Why does Castro hate us?

[SuNmAN]

Wikipedia:

"Assassination Attempts
It has been estimated that there have been over 600 attempts on Castro's life committed by the CIA. Fabian Escalante, who was long tasked with protecting the life of Castro has calculated the exact number of assassination schemes and/or attempts by the CIA to be 638. Some such attempts have included an exploding cigar, a fungal-infected scuba-diving suit, and a mafia-style shooting. Some of these plots are depicted in a documentary entitled 638 Ways to Kill Castro.[54] One of these attempts was by his ex-lover Marita Lorenz whom he met in 1959. She subsequently fell under CIA control and attempted to smuggle a jar of cold cream containing poison pills into his room. When Castro realised he reportedly gave her a gun and told her to kill him but her nerve failed.[55] Castro once said in regards to the numerous attempts on his life, "If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal."


yeah no sh*t, I would hate the hell out of us too if I were Castro !!!

[10thzodiac]

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/war/operation_northwoods.htm (http://www.rationalrevolution.net/war/operation_northwoods.htm)

[yellowwing]

Why does Iran hate us? Its been 27 years since our boy Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was run out of Tehran.

Can't they forgive and forget? :D

[SuNmAN]

Why does Iran hate us? Its been 27 years since our boy Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was run out of Tehran.

Can't they forgive and forget? :D

yeah we tried to assasinate Ayatollah Khomeini too.

Thats actually a hostile country though.

I don't view Cuba as an enemy state. Iran I do.

[10thzodiac]

http://cryptome.quintessenz.org/mirror/jcs-corrupt.htm (http://cryptome.quintessenz.org/mirror/jcs-corrupt.htm)

[bob3628]

Personally I think it's high time we normalized relations with Cuba. If we can get along with North Vietnam and China, why not Cuba ??

[SuNmAN]

omg a reasonable, clear thinking individual...thank God

[DWG]

OK, here we go. This is stuff you should have learned in school but I guess they are too busy teaching kids how to put on condoms or whatever it is they teach nowadays instead of history.
In 1962 Fidel Castro brought the U.S.and the Soviet Union to the brink of THERMONUCLEAR WAR! Not saber rattling, menacing grumbling, but "burn down the house; this is not a drill" war. By his allowing the soviets to introduce missles to this hemisphere, on our front door, he threatened our national interest in the most extreme way possible; total destruction-this was the hey day of mutual assured destruction and the russians wanted to test a young president. Florida was an armed camp comparable to Britain in 1944. 24/7 troops and material were rolling into the state, you couldn't cross major highways for long periods of time due to the convoys. The Intercoastal waterway was jammed with barges ferrying more troops and supplies. SAC was on war footing with half their aircraft armed and in the air and the rest redeployed to civilian airfields to avoid the potential first strike at military bases. I did not realize how scared my parents were at the time (I was 11), but every one thought that THIS WAS IT! We knew there were already missles in Cuba and the Soviets were bringing more. Neither Castro nor the US knew that the Soviets not only wouldn't, but couldn't back up his play. Everyone involved thought the balloon was going up and we were sitting right on ground zero. When the russians finally blinked and the compromise was reached castro was livid. But, we negated our own Monroe Doctrine, gave up our missles in Turkey and promised not to invade cuba and to have a hands off policy in return for the russians not attempting to place ICBMs in this hemisphere. Part of our hands off policy was no trade with cuba. We did not blockade the island, we did not turn any ships away from cuba out at sea, we just chose not to deal with a communist nation on our border. At this point several of our "allies" at the time chose the same course. Russia kept cuba afloat by buying their sugar at inflated prices and paying with conventional arms and grain. Over the course of time 90% of the rest of the world began trading with cuba and so did we through intermediaries. Castro could have, at any time, taken the money he was supplied and improved the lot of the Cuban people;he did not. Castro chose to train revolutionaries and buy weapons and engage in fomenting unrest throughout central and south America and later Africa. He knew we would not invade per our agreement over the missle crisis, but he also knew he could blame all the ills of his failed revolution on the Americanos and use that to further oppress the people. This also gave him a safety valve to rid himself of dissidents, the sick, crazy and undesirable; let them "flee" to America and claim political sanctuary at any time he so chose. So cuba(read castro) has had ample opportunity to reenter the 1st world but has opted to be a peoples' paradise, don't blame the mean ol' gringos for that choice, it was their governments'. Castro doesn't want to normalize with the US because that would rob him of his excuse for failure.
In the meantime, JFK, to prove he still had a set ,chose to get involved in fighting communism, not on our shores, where we should have, but half a world away in a place called French Indo-China. In hindsight, we should have invaded cuba and fought a war on communism where it shoud have been fought and for people who were interested in being free. But we didn't know that the Soviet ICBMs were actually rusting in their silos and couldn't launch so we all decided to have a proxy war somewhere no one cared about. We see how that turned out.
And after all the grief castro has indeed caused in the world , from columbia to east africa, why should we want to bend over backwards to see if he will "forgive" us our arrogance! I feel he still owes me an apology for almost getting me and my family caught up in a nuclear holocaust, and ask any Cuban what they think fidel owes them? :usmc:

[10thzodiac]

<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" align=center dwcopytype="CopyTableCell"><TBODY><TR align=left><TD>
by Noam Chomsky <!-- #EndEditable -->

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1024-06.htm
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Now that the Bush administration, pursuing its "war against terrorism," has once again elevated Cuba into America's cross-hairs as a newly anointed member of the Axis of Evil, it seems like a good moment to consider the question of terrorism and Cuba. Noam Chomsky takes up this matter in his new book, 'Hegemony or Survival, America's Quest for Global Dominance (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805074007/commondreams-20)', and a long, chilling excerpt from that book is included below (with his kind permission). No one has written more powerfully or consistently on the subject of state violence and state terror or reminded us more powerfully or consistently that "terror" isn't primarily what small stateless bands of fanatics deliver to large and powerful states. History is, in a sense, a history of state terror and the United States has been a practitioner of the form, in the case of Cuba, as Chomsky shows, with unrelenting perseverance and relish for nearly half a century.
-- Tom Engelhardt
The Batista dictatorship was overthrown in January 1959 by Castro's guerrilla forces. In March, the National Security Council (NSC) considered means to institute regime change. In May, the CIA began to arm guerrillas inside Cuba. "During the Winter of 1959-1960, there was a significant increase in CIA-supervised bombing and incendiary raids piloted by exiled Cubans" based in the US. We need not tarry on what the US or its clients would do under such circumstances. Cuba, however, did not respond with violent actions within the United States for revenge or deterrence. Rather, it followed the procedure required by international law. In July 1960, Cuba called on the UN for help, providing the Security Council with records of some twenty bombings, including names of pilots, plane registration numbers, unexploded bombs, and other specific details, alleging considerable damage and casualties and calling for resolution of the conflict through diplomatic channels. US Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge responded by giving his "assurance [that] the United States has no aggressive purpose against Cuba." Four months before, in March 1960, his government had made a formal decision in secret to overthrow the Castro government, and preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion were well advanced.
Washington was concerned that Cubans might try to defend themselves. CIA chief Allen Dulles therefore urged Britain not to provide arms to Cuba. His "main reason," the British ambassador reported to London, "was that this might lead the Cubans to ask for Soviet or Soviet bloc arms," a move that "would have a tremendous effect," Dulles pointed out, allowing Washington to portray Cuba as a security threat to the hemisphere, following the script that had worked so well in Guatemala. Dulles was referring to Washington's successful demolition of Guatemala's first democratic experiment, a ten-year interlude of hope and progress, greatly feared in Washington because of the enormous popular support reported by US intelligence and the "demonstration effect" of social and economic measures to benefit the large majority. The Soviet threat was routinely invoked, abetted by Guatemala's appeal to the Soviet bloc for arms after the US had threatened attack and cut off other sources of supply. The result was a half-century of horror, even worse than the US-backed tyranny that came before.
For Cuba, the schemes devised by the doves were similar to those of CIA director Dulles. Warning President Kennedy about the "inevitable political and diplomatic fall-out" from the planned invasion of Cuba by a proxy army, Arthur Schlesinger suggested efforts to trap Castro in some action that could be used as a pretext for invasion: "One can conceive a black operation in, say, Haiti which might in time lure Castro into sending a few boatloads of men on to a Haitian beach in what could be portrayed as an effort to overthrow the Haitian regime, . . . then the moral issue would be clouded, and the anti-US campaign would be hobbled from the start." Reference is to the regime of the murderous dictator "Papa Doc" Duvalier, which was backed by the US (with some reservations), so that an effort to help Haitians overthrow it would be a crime.
Eisenhower's March 1960 plan called for the overthrow of Castro in favor of a regime "more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the U.S.," including support for "military operation on the island" and "development of an adequate paramilitary force outside of Cuba." Intelligence reported that popular support for Castro was high, but the US would determine the "true interests of the Cuban people." The regime change was to be carried out "in such a manner as to avoid any appearance of U.S. intervention," because of the anticipated reaction in Latin America and the problems of doctrinal management at home.
Operation Mongoose
The Bay of Pigs invasion came a year later, in April 1961, after Kennedy had taken office. It was authorized in an atmosphere of "hysteria" over Cuba in the White House, Robert McNamara later testified before the Senate's Church Committee. At the first cabinet meeting after the failed invasion, the atmosphere was "almost savage," Chester Bowles noted privately: "there was an almost frantic reaction for an action program." At an NSC meeting two days later, Bowles found the atmosphere "almost as emotional" and was struck by "the great lack of moral integrity" that prevailed. The mood was reflected in Kennedy's public pronouncements: "The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong . . . can possibly survive," he told the country, sounding a theme that would be used to good effect by the Reaganites during their own terrorist wars. Kennedy was aware that allies "think that we're slightly demented" on the subject of Cuba, a perception that persists to the present.
Kennedy implemented a crushing embargo that could scarcely be endured by a small country that had become a "virtual colony" of the US in the sixty years following its "liberation" from Spain. He also ordered an intensification of the terrorist campaign: "He asked his brother, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy, to lead the top-level interagency group that oversaw Operation Mongoose, a program of paramilitary operations, economic warfare, and sabotage he launched in late 1961 to visit the 'terrors of the earth' on Fidel Castro and, more prosaically, to topple him."
The terrorist campaign was "no laughing matter," Jorge Dominguez writes in a review of recently declassified materials on operations under Kennedy, materials that are "heavily sanitized" and "only the tip of the iceberg," Piero Gleijeses adds.
Operation Mongoose was "the centerpiece of American policy toward Cuba from late 1961 until the onset of the 1962 missile crisis," Mark White reports, the program on which the Kennedy brothers "came to pin their hopes." Robert Kennedy informed the CIA that the Cuban problem carries "the top priority in the United States Government -- all else is secondary -- no time, no effort, or manpower is to be spared" in the effort to overthrow the Castro regime. The chief of Mongoose operations, Edward Lansdale, provided a timetable leading to "open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime" in October 1962. The "final definition" of the program recognized that "final success will require decisive U.S. military intervention," after terrorism and subversion had laid the basis. The implication is that US military intervention would take place in October 1962 -- when the missile crisis erupted.
In February 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved a plan more extreme than Schlesinger's: to use "covert means . . . to lure or provoke Castro, or an uncontrollable subordinate, into an overt hostile reaction against the United States; a reaction which would in turn create the justification for the US to not only retaliate but destroy Castro with speed, force and determination." In March, at the request of the DOD Cuba Project, the Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted a memorandum to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara outlining "pretexts which they would consider would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba." The plan would be undertaken if "a credible internal revolt is impossible of attainment during the next 9-10 months," but before Cuba could establish relations with Russia that might "directly involve the Soviet Union."
A prudent resort to terror should avoid risk to the perpetrator.
The March plan was to construct "seemingly unrelated events to camouflage the ultimate objective and create the necessary impression of Cuban rashness and responsibility on a large scale, directed at other countries as well as the United States," placing the US "in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances [and developing] an international image of Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere." Proposed measures included blowing up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay to create "a 'Remember the Maine' incident," publishing casualty lists in US newspapers to "cause a helpful wave of national indignation," portraying Cuban investigations as "fairly compelling evidence that the ship was taken under attack," developing a "Communist Cuban terror campaign and even in Washington," using Soviet bloc incendiaries for cane-burning raids in neighboring countries, shooting down a drone aircraft with a pretense that it was a charter flight carrying college students on a holiday, and other similarly ingenious schemes -- not implemented, but another sign of the "frantic" and "savage" atmosphere that prevailed.
On August 23 the president issued National Security Memorandum No. 181, "a directive to engineer an internal revolt that would be followed by U.S. military intervention," involving "significant U.S. military plans, maneuvers, and movement of forces and equipment" that were surely known to Cuba and Russia. Also in August, terrorist attacks were intensified, including speedboat strafing attacks on a Cuban seaside hotel "where Soviet military technicians were known to congregate, killing a score of Russians and Cubans"; attacks on British and Cuban cargo ships; the contamination of sugar shipments; and other atrocities and sabotage, mostly carried out by Cuban exile organizations permitted to operate freely in Florida. A few weeks later came "the most dangerous moment in human history."
"A bad press in some friendly countries"
Terrorist operations continued through the tensest moments of the missile crisis. They were formally canceled on October 30, several days after the Kennedy and Khrushchev agreement, but went on nonetheless. On November 8, "a Cuban covert action sabotage team dispatched from the United States successfully blew up a Cuban industrial facility," killing 400 workers, according to the Cuban government. Raymond Garthoff writes that "the Soviets could only see [the attack] as an effort to backpedal on what was, for them, the key question remaining: American assurances not to attack Cuba." These and other actions reveal again, he concludes, "that the risk and danger to both sides could have been extreme, and catastrophe not excluded."
After the crisis ended, Kennedy renewed the terrorist campaign. Ten days before his assassination he approved a CIA plan for "destruction operations" by US proxy forces "against a large oil refinery and storage facilities, a large electric plant, sugar refineries, railroad bridges, harbor facilities, and underwater demolition of docks and ships." A plot to kill Castro was initiated on the day of the Kennedy assassination. The campaign was called off in 1965, but "one of Nixon's first acts in office in 1969 was to direct the CIA to intensify covert operations against Cuba."
Of particular interest are the perceptions of the planners. In his review of recently released documents on Kennedy-era terror, Dominguez observes that "only once in these nearly thousand pages of documentation did a U.S. official raise something that resembled a faint moral objection to U.S.-government sponsored terrorism": a member of the NSC staff suggested that it might lead to some Russian reaction, and raids that are "haphazard and kill innocents . . . might mean a bad press in some friendly countries." The same attitudes prevail throughout the internal discussions, as when Robert Kennedy warned that a full-scale invasion of Cuba would "kill an awful lot of people, and we're going to take an awful lot of heat on it."
Terrorist activities continued under Nixon, peaking in the mid- 1970s, with attacks on fishing boats, embassies, and Cuban offices overseas, and the bombing of a Cubana airliner, killing all seventy-three passengers. These and subsequent terrorist operations were carried out from US territory, though by then they were regarded as criminal acts by the FBI.
So matters proceeded, while Castro was condemned by editors for maintaining an "armed camp, despite the security from attack promised by Washington in 1962." The promise should have sufficed, despite what followed; not to speak of the promises that preceded, by then well documented, along with information about how well they could be trusted: e.g., the "Lodge moment" of July 1960.
On the thirtieth anniversary of the missile crisis, Cuba protested a machine-gun attack against a Spanish-Cuban tourist hotel; responsibility was claimed by a group in Miami. Bombings in Cuba in 1997, which killed an Italian tourist, were traced back to Miami. The perpetrators were Salvadoran criminals operating under the direction of Luis Posada Carriles and financed in Miami. One of the most notorious international terrorists, Posada had escaped from a Venezuelan prison, where he had been held for the Cubana airliner bombing, with the aid of Jorge Mas Canosa, a Miami businessman who was the head of the tax-exempt Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF). Posada went from Venezuela to El Salvador, where he was put to work at the Ilopango military air base to help organize US terrorist attacks against Nicaragua under Oliver North's direction.
Posada has described in detail his terrorist activities and the funding for them from exiles and CANF in Miami, but felt secure that he would not be investigated by the FBI. He was a Bay of Pigs veteran, and his subsequent operations in the 1960s were directed by the CIA. When he later joined Venezuelan intelligence with CIA help, he was able to arrange for Orlando Bosch, an associate from his CIA days who had been convicted in the US for a bomb attack on a Cuba-bound freighter, to join him in Venezuela to organize further attacks against Cuba. An ex-CIA official familiar with the Cubana bombing identifies Posada and Bosch as the only suspects in the bombing, which Bosch defended as "a legitimate act of war." Generally considered the "mastermind" of the airline bombing, Bosch was responsible for thirty other acts of terrorism, according to the FBI. He was granted a presidential pardon in 1989 by the incoming Bush I administration after intense lobbying by Jeb Bush and South Florida Cuban-American leaders, overruling the Justice Department, which had found the conclusion "inescapable that it would be prejudicial to the public interest for the United States to provide a safe haven for Bosch the security of this nation is affected by its ability to urge credibly other nations to refuse aid and shelter to terrorists."
[B]Economic warfare
Cuban offers to cooperate in intelligence-sharing to prevent terrorist attacks have been rejected by Washington, though some did lead to US actions. "Senior members of the FBI visited Cuba in 1998 to meet their Cuban counterparts, who gave [the FBI] dossiers about what they suggested was a Miami-based terrorist network: information which had been compiled in part by Cubans who had infiltrated exile groups." Three months later the FBI arrested Cubans who had infiltrated the US-based terrorist groups. Five were sentenced to long terms in prison.
The national security pretext lost whatever shreds of credibility it might have had after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, though it was not until 1998 that US intelligence officially informed the country that Cuba no longer posed a threat to US national security. The Clinton administration, however, insisted that the military threat posed by Cuba be reduced to "negligible," but not completely removed. Even with this qualification, the intelligence assessment eliminated a danger that had been identified by the Mexican ambassador in 1961, when he rejected JFK's attempt to organize collective action against Cuba on the grounds that "if we publicly declare that Cuba is a threat to our security, forty million Mexicans will die laughing."
In fairness, however, it should be recognized that missiles in Cuba did pose a threat. In private discussions the Kennedy brothers expressed their fears that the presence of Russian missiles in Cuba might deter a US invasion of Venezuela. So "the Bay of Pigs was really right," JFK concluded.
The Bush I administration reacted to the elimination of the security pretext by making the embargo much harsher, under pressure from Clinton, who outflanked Bush from the right during the 1992 election campaign. Economic warfare was made still more stringent in 1996, causing a furor even among the closest US allies. The embargo came under considerable domestic criticism as well, on the grounds that it harms US exporters and investors -- the embargo's only victims, according to the standard picture in the US; Cubans are unaffected. Investigations by US specialists tell a different story. Thus, a detailed study by the American Association for World Health concluded that the embargo had severe health effects, and only Cuba's remarkable health care system had prevented a "humanitarian catastrophe"; this has received virtually no mention in the US.
The embargo has effectively barred even food and medicine. In 1999 the Clinton administration eased such sanctions for all countries on the official list of "terrorist states," apart from Cuba, singled out for unique punishment. Nevertheless, Cuba is not entirely alone in this regard. After a hurricane devastated West Indian islands in August 1980, President Carter refused to allow any aid unless Grenada was excluded, as punishment for some unspecified initiatives of the reformist Maurice Bishop government. When the stricken countries refused to agree to Grenada's exclusion, having failed to perceive the threat to survival posed by the nutmeg capital of the world, Carter withheld all aid. Similarly, when Nicaragua was struck by a hurricane in October 1988, bringing starvation and causing severe ecological damage, the current incumbents in Washington recognized that their terrorist war could benefit from the disaster, and therefore refused aid, even to the Atlantic Coast area with close links to the US and deep resentment against the Sandinistas. They followed suit when a tidal wave wiped out Nicaraguan fishing villages, leaving hundreds dead and missing in September 1992. In this case, there was a show of aid, but hidden in the small print was the fact that apart from an impressive donation of $25,000, the aid was deducted from assistance already scheduled. Congress was assured, however, that the pittance of aid would not affect the administration's suspension of over $100 million of aid because the US-backed Nicaraguan government had failed to demonstrate a sufficient degree of subservience.
US economic warfare against Cuba has been strongly condemned in virtually every relevant international forum, even declared illegal by the Judicial Commission of the normally compliant Organization of American States. The European Union called on the World Trade Organization to condemn the embargo. The response of the Clinton administration was that "Europe is challenging 'three decades of American Cuba policy that goes back to the Kennedy Administration,' and is aimed entirely at forcing a change of government in Havana." The administration also declared that the WTO has no competence to rule on US national security or to compel the US to change its laws. Washington then withdrew from the proceedings, rendering the matter moot.
Successful defiance
The reasons for the international terrorist attacks against Cuba and the illegal economic embargo are spelled out in the internal record. And no one should be surprised to discover that they fit a familiar pattern -- that of Guatemala a few years earlier, for example.
From the timing alone, it is clear that concern over a Russian threat could not have been a major factor. The plans for forceful regime change were drawn up and implemented before there was any significant Russian connection, and punishment was intensified after the Russians disappeared from the scene. True, a Russian threat did develop, but that was more a consequence than a cause of US terrorism and economic warfare.
In July 1961 the CIA warned that "the extensive influence of 'Castroism' is not a function of Cuban power. . . . Castro's shadow looms large because social and economic conditions throughout Latin America invite opposition to ruling authority and encourage agitation for radical change," for which Castro's Cuba provided a model. Earlier, Arthur Schlesinger had transmitted to the incoming President Kennedy his Latin American Mission report, which warned of the susceptibility of Latin Americans to "the Castro idea of taking matters into one's own hands." The report did identify a Kremlin connection: the Soviet Union "hovers in the wings, flourishing large development loans and presenting itself as the model for achieving modernization in a single generation." The dangers of the "Castro idea" are particularly grave, Schlesinger later elaborated, when "the distribution of land and other forms of national wealth greatly favors the propertied classes" and "the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent living." Kennedy feared that Russian aid might make Cuba a "showcase" for development, giving the Soviets the upper hand throughout Latin America.
In early 1964, the State Department Policy Planning Council expanded on these concerns: "The primary danger we face in Castro is . . . in the impact the very existence of his regime has upon the leftist movement in many Latin American countries. . . . The simple fact is that Castro represents a successful defiance of the US, a negation of our whole hemispheric policy of almost a century and a half." To put it simply, Thomas Paterson writes, "Cuba, as symbol and reality, challenged U.S. hegemony in Latin America." International terrorism and economic warfare to bring about regime change are justified not by what Cuba does, but by its "very existence," its "successful defiance" of the proper master of the hemisphere. Defiance may justify even more violent actions, as in Serbia, as quietly conceded after the fact; or Iraq, as also recognized when pretexts had collapsed.
Outrage over defiance goes far back in American history. Two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson bitterly condemned France for its "attitude of defiance" in holding New Orleans, which he coveted. Jefferson warned that France's "character [is] placed in a point of eternal friction with our character, which though loving peace and the pursuit of wealth, is high-minded." France's "defiance [requires us to] marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation," Jefferson advised, reversing his earlier attitudes, which reflected France's crucial contribution to the liberation of the colonies from British rule. Thanks to Haiti's liberation struggle, unaided and almost universally opposed, France's defiance soon ended, but the guiding principles remain in force, determining friend and foe.
[Note that this passage (pages 80-90) is fully footnoted in Hegemony or Survival. Chomsky's discussion of the Cuban missile crisis itself can be found elsewhere in the same chapter of the book.] [I]Noam Chomsky is a Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. In addition to' Hegemony or Survival, America's Quest for Global Dominance' (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805074007/commondreams-20) (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books), he is the author of numerous books on linguistics and on U.S. foreign policy.

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[10thzodiac]

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by Noam Chomsky <!-- #EndEditable -->

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1024-06.htm
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Now that the Bush administration, pursuing its "war against terrorism," has once again elevated Cuba into America's cross-hairs as a newly anointed member of the Axis of Evil, it seems like a good moment to consider the question of terrorism and Cuba. Noam Chomsky takes up this matter in his new book, 'Hegemony or Survival, America's Quest for Global Dominance (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805074007/commondreams-20)', and a long, chilling excerpt from that book is included below (with his kind permission). No one has written more powerfully or consistently on the subject of state violence and state terror or reminded us more powerfully or consistently that "terror" isn't primarily what small stateless bands of fanatics deliver to large and powerful states. History is, in a sense, a history of state terror and the United States has been a practitioner of the form, in the case of Cuba, as Chomsky shows, with unrelenting perseverance and relish for nearly half a century.
-- Tom Engelhardt
The Batista dictatorship was overthrown in January 1959 by Castro's guerrilla forces. In March, the National Security Council (NSC) considered means to institute regime change. In May, the CIA began to arm guerrillas inside Cuba. "During the Winter of 1959-1960, there was a significant increase in CIA-supervised bombing and incendiary raids piloted by exiled Cubans" based in the US. We need not tarry on what the US or its clients would do under such circumstances. Cuba, however, did not respond with violent actions within the United States for revenge or deterrence. Rather, it followed the procedure required by international law. In July 1960, Cuba called on the UN for help, providing the Security Council with records of some twenty bombings, including names of pilots, plane registration numbers, unexploded bombs, and other specific details, alleging considerable damage and casualties and calling for resolution of the conflict through diplomatic channels. US Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge responded by giving his "assurance [that] the United States has no aggressive purpose against Cuba." Four months before, in March 1960, his government had made a formal decision in secret to overthrow the Castro government, and preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion were well advanced.
Washington was concerned that Cubans might try to defend themselves. CIA chief Allen Dulles therefore urged Britain not to provide arms to Cuba. His "main reason," the British ambassador reported to London, "was that this might lead the Cubans to ask for Soviet or Soviet bloc arms," a move that "would have a tremendous effect," Dulles pointed out, allowing Washington to portray Cuba as a security threat to the hemisphere, following the script that had worked so well in Guatemala. Dulles was referring to Washington's successful demolition of Guatemala's first democratic experiment, a ten-year interlude of hope and progress, greatly feared in Washington because of the enormous popular support reported by US intelligence and the "demonstration effect" of social and economic measures to benefit the large majority. The Soviet threat was routinely invoked, abetted by Guatemala's appeal to the Soviet bloc for arms after the US had threatened attack and cut off other sources of supply. The result was a half-century of horror, even worse than the US-backed tyranny that came before.
For Cuba, the schemes devised by the doves were similar to those of CIA director Dulles. Warning President Kennedy about the "inevitable political and diplomatic fall-out" from the planned invasion of Cuba by a proxy army, Arthur Schlesinger suggested efforts to trap Castro in some action that could be used as a pretext for invasion: "One can conceive a black operation in, say, Haiti which might in time lure Castro into sending a few boatloads of men on to a Haitian beach in what could be portrayed as an effort to overthrow the Haitian regime, . . . then the moral issue would be clouded, and the anti-US campaign would be hobbled from the start." Reference is to the regime of the murderous dictator "Papa Doc" Duvalier, which was backed by the US (with some reservations), so that an effort to help Haitians overthrow it would be a crime.
Eisenhower's March 1960 plan called for the overthrow of Castro in favor of a regime "more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the U.S.," including support for "military operation on the island" and "development of an adequate paramilitary force outside of Cuba." Intelligence reported that popular support for Castro was high, but the US would determine the "true interests of the Cuban people." The regime change was to be carried out "in such a manner as to avoid any appearance of U.S. intervention," because of the anticipated reaction in Latin America and the problems of doctrinal management at home.
Operation Mongoose
The Bay of Pigs invasion came a year later, in April 1961, after Kennedy had taken office. It was authorized in an atmosphere of "hysteria" over Cuba in the White House, Robert McNamara later testified before the Senate's Church Committee. At the first cabinet meeting after the failed invasion, the atmosphere was "almost savage," Chester Bowles noted privately: "there was an almost frantic reaction for an action program." At an NSC meeting two days later, Bowles found the atmosphere "almost as emotional" and was struck by "the great lack of moral integrity" that prevailed. The mood was reflected in Kennedy's public pronouncements: "The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong . . . can possibly survive," he told the country, sounding a theme that would be used to good effect by the Reaganites during their own terrorist wars. Kennedy was aware that allies "think that we're slightly demented" on the subject of Cuba, a perception that persists to the present.
Kennedy implemented a crushing embargo that could scarcely be endured by a small country that had become a "virtual colony" of the US in the sixty years following its "liberation" from Spain. He also ordered an intensification of the terrorist campaign: "He asked his brother, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy, to lead the top-level interagency group that oversaw Operation Mongoose, a program of paramilitary operations, economic warfare, and sabotage he launched in late 1961 to visit the 'terrors of the earth' on Fidel Castro and, more prosaically, to topple him."
The terrorist campaign was "no laughing matter," Jorge Dominguez writes in a review of recently declassified materials on operations under Kennedy, materials that are "heavily sanitized" and "only the tip of the iceberg," Piero Gleijeses adds.
Operation Mongoose was "the centerpiece of American policy toward Cuba from late 1961 until the onset of the 1962 missile crisis," Mark White reports, the program on which the Kennedy brothers "came to pin their hopes." Robert Kennedy informed the CIA that the Cuban problem carries "the top priority in the United States Government -- all else is secondary -- no time, no effort, or manpower is to be spared" in the effort to overthrow the Castro regime. The chief of Mongoose operations, Edward Lansdale, provided a timetable leading to "open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime" in October 1962. The "final definition" of the program recognized that "final success will require decisive U.S. military intervention," after terrorism and subversion had laid the basis. The implication is that US military intervention would take place in October 1962 -- when the missile crisis erupted.
In February 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved a plan more extreme than Schlesinger's: to use "covert means . . . to lure or provoke Castro, or an uncontrollable subordinate, into an overt hostile reaction against the United States; a reaction which would in turn create the justification for the US to not only retaliate but destroy Castro with speed, force and determination." In March, at the request of the DOD Cuba Project, the Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted a memorandum to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara outlining "pretexts which they would consider would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba." The plan would be undertaken if "a credible internal revolt is impossible of attainment during the next 9-10 months," but before Cuba could establish relations with Russia that might "directly involve the Soviet Union."
A prudent resort to terror should avoid risk to the perpetrator.
The March plan was to construct "seemingly unrelated events to camouflage the ultimate objective and create the necessary impression of Cuban rashness and responsibility on a large scale, directed at other countries as well as the United States," placing the US "in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances [and developing] an international image of Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere." Proposed measures included blowing up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay to create "a 'Remember the Maine' incident," publishing casualty lists in US newspapers to "cause a helpful wave of national indignation," portraying Cuban investigations as "fairly compelling evidence that the ship was taken under attack," developing a "Communist Cuban terror campaign and even in Washington," using Soviet bloc incendiaries for cane-burning raids in neighboring countries, shooting down a drone aircraft with a pretense that it was a charter flight carrying college students on a holiday, and other similarly ingenious schemes -- not implemented, but another sign of the "frantic" and "savage" atmosphere that prevailed.
On August 23 the president issued National Security Memorandum No. 181, "a directive to engineer an internal revolt that would be followed by U.S. military intervention," involving "significant U.S. military plans, maneuvers, and movement of forces and equipment" that were surely known to Cuba and Russia. Also in August, terrorist attacks were intensified, including speedboat strafing attacks on a Cuban seaside hotel "where Soviet military technicians were known to congregate, killing a score of Russians and Cubans"; attacks on British and Cuban cargo ships; the contamination of sugar shipments; and other atrocities and sabotage, mostly carried out by Cuban exile organizations permitted to operate freely in Florida. A few weeks later came "the most dangerous moment in human history."
"A bad press in some friendly countries"
Terrorist operations continued through the tensest moments of the missile crisis. They were formally canceled on October 30, several days after the Kennedy and Khrushchev agreement, but went on nonetheless. On November 8, "a Cuban covert action sabotage team dispatched from the United States successfully blew up a Cuban industrial facility," killing 400 workers, according to the Cuban government. Raymond Garthoff writes that "the Soviets could only see [the attack] as an effort to backpedal on what was, for them, the key question remaining: American assurances not to attack Cuba." These and other actions reveal again, he concludes, "that the risk and danger to both sides could have been extreme, and catastrophe not excluded."
After the crisis ended, Kennedy renewed the terrorist campaign. Ten days before his assassination he approved a CIA plan for "destruction operations" by US proxy forces "against a large oil refinery and storage facilities, a large electric plant, sugar refineries, railroad bridges, harbor facilities, and underwater demolition of docks and ships." A plot to kill Castro was initiated on the day of the Kennedy assassination. The campaign was called off in 1965, but "one of Nixon's first acts in office in 1969 was to direct the CIA to intensify covert operations against Cuba."
Of particular interest are the perceptions of the planners. In his review of recently released documents on Kennedy-era terror, Dominguez observes that "only once in these nearly thousand pages of documentation did a U.S. official raise something that resembled a faint moral objection to U.S.-government sponsored terrorism": a member of the NSC staff suggested that it might lead to some Russian reaction, and raids that are "haphazard and kill innocents . . . might mean a bad press in some friendly countries." The same attitudes prevail throughout the internal discussions, as when Robert Kennedy warned that a full-scale invasion of Cuba would "kill an awful lot of people, and we're going to take an awful lot of heat on it."
Terrorist activities continued under Nixon, peaking in the mid- 1970s, with attacks on fishing boats, embassies, and Cuban offices overseas, and the bombing of a Cubana airliner, killing all seventy-three passengers. These and subsequent terrorist operations were carried out from US territory, though by then they were regarded as criminal acts by the FBI.
So matters proceeded, while Castro was condemned by editors for maintaining an "armed camp, despite the security from attack promised by Washington in 1962." The promise should have sufficed, despite what followed; not to speak of the promises that preceded, by then well documented, along with information about how well they could be trusted: e.g., the "Lodge moment" of July 1960.
On the thirtieth anniversary of the missile crisis, Cuba protested a machine-gun attack against a Spanish-Cuban tourist hotel; responsibility was claimed by a group in Miami. Bombings in Cuba in 1997, which killed an Italian tourist, were traced back to Miami. The perpetrators were Salvadoran criminals operating under the direction of Luis Posada Carriles and financed in Miami. One of the most notorious international terrorists, Posada had escaped from a Venezuelan prison, where he had been held for the Cubana airliner bombing, with the aid of Jorge Mas Canosa, a Miami businessman who was the head of the tax-exempt Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF). Posada went from Venezuela to El Salvador, where he was put to work at the Ilopango military air base to help organize US terrorist attacks against Nicaragua under Oliver North's direction.
Posada has described in detail his terrorist activities and the funding for them from exiles and CANF in Miami, but felt secure that he would not be investigated by the FBI. He was a Bay of Pigs veteran, and his subsequent operations in the 1960s were directed by the CIA. When he later joined Venezuelan intelligence with CIA help, he was able to arrange for Orlando Bosch, an associate from his CIA days who had been convicted in the US for a bomb attack on a Cuba-bound freighter, to join him in Venezuela to organize further attacks against Cuba. An ex-CIA official familiar with the Cubana bombing identifies Posada and Bosch as the only suspects in the bombing, which Bosch defended as "a legitimate act of war." Generally considered the "mastermind" of the airline bombing, Bosch was responsible for thirty other acts of terrorism, according to the FBI. He was granted a presidential pardon in 1989 by the incoming Bush I administration after intense lobbying by Jeb Bush and South Florida Cuban-American leaders, overruling the Justice Department, which had found the conclusion "inescapable that it would be prejudicial to the public interest for the United States to provide a safe haven for Bosch the security of this nation is affected by its ability to urge credibly other nations to refuse aid and shelter to terrorists."
[B]Economic warfare
Cuban offers to cooperate in intelligence-sharing to prevent terrorist attacks have been rejected by Washington, though some did lead to US actions. "Senior members of the FBI visited Cuba in 1998 to meet their Cuban counterparts, who gave [the FBI] dossiers about what they suggested was a Miami-based terrorist network: information which had been compiled in part by Cubans who had infiltrated exile groups." Three months later the FBI arrested Cubans who had infiltrated the US-based terrorist groups. Five were sentenced to long terms in prison.
The national security pretext lost whatever shreds of credibility it might have had after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, though it was not until 1998 that US intelligence officially informed the country that Cuba no longer posed a threat to US national security. The Clinton administration, however, insisted that the military threat posed by Cuba be reduced to "negligible," but not completely removed. Even with this qualification, the intelligence assessment eliminated a danger that had been identified by the Mexican ambassador in 1961, when he rejected JFK's attempt to organize collective action against Cuba on the grounds that "if we publicly declare that Cuba is a threat to our security, forty million Mexicans will die laughing."
In fairness, however, it should be recognized that missiles in Cuba did pose a threat. In private discussions the Kennedy brothers expressed their fears that the presence of Russian missiles in Cuba might deter a US invasion of Venezuela. So "the Bay of Pigs was really right," JFK concluded.
The Bush I administration reacted to the elimination of the security pretext by making the embargo much harsher, under pressure from Clinton, who outflanked Bush from the right during the 1992 election campaign. Economic warfare was made still more stringent in 1996, causing a furor even among the closest US allies. The embargo came under considerable domestic criticism as well, on the grounds that it harms US exporters and investors -- the embargo's only victims, according to the standard picture in the US; Cubans are unaffected. Investigations by US specialists tell a different story. Thus, a detailed study by the American Association for World Health concluded that the embargo had severe health effects, and only Cuba's remarkable health care system had prevented a "humanitarian catastrophe"; this has received virtually no mention in the US.
The embargo has effectively barred even food and medicine. In 1999 the Clinton administration eased such sanctions for all countries on the official list of "terrorist states," apart from Cuba, singled out for unique punishment. Nevertheless, Cuba is not entirely alone in this regard. After a hurricane devastated West Indian islands in August 1980, President Carter refused to allow any aid unless Grenada was excluded, as punishment for some unspecified initiatives of the reformist Maurice Bishop government. When the stricken countries refused to agree to Grenada's exclusion, having failed to perceive the threat to survival posed by the nutmeg capital of the world, Carter withheld all aid. Similarly, when Nicaragua was struck by a hurricane in October 1988, bringing starvation and causing severe ecological damage, the current incumbents in Washington recognized that their terrorist war could benefit from the disaster, and therefore refused aid, even to the Atlantic Coast area with close links to the US and deep resentment against the Sandinistas. They followed suit when a tidal wave wiped out Nicaraguan fishing villages, leaving hundreds dead and missing in September 1992. In this case, there was a show of aid, but hidden in the small print was the fact that apart from an impressive donation of $25,000, the aid was deducted from assistance already scheduled. Congress was assured, however, that the pittance of aid would not affect the administration's suspension of over $100 million of aid because the US-backed Nicaraguan government had failed to demonstrate a sufficient degree of subservience.
US economic warfare against Cuba has been strongly condemned in virtually every relevant international forum, even declared illegal by the Judicial Commission of the normally compliant Organization of American States. The European Union called on the World Trade Organization to condemn the embargo. The response of the Clinton administration was that "Europe is challenging 'three decades of American Cuba policy that goes back to the Kennedy Administration,' and is aimed entirely at forcing a change of government in Havana." The administration also declared that the WTO has no competence to rule on US national security or to compel the US to change its laws. Washington then withdrew from the proceedings, rendering the matter moot.
Successful defiance
The reasons for the international terrorist attacks against Cuba and the illegal economic embargo are spelled out in the internal record. And no one should be surprised to discover that they fit a familiar pattern -- that of Guatemala a few years earlier, for example.
From the timing alone, it is clear that concern over a Russian threat could not have been a major factor. The plans for forceful regime change were drawn up and implemented before there was any significant Russian connection, and punishment was intensified after the Russians disappeared from the scene. True, a Russian threat did develop, but that was more a consequence than a cause of US terrorism and economic warfare.
In July 1961 the CIA warned that "the extensive influence of 'Castroism' is not a function of Cuban power. . . . Castro's shadow looms large because social and economic conditions throughout Latin America invite opposition to ruling authority and encourage agitation for radical change," for which Castro's Cuba provided a model. Earlier, Arthur Schlesinger had transmitted to the incoming President Kennedy his Latin American Mission report, which warned of the susceptibility of Latin Americans to "the Castro idea of taking matters into one's own hands." The report did identify a Kremlin connection: the Soviet Union "hovers in the wings, flourishing large development loans and presenting itself as the model for achieving modernization in a single generation." The dangers of the "Castro idea" are particularly grave, Schlesinger later elaborated, when "the distribution of land and other forms of national wealth greatly favors the propertied classes" and "the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent living." Kennedy feared that Russian aid might make Cuba a "showcase" for development, giving the Soviets the upper hand throughout Latin America.
In early 1964, the State Department Policy Planning Council expanded on these concerns: "The primary danger we face in Castro is . . . in the impact the very existence of his regime has upon the leftist movement in many Latin American countries. . . . The simple fact is that Castro represents a successful defiance of the US, a negation of our whole hemispheric policy of almost a century and a half." To put it simply, Thomas Paterson writes, "Cuba, as symbol and reality, challenged U.S. hegemony in Latin America." International terrorism and economic warfare to bring about regime change are justified not by what Cuba does, but by its "very existence," its "successful defiance" of the proper master of the hemisphere. Defiance may justify even more violent actions, as in Serbia, as quietly conceded after the fact; or Iraq, as also recognized when pretexts had collapsed.
Outrage over defiance goes far back in American history. Two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson bitterly condemned France for its "attitude of defiance" in holding New Orleans, which he coveted. Jefferson warned that France's "character [is] placed in a point of eternal friction with our character, which though loving peace and the pursuit of wealth, is high-minded." France's "defiance [requires us to] marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation," Jefferson advised, reversing his earlier attitudes, which reflected France's crucial contribution to the liberation of the colonies from British rule. Thanks to Haiti's liberation struggle, unaided and almost universally opposed, France's defiance soon ended, but the guiding principles remain in force, determining friend and foe.
[Note that this passage (pages 80-90) is fully footnoted in Hegemony or Survival. Chomsky's discussion of the Cuban missile crisis itself can be found elsewhere in the same chapter of the book.] [I]Noam Chomsky is a Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. In addition to' Hegemony or Survival, America's Quest for Global Dominance' (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805074007/commondreams-20) (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books), he is the author of numerous books on linguistics and on U.S. foreign policy.

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by Noam Chomsky <!-- #EndEditable -->

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Now that the Bush administration, pursuing its "war against terrorism," has once again elevated Cuba into America's cross-hairs as a newly anointed member of the Axis of Evil, it seems like a good moment to consider the question of terrorism and Cuba. Noam Chomsky takes up this matter in his new book, 'Hegemony or Survival, America's Quest for Global Dominance (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805074007/commondreams-20)', and a long, chilling excerpt from that book is included below (with his kind permission). No one has written more powerfully or consistently on the subject of state violence and state terror or reminded us more powerfully or consistently that "terror" isn't primarily what small stateless bands of fanatics deliver to large and powerful states. History is, in a sense, a history of state terror and the United States has been a practitioner of the form, in the case of Cuba, as Chomsky shows, with unrelenting perseverance and relish for nearly half a century.
-- Tom Engelhardt
The Batista dictatorship was overthrown in January 1959 by Castro's guerrilla forces. In March, the National Security Council (NSC) considered means to institute regime change. In May, the CIA began to arm guerrillas inside Cuba. "During the Winter of 1959-1960, there was a significant increase in CIA-supervised bombing and incendiary raids piloted by exiled Cubans" based in the US. We need not tarry on what the US or its clients would do under such circumstances. Cuba, however, did not respond with violent actions within the United States for revenge or deterrence. Rather, it followed the procedure required by international law. In July 1960, Cuba called on the UN for help, providing the Security Council with records of some twenty bombings, including names of pilots, plane registration numbers, unexploded bombs, and other specific details, alleging considerable damage and casualties and calling for resolution of the conflict through diplomatic channels. US Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge responded by giving his "assurance [that] the United States has no aggressive purpose against Cuba." Four months before, in March 1960, his government had made a formal decision in secret to overthrow the Castro government, and preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion were well advanced.
Washington was concerned that Cubans might try to defend themselves. CIA chief Allen Dulles therefore urged Britain not to provide arms to Cuba. His "main reason," the British ambassador reported to London, "was that this might lead the Cubans to ask for Soviet or Soviet bloc arms," a move that "would have a tremendous effect," Dulles pointed out, allowing Washington to portray Cuba as a security threat to the hemisphere, following the script that had worked so well in Guatemala. Dulles was referring to Washington's successful demolition of Guatemala's first democratic experiment, a ten-year interlude of hope and progress, greatly feared in Washington because of the enormous popular support reported by US intelligence and the "demonstration effect" of social and economic measures to benefit the large majority. The Soviet threat was routinely invoked, abetted by Guatemala's appeal to the Soviet bloc for arms after the US had threatened attack and cut off other sources of supply. The result was a half-century of horror, even worse than the US-backed tyranny that came before.
For Cuba, the schemes devised by the doves were similar to those of CIA director Dulles. Warning President Kennedy about the "inevitable political and diplomatic fall-out" from the planned invasion of Cuba by a proxy army, Arthur Schlesinger suggested efforts to trap Castro in some action that could be used as a pretext for invasion: "One can conceive a black operation in, say, Haiti which might in time lure Castro into sending a few boatloads of men on to a Haitian beach in what could be portrayed as an effort to overthrow the Haitian regime, . . . then the moral issue would be clouded, and the anti-US campaign would be hobbled from the start." Reference is to the regime of the murderous dictator "Papa Doc" Duvalier, which was backed by the US (with some reservations), so that an effort to help Haitians overthrow it would be a crime.
Eisenhower's March 1960 plan called for the overthrow of Castro in favor of a regime "more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the U.S.," including support for "military operation on the island" and "development of an adequate paramilitary force outside of Cuba." Intelligence reported that popular support for Castro was high, but the US would determine the "true interests of the Cuban people." The regime change was to be carried out "in such a manner as to avoid any appearance of U.S. intervention," because of the anticipated reaction in Latin America and the problems of doctrinal management at home.
Operation Mongoose
The Bay of Pigs invasion came a year later, in April 1961, after Kennedy had taken office. It was authorized in an atmosphere of "hysteria" over Cuba in the White House, Robert McNamara later testified before the Senate's Church Committee. At the first cabinet meeting after the failed invasion, the atmosphere was "almost savage," Chester Bowles noted privately: "there was an almost frantic reaction for an action program." At an NSC meeting two days later, Bowles found the atmosphere "almost as emotional" and was struck by "the great lack of moral integrity" that prevailed. The mood was reflected in Kennedy's public pronouncements: "The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong . . . can possibly survive," he told the country, sounding a theme that would be used to good effect by the Reaganites during their own terrorist wars. Kennedy was aware that allies "think that we're slightly demented" on the subject of Cuba, a perception that persists to the present.
Kennedy implemented a crushing embargo that could scarcely be endured by a small country that had become a "virtual colony" of the US in the sixty years following its "liberation" from Spain. He also ordered an intensification of the terrorist campaign: "He asked his brother, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy, to lead the top-level interagency group that oversaw Operation Mongoose, a program of paramilitary operations, economic warfare, and sabotage he launched in late 1961 to visit the 'terrors of the earth' on Fidel Castro and, more prosaically, to topple him."
The terrorist campaign was "no laughing matter," Jorge Dominguez writes in a review of recently declassified materials on operations under Kennedy, materials that are "heavily sanitized" and "only the tip of the iceberg," Piero Gleijeses adds.
Operation Mongoose was "the centerpiece of American policy toward Cuba from late 1961 until the onset of the 1962 missile crisis," Mark White reports, the program on which the Kennedy brothers "came to pin their hopes." Robert Kennedy informed the CIA that the Cuban problem carries "the top priority in the United States Government -- all else is secondary -- no time, no effort, or manpower is to be spared" in the effort to overthrow the Castro regime. The chief of Mongoose operations, Edward Lansdale, provided a timetable leading to "open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime" in October 1962. The "final definition" of the program recognized that "final success will require decisive U.S. military intervention," after terrorism and subversion had laid the basis. The implication is that US military intervention would take place in October 1962 -- when the missile crisis erupted.
In February 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved a plan more extreme than Schlesinger's: to use "covert means . . . to lure or provoke Castro, or an uncontrollable subordinate, into an overt hostile reaction against the United States; a reaction which would in turn create the justification for the US to not only retaliate but destroy Castro with speed, force and determination." In March, at the request of the DOD Cuba Project, the Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted a memorandum to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara outlining "pretexts which they would consider would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba." The plan would be undertaken if "a credible internal revolt is impossible of attainment during the next 9-10 months," but before Cuba could establish relations with Russia that might "directly involve the Soviet Union."
A prudent resort to terror should avoid risk to the perpetrator.
The March plan was to construct "seemingly unrelated events to camouflage the ultimate objective and create the necessary impression of Cuban rashness and responsibility on a large scale, directed at other countries as well as the United States," placing the US "in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances [and developing] an international image of Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere." Proposed measures included blowing up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay to create "a 'Remember the Maine' incident," publishing casualty lists in US newspapers to "cause a helpful wave of national indignation," portraying Cuban investigations as "fairly compelling evidence that the ship was taken under attack," developing a "Communist Cuban terror campaign and even in Washington," using Soviet bloc incendiaries for cane-burning raids in neighboring countries, shooting down a drone aircraft with a pretense that it was a charter flight carrying college students on a holiday, and other similarly ingenious schemes -- not implemented, but another sign of the "frantic" and "savage" atmosphere that prevailed.
On August 23 the president issued National Security Memorandum No. 181, "a directive to engineer an internal revolt that would be followed by U.S. military intervention," involving "significant U.S. military plans, maneuvers, and movement of forces and equipment" that were surely known to Cuba and Russia. Also in August, terrorist attacks were intensified, including speedboat strafing attacks on a Cuban seaside hotel "where Soviet military technicians were known to congregate, killing a score of Russians and Cubans"; attacks on British and Cuban cargo ships; the contamination of sugar shipments; and other atrocities and sabotage, mostly carried out by Cuban exile organizations permitted to operate freely in Florida. A few weeks later came "the most dangerous moment in human history."
"A bad press in some friendly countries"
Terrorist operations continued through the tensest moments of the missile crisis. They were formally canceled on October 30, several days after the Kennedy and Khrushchev agreement, but went on nonetheless. On November 8, "a Cuban covert action sabotage team dispatched from the United States successfully blew up a Cuban industrial facility," killing 400 workers, according to the Cuban government. Raymond Garthoff writes that "the Soviets could only see [the attack] as an effort to backpedal on what was, for them, the key question remaining: American assurances not to attack Cuba." These and other actions reveal again, he concludes, "that the risk and danger to both sides could have been extreme, and catastrophe not excluded."
After the crisis ended, Kennedy renewed the terrorist campaign. Ten days before his assassination he approved a CIA plan for "destruction operations" by US proxy forces "against a large oil refinery and storage facilities, a large electric plant, sugar refineries, railroad bridges, harbor facilities, and underwater demolition of docks and ships." A plot to kill Castro was initiated on the day of the Kennedy assassination. The campaign was called off in 1965, but "one of Nixon's first acts in office in 1969 was to direct the CIA to intensify covert operations against Cuba."
Of particular interest are the perceptions of the planners. In his review of recently released documents on Kennedy-era terror, Dominguez observes that "only once in these nearly thousand pages of documentation did a U.S. official raise something that resembled a faint moral objection to U.S.-government sponsored terrorism": a member of the NSC staff suggested that it might lead to some Russian reaction, and raids that are "haphazard and kill innocents . . . might mean a bad press in some friendly countries." The same attitudes prevail throughout the internal discussions, as when Robert Kennedy warned that a full-scale invasion of Cuba would "kill an awful lot of people, and we're going to take an awful lot of heat on it."
Terrorist activities continued under Nixon, peaking in the mid- 1970s, with attacks on fishing boats, embassies, and Cuban offices overseas, and the bombing of a Cubana airliner, killing all seventy-three passengers. These and subsequent terrorist operations were carried out from US territory, though by then they were regarded as criminal acts by the FBI.
So matters proceeded, while Castro was condemned by editors for maintaining an "armed camp, despite the security from attack promised by Washington in 1962." The promise should have sufficed, despite what followed; not to speak of the promises that preceded, by then well documented, along with information about how well they could be trusted: e.g., the "Lodge moment" of July 1960.
On the thirtieth anniversary of the missile crisis, Cuba protested a machine-gun attack against a Spanish-Cuban tourist hotel; responsibility was claimed by a group in Miami. Bombings in Cuba in 1997, which killed an Italian tourist, were traced back to Miami. The perpetrators were Salvadoran criminals operating under the direction of Luis Posada Carriles and financed in Miami. One of the most notorious international terrorists, Posada had escaped from a Venezuelan prison, where he had been held for the Cubana airliner bombing, with the aid of Jorge Mas Canosa, a Miami businessman who was the head of the tax-exempt Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF). Posada went from Venezuela to El Salvador, where he was put to work at the Ilopango military air base to help organize US terrorist attacks against Nicaragua under Oliver North's direction.
Posada has described in detail his terrorist activities and the funding for them from exiles and CANF in Miami, but felt secure that he would not be investigated by the FBI. He was a Bay of Pigs veteran, and his subsequent operations in the 1960s were directed by the CIA. When he later joined Venezuelan intelligence with CIA help, he was able to arrange for Orlando Bosch, an associate from his CIA days who had been convicted in the US for a bomb attack on a Cuba-bound freighter, to join him in Venezuela to organize further attacks against Cuba. An ex-CIA official familiar with the Cubana bombing identifies Posada and Bosch as the only suspects in the bombing, which Bosch defended as "a legitimate act of war." Generally considered the "mastermind" of the airline bombing, Bosch was responsible for thirty other acts of terrorism, according to the FBI. He was granted a presidential pardon in 1989 by the incoming Bush I administration after intense lobbying by Jeb Bush and South Florida Cuban-American leaders, overruling the Justice Department, which had found the conclusion "inescapable that it would be prejudicial to the public interest for the United States to provide a safe haven for Bosch the security of this nation is affected by its ability to urge credibly other nations to refuse aid and shelter to terrorists."
[B]Economic warfare
Cuban offers to cooperate in intelligence-sharing to prevent terrorist attacks have been rejected by Washington, though some did lead to US actions. "Senior members of the FBI visited Cuba in 1998 to meet their Cuban counterparts, who gave [the FBI] dossiers about what they suggested was a Miami-based terrorist network: information which had been compiled in part by Cubans who had infiltrated exile groups." Three months later the FBI arrested Cubans who had infiltrated the US-based terrorist groups. Five were sentenced to long terms in prison.
The national security pretext lost whatever shreds of credibility it might have had after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, though it was not until 1998 that US intelligence officially informed the country that Cuba no longer posed a threat to US national security. The Clinton administration, however, insisted that the military threat posed by Cuba be reduced to "negligible," but not completely removed. Even with this qualification, the intelligence assessment eliminated a danger that had been identified by the Mexican ambassador in 1961, when he rejected JFK's attempt to organize collective action against Cuba on the grounds that "if we publicly declare that Cuba is a threat to our security, forty million Mexicans will die laughing."
In fairness, however, it should be recognized that missiles in Cuba did pose a threat. In private discussions the Kennedy brothers expressed their fears that the presence of Russian missiles in Cuba might deter a US invasion of Venezuela. So "the Bay of Pigs was really right," JFK concluded.
The Bush I administration reacted to the elimination of the security pretext by making the embargo much harsher, under pressure from Clinton, who outflanked Bush from the right during the 1992 election campaign. Economic warfare was made still more stringent in 1996, causing a furor even among the closest US allies. The embargo came under considerable domestic criticism as well, on the grounds that it harms US exporters and investors -- the embargo's only victims, according to the standard picture in the US; Cubans are unaffected. Investigations by US specialists tell a different story. Thus, a detailed study by the American Association for World Health concluded that the embargo had severe health effects, and only Cuba's remarkable health care system had prevented a "humanitarian catastrophe"; this has received virtually no mention in the US.
The embargo has effectively barred even food and medicine. In 1999 the Clinton administration eased such sanctions for all countries on the official list of "terrorist states," apart from Cuba, singled out for unique punishment. Nevertheless, Cuba is not entirely alone in this regard. After a hurricane devastated West Indian islands in August 1980, President Carter refused to allow any aid unless Grenada was excluded, as punishment for some unspecified initiatives of the reformist Maurice Bishop government. When the stricken countries refused to agree to Grenada's exclusion, having failed to perceive the threat to survival posed by the nutmeg capital of the world, Carter withheld all aid. Similarly, when Nicaragua was struck by a hurricane in October 1988, bringing starvation and causing severe ecological damage, the current incumbents in Washington recognized that their terrorist war could benefit from the disaster, and therefore refused aid, even to the Atlantic Coast area with close links to the US and deep resentment against the Sandinistas. They followed suit when a tidal wave wiped out Nicaraguan fishing villages, leaving hundreds dead and missing in September 1992. In this case, there was a show of aid, but hidden in the small print was the fact that apart from an impressive donation of $25,000, the aid was deducted from assistance already scheduled. Congress was assured, however, that the pittance of aid would not affect the administration's suspension of over $100 million of aid because the US-backed Nicaraguan government had failed to demonstrate a sufficient degree of subservience.
US economic warfare against Cuba has been strongly condemned in virtually every relevant international forum, even declared illegal by the Judicial Commission of the normally compliant Organization of American States. The European Union called on the World Trade Organization to condemn the embargo. The response of the Clinton administration was that "Europe is challenging 'three decades of American Cuba policy that goes back to the Kennedy Administration,' and is aimed entirely at forcing a change of government in Havana." The administration also declared that the WTO has no competence to rule on US national security or to compel the US to change its laws. Washington then withdrew from the proceedings, rendering the matter moot.
Successful defiance
The reasons for the international terrorist attacks against Cuba and the illegal economic embargo are spelled out in the internal record. And no one should be surprised to discover that they fit a familiar pattern -- that of Guatemala a few years earlier, for example.
From the timing alone, it is clear that concern over a Russian threat could not have been a major factor. The plans for forceful regime change were drawn up and implemented before there was any significant Russian connection, and punishment was intensified after the Russians disappeared from the scene. True, a Russian threat did develop, but that was more a consequence than a cause of US terrorism and economic warfare.
In July 1961 the CIA warned that "the extensive influence of 'Castroism' is not a function of Cuban power. . . . Castro's shadow looms large because social and economic conditions throughout Latin America invite opposition to ruling authority and encourage agitation for radical change," for which Castro's Cuba provided a model. Earlier, Arthur Schlesinger had transmitted to the incoming President Kennedy his Latin American Mission report, which warned of the susceptibility of Latin Americans to "the Castro idea of taking matters into one's own hands." The report did identify a Kremlin connection: the Soviet Union "hovers in the wings, flourishing large development loans and presenting itself as the model for achieving modernization in a single generation." The dangers of the "Castro idea" are particularly grave, Schlesinger later elaborated, when "the distribution of land and other forms of national wealth greatly favors the propertied classes" and "the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent living." Kennedy feared that Russian aid might make Cuba a "showcase" for development, giving the Soviets the upper hand throughout Latin America.
In early 1964, the State Department Policy Planning Council expanded on these concerns: "The primary danger we face in Castro is . . . in the impact the very existence of his regime has upon the leftist movement in many Latin American countries. . . . The simple fact is that Castro represents a successful defiance of the US, a negation of our whole hemispheric policy of almost a century and a half." To put it simply, Thomas Paterson writes, "Cuba, as symbol and reality, challenged U.S. hegemony in Latin America." International terrorism and economic warfare to bring about regime change are justified not by what Cuba does, but by its "very existence," its "successful defiance" of the proper master of the hemisphere. Defiance may justify even more violent actions, as in Serbia, as quietly conceded after the fact; or Iraq, as also recognized when pretexts had collapsed.
Outrage over defiance goes far back in American history. Two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson bitterly condemned France for its "attitude of defiance" in holding New Orleans, which he coveted. Jefferson warned that France's "character [is] placed in a point of eternal friction with our character, which though loving peace and the pursuit of wealth, is high-minded." France's "defiance [requires us to] marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation," Jefferson advised, reversing his earlier attitudes, which reflected France's crucial contribution to the liberation of the colonies from British rule. Thanks to Haiti's liberation struggle, unaided and almost universally opposed, France's defiance soon ended, but the guiding principles remain in force, determining friend and foe.
[Note that this passage (pages 80-90) is fully footnoted in Hegemony or Survival. Chomsky's discussion of the Cuban missile crisis itself can be found elsewhere in the same chapter of the book.] [I]Noam Chomsky is a Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. In addition to' Hegemony or Survival, America's Quest for Global Dominance' (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805074007/commondreams-20) (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books), he is the author of numerous books on linguistics and on U.S. foreign policy.

</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>

[DWG]

As to &quot;over 600 attempts&quot; on castros' life-give me a break-even the CIA gets one right more often that that. I find it interesting that this &quot;fact&quot; comes from the guy in charge of protecting him;...

[DWG]

Anyone who cites chomsky as a source should be deported! And Z, why not just provide us with a link we can ignore instead of the entire text of chomsky ravings?

[10thzodiac]

Anyone who cites chomsky as a source should be deported! And Z, why not just provide us with a link we can ignore instead of the entire text of chomsky ravings?

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/northwoods.html

SF
10thz http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mesg/tsmileys2/04.gif

[DWG]

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/northwoods.html

SF
10thz http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mesg/tsmileys2/04.gif
Much better, thank you! SF:)

[HardJedi]

not to be TOO inflamatory, but Noam Chomsky is a hypocrite, idiot and fool.

[DWG]

not to be TOO inflamatory, but Noam Chomsky is a hypocrite, idiot and fool.

I just have a problem with anybody whose approach to history starts with "the United States is evil and here's why". Only book I have ever thrown away, on purpose and with feeling, was by chomsky!:mad:

[gwladgarwr]

Anyone who cites chomsky as a source should be deported! And Z, why not just provide us with a link we can ignore instead of the entire text of chomsky ravings?

I'm actually a PhD hopeful in Linguistics at George Mason and have quoted Chomsky numerous times - but only on linguistics. He's truly a genius in linguistics (if you're interested in that kind of thing.)

However, someone with his brains and more than 70 years of dealing with language and linguistics is somehow mentally one Schlitz short of a six-pack. He's been a Socialist and America-hater since boyhood, and some of his writings verge on anti-Semetic (and he's Jewish himself.) His own father was a renown Hebrew scholar in his day! It's a shame that a man of his knowledge and experience uses his skill at rhetoric to bash the country that has given him the opportunity to scale the heights of academia, and, most of all, he's WRONG. But, after all, what would you expect of a committed Communist?

He styles himself as one of the intellectual elites that will form part of the (temporary) dictatorship in the communist revolution. Whatever. Someone forgot to tell him that the communist revolution train derailed some years ago and the world is moving on from this failed experiment in authoritarianism and centralized economy - including China and Vietnam. Chomsky is this smart yet is all about it?

Maybe I should quit college and open tackle-n-bait shop. :usmc:

[DWG]

I'm actually a PhD hopeful in Linguistics at George Mason and have quoted Chomsky numerous times - but only on linguistics. He's truly a genius in linguistics (if you're interested in that kind of thing.)

However, someone with his brains and more than 70 years of dealing with language and linguistics is somehow mentally one Schlitz short of a six-pack. He's been a Socialist and America-hater since boyhood, and some of his writings verge on anti-Semetic (and he's Jewish himself.) His own father was a renown Hebrew scholar in his day! It's a shame that a man of his knowledge and experience uses his skill at rhetoric to bash the country that has given him the opportunity to scale the heights of academia, and, most of all, he's WRONG. But, after all, what would you expect of a committed Communist?

He styles himself as one of the intellectual elites that will form part of the (temporary) dictatorship in the communist revolution. Whatever. Someone forgot to tell him that the communist revolution train derailed some years ago and the world is moving on from this failed experiment in authoritarianism and centralized economy - including China and Vietnam. Chomsky is this smart yet is all about it?

Maybe I should quit college and open tackle-n-bait shop. :usmc:


They also forgot to tell him what usually happens to Jews under communism (putsch). Thanks for backing me up on this idiot, I started to call him a moron but I'll give him credit for brains, just not any sense. The Corps needs linguists so don't stop now-we gotta know what the muj are muttering about!:D
That bait and tackle shop will be there in 40 yrs. or so and you'll appreciate it more. SF :flag:

[ggyoung]

It looks like "suntoy" is getting the rest of the 99% of this site in a rageing, mad mood again. I can not beleve that this know nothing is geting everyone pi++ again. Just say NO

[10thzodiac]

I just have a problem with anybody whose approach to history starts with "the United States is evil and here's why". Only book I have ever thrown away, on purpose and with feeling, was by chomsky!:mad:

DW United States is not evil and here is why: It's like Christianity and Islamism, its just some of the God Dam people in them that are evil.

I'll give you three guesses who I think is more evil than Norm Chomsky in America and the last two guesses won't count http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mesg/tsmileys2/18.gif

SF
10thz

[10thzodiac]

We're funny !

I met an Old Gunny working in the local hardware store many years ago and he was just waiting for SS to kick in and get his bait and tackle shop.

I was telling the Mrs. this morning when I was a kid in Venice, CA I use to go down to the pier or the break-water (Rocks) by "Muscle Beach" and fish my heart out. Here I'm '64 talking about it, sure got to get back somewhere like that again before they close the box.

SF
See all of you at the pier someday http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mesg/tsmileys2/01.gif Havana ?
10thz

[DWG]

DW United States is not evil and here is why: It's like Christianity and Islamism, its just some of the God Dam people in them that are evil.

I'll give you three guesses who I think is more evil than Norm Chomsky in America and the last two guesses won't count http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mesg/tsmileys2/18.gif

SF
10thz

I'll bet he can fly an F-4. Let's see chomsky match that!!!:banana:

[DWG]

We're funny !

I met an Old Gunny working in the local hardware store many years ago and he was just waiting for SS to kick in and get his bait and tackle shop.

I was telling the Mrs. this morning when I was a kid in Venice, CA I use to go down to the pier or the break-water (Rocks) by "Muscle Beach" and fish my heart out. Here I'm '64 talking about it, sure got to get back somewhere like that again before they close the box.

SF
See all of you at pier someday http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mesg/tsmileys2/01.gif Havana ?
10thz

Should have known you had an ulterior motive for chummying up to fidel! Did you get the pier concession yet?

[10thzodiac]

Should have known you had an ulterior motive for chummying up to fidel! Did you get the pier concession yet?

Actually I had a dum-dum chambered in my .45 in Gitmo with Fidel's name on it during the missile crisis.

I guess now, I'll have to settle for sneaking over there through Canada or Mexico.

Not too long ago on the news, an American women came back through Canada with her passport stamped Cuba and she was fined $10,000.00 http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mesg/tsmileys2/17.gif maybe Puerto Rico for now is a better idea, close to a VA too http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mesg/tsmileys2/04.gif 64 ya know

Cuba was beautiful by the beach in Guantanamo, I did allot of spear fishing there after the crisis was over in '62.

[DWG]

My optometrist, when I was a kid, told me he spent two weeks in Havana when he first got out of the army. Said he went through a couple of thousand bucks between him and his brother. That was big dough back then(late 50s)-he said it was worth every cent. Havana was apparently beautiful before it became a "workers' paradise!

[10thzodiac]

My optometrist, when I was a kid, told me he spent two weeks in Havana when he first got out of the army. Said he went through a couple of thousand bucks between him and his brother. That was big dough back then(late 50s)-he said it was worth every cent. Havana was apparently beautiful before it became a "workers' paradise!

When I was on the Rock 63-65 , one of the Lt's was going to Rio for leave.

I was there in '87 and they have a saying, "Bringing a women to Rio, is like bringing a bucket of sand to the beach."

You know, they were right http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mesg/tsmileys2/17.gif

[DWG]

It looks like "suntoy" is getting the rest of the 99% of this site in a rageing, mad mood again. I can not beleve that this know nothing is geting everyone pi++ again. Just say NO

Ya gotta admit, SuNMaN evokes more replies than anyone else! This forum starts to smoke when he cranks up! Like him or not he gets every one interested in "what dat fool saying now!":banana: :D

[SkilletsUSMC]

Ya gotta admit, SuNMaN evokes more replies than anyone else! This forum starts to smoke when he cranks up! Like him or not he gets every one interested in "what dat fool saying now!":banana: :D

I have a question for Sunman....

why would we try to kill castro 638 times if he wasnt a serious problem???

[DWG]

I have a question for Sunman....

why would we try to kill castro 638 times if he wasnt a serious problem???
Because we're FU*KING EVIL; haven't you been paying attention to 10Z?

Now put your tin foil hat back on and read his 39 page rant that he posted earlier-RIGHT NOW, DAMMIT!!!:mad:

[10thzodiac]

Because we're FU*KING EVIL; haven't you been paying attention to 10Z?

Now put your tin foil hat back on and read his 39 page rant that he posted earlier-RIGHT NOW, DAMMIT!!!:mad:

DW, why would you deliberately misquote what I said in my post #19 above ?

My Post #19 Again:

"DW United States is not evil and here is why: It's like Christianity and Islamism, its just some of the God Dam people in them that are evil.

I'll give you three guesses who I think is more evil than Norm Chomsky in America and the last two guesses won't count http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mesg/tsmileys2/18.gif"

SF
10thz

[DWG]

DW, why would you deliberately misquote what I said in my post #19 above ?

My Post #19 Again:

"DW United States is not evil and here is why: It's like Christianity and Islamism, its just some of the God Dam people in them that are evil.

I'll give you three guesses who I think is more evil than Norm Chomsky in America and the last two guesses won't count http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mesg/tsmileys2/18.gif"

SF
10thz


I was basing it on you quoting chumpsky, not your specific post, but you got me. Sorry Marine:( !


RETRACTION: 10Z DID NOT SAY U.S. IS EVIL! 10Z merely posted quotes of someone who thinks US is evil! I repeat: 10Z DID NOT SAY U.S. IS EVIL!

How's that?:)

[10thzodiac]

I was basing it on you quoting chumpsky, not your specific post, but you got me. Sorry Marine:( !


RETRACTION: 10Z DID NOT SAY U.S. IS EVIL! 10Z merely posted quotes of someone who thinks US is evil! I repeat: 10Z DID NOT SAY U.S. IS EVIL!

How's that?:)

Thanks Marine :thumbup: