guatemala-styled intervention by the U.S. into Cuba as well as the fact that Cuba’s population was largely Catholic and anti-communist themselves.  Fidel Castro’s standard response to American accusations of his being communist was that Yankees typically branded all Latin reformists as communist.  While Castro was anti-American it is likely he wasn't a communist when he first took power.  Unlike his more bookish brother Raul, who concerned himself with Marxist ideas, Fidel was the man of action, a born leader with an intense ambition for power and the need to rule.  He was a bearded romantic in army fatigues and he would see to it that his control of government would not be contested.  Once he arrived in Havana it wasn't long before Castro postponed his promised elections.  Why would a man with enormous popularity cancel the vote?  He didn't want to validate elections as an institution.  Times are not always favorable to those running the show.  Circumstance can easily sway people’s opinion.  Castro would not jeopardize his vision of the long term good to the fickle results contained in a ballot box.  It was important that people quickly acclimate themselves to the reality of there being no alternative to that of Castro’s rule. 

By the fall of 1959 Castro has the first of several secret meetings with a Soviet envoy while Eisenhower gives a green light to aid Cuban exiles in their fight with Castro.  Castro views Washington as hostile and aggressive while Eisenhower sees Cuba as falling into the communist bloc.  Mutual suspicions prompt actions that validate the fears each nation has of the other.  Hundreds of Batista’s men are executed.  Exiles launch raids of sabotage against Castro’s Cuba.  Castro nationalizes America’s Cuban possessions.  Washington legislates an economic boycott of Cuba.  Castro orders most American embassy personnel out of Cuba.  Eisenhower breaks off diplomatic relations with Castro’s government.  Castro solicits military aid from the Soviet Union.  The CIA begins training a Cuban army in Guatemala.  Talk between the two nations is limited to public airing of charges against the other.  There is nothing to impede an escalation of events that leads first to an invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs and, later, a nuclear confrontation between the two super powers when Soviet ballistic missiles are discovered on Cuban soil. 

People would like to believe their leaders make rational, informed decisions.  We would like to think mechanisms are in place that would thwart the worst of human catastrophes.  How reassuring these thoughts were they only true.  At the core of our highly evolved, intelligent existence remains a factor we call the roll of the dice.  It’s the ever-present gamble we make in placing devastating power in the hands of human nature.


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Rendezvous of Generals

Rendezvous of Generals
13 February, 1943

C L I C K     T O     E N L A R G E

Picture:  401 x 368 - Argentina Salvajizada

Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the allied forces, North Africa had just received his fourth star.  It gave him the appropriate rank to oversee his British deputies that ran the day to day business of war.  During the night of February 12^th he slipped away from his headquarters in Algiers and drove in a small convoy of vehicles toward Tebessa, the major supply and command center for II Corps, headquarters for the American troops in Tunisia.  Eisenhower’s visit was prompted by a number of concerns, most recent being the increased activity of Colonel General Hans-Jurgen von Arnim’s 5^th Panzer Army.  On January 30^th, elements of the 21^st Panzer Division overwhelmed poorly equipped French troops and captured Faid Pass, breaching the Allied line of defense along a mountain range called the Eastern Dorsal.  Now there were highly regarded intelligence reports of a new planned German attack at another pass farther north near a town called Fondouk. 

Picture:  747 x 425 at 96 dpi - Wikipedia

Lieutenant General Kenneth Anderson, commander of the allied 1^st Army in Tunisia, was holding powerful elements of the American 1^st Armored Division and Major General Terry Allen’s 1^st Infantry Division, The Big Red One, in reserve near Fondouk.  Anderson need not know the source of his intelligence, Ultra, was a super secret organization located at Bletchley Park near London, that had cracked the German military’s Enigma code.  What Anderson did know was that his intelligence source had been of immense aid to General Bernard Montgomery in defeating Erwin Rommel at El Alamein.  With the aid of Ultra, Montgomery knew the strength of the German Afrika Korps and could anticipate Rommel’s every move.  Now this same source encouraged Anderson to focus his strength away from American positions that were thinly dispersed along a line that led further south. 

Picture:  904 x 587 - BT Yahoo

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had led his Afrika Korps in a demoralizing retreat for almost three months since his loss at El Alamein in early November the previous year.  In the course of his westward trek across Libya he had infuriated Mussolini by ceding to the British Eighth Army the important port of Tripoli without even a respectful semblance of battle.  He had alienated his benefactor, Hitler, by displaying what the Fuhrer perceived to be both a loss of nerve and an attitude of defeatism.  Now, as his troops began assembling along the Mareth Line, a series of fortifications in eastern Tunisia that were built by the French, Rommel turned his eyes towards a target he believed to be ripe for plunder.  The newly arrived American troops, barely trained and mostly untested in battle, appeared vulnerable to Rommel’s famed tactic of a focused, crushing armored attack.  His infantry at Mareth would be an adequate defense while Montgomery took the next few weeks organizing his Eighth Army for a new offensive push into Tunisia.  Meanwhile, Rommel could use this time to scatter the American forces, capture Tebessa and, who knows, send the allied forces reeling into western Algeria.  It seemed a feasible plan but, with the depleted state of Rommel’s Afrika Korps, he would need cooperation and help from the other German force occupying Tunisia, Arnim’s Fifth Panzer Army.

Picture:  800 x 602 at 96 dpi - WW2 Total

Operation Torch, the allied invasion of North Africa, forced Hitler to protect the important Tunisian ports of Bizerte and Tunis with troops and tanks he would have preferred sending to the Russian Front.  The commander of the newly constituted Fifth Panzer Army, Colonel General von Arnim, believed the available resources limited his role to a defense of small attacks designed to keep the allies off balance.  For Arnim there simply wasn’t the supplies available to fuel the sustained offense proposed by Rommel.  The immediate superior to both generals, Field Marshal Albrecht Kesselring, sided with Rommel and obtained from Arnim an agreement of grudging support.  The coming campaign would prove Arnim’s support was always too late with too little.

Picture:  1265 x 966 - Historical Resources

Eisenhower met with his commanders in the field through Saturday and into the early morning hours of Sunday, February 14th, 1943 – Valentine’s Day.  He found his admonition to keep the 1^st Armored Division together as a potent reserve force had gone unheeded.  There simply were too many holes to be filled over the long front and too few infantry units available to honor Eisenhower’s instructions.  The allied Supreme Commander was visibly disturbed by the complacency exhibited among the green American troops and their officers.  Their ideas of combat were fantasy.  Their training left them unprepared for the storm that would descend upon them with the rise of that Sunday morning’s sun.  The experience of the next several days would give its survivors an appreciation of the difference between a sleepy field manual exercise and the sharp focus that life versus death gives to what you've learned and what you do.

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