In October 1962, in what is widely known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, Washington pushed the world to the edge of nuclear war. Released on the 40th anniversary of these events, the new Pathfinder book October 1962: The ‘Missile’ Crisis as Seen from Cuba, by Cuban author Tomás Diez Acosta, tells the story of what really happened.
After Cuban workers and farmers overthrew a U.S.-backed dictatorship and began a deep-going revolution in 1959, Washington took increasingly aggressive actions to try to overthrow the new revolutionary power. In April 1961, Cuba’s revolutionary militias and armed forces crushed a U.S.-organized mercenary invasion at the Bay of Pigs.
In the spring and summer of 1962, in face of escalating preparations by Washington for a full-scale invasion of Cuba, the Cuban government signed a mutual defense pact with the Soviet Union. In October U.S. president John F. Kennedy was informed U.S. spy planes had discovered Soviet nuclear missiles installed on the island. Using this as a pretext to advance the U.S. moves toward an armed assault, Kennedy demanded removal of the missiles. Washington imposed a naval blockade of Cuba, stepped up preparations for an armed assault, and placed its armed forces on nuclear alert.
In face of the mobilization of Cuban workers and farmers to defend their national sovereignty and revolutionary gains, the U.S. government backed off its invasion plans. Following an exchange of communications between Washington and Moscow, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, without consulting Cuba, announced his decision to remove the missiles on October 28.
With this issue, the Militant will begin printing excerpts from October 1962: The ‘Missile’ Crisis as Seen from Cuba over the coming weeks. This week’s feature is from the first chapter. Diez Acosta details how, after the U.S. defeat at the Bay of Pigs, Washington accelerated its aggressive moves against the Cuban Revolution, with attempts to assassinate Fidel and Raúl Castro and other covert acts of terror. This was part of the buildup to a planned U.S. invasion that came to a head in October 1962.
Copyright © 2002 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.
This setback also led to the dismantling of the whole apparatus created by the Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower to overthrow the Cuban Revolution. The Kennedy administration then began to develop its own new anti-Cuba plan, in line with its approach to foreign policy and its political and military strategy of "flexible response." Its overall aim was to strengthen the role of the United States as the leader of the capitalist world in its Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc countries.
In addition, the Bay of Pigs fiasco had become a constant concern--almost an obsession--for the Kennedy brothers, who inherited from their father the guiding principle: "Don’t get mad. Get even."1
For that reason, even before Cuban forces had captured the last mercenaries hiding in the mangroves and salt marshes of the Zapata Swamp, the president of the United States decided to create an Interagency Task Force of the National Security Council (NSC), whose mission was to come up with an immediate follow-up plan for Cuba. This group was initially headed by Paul H. Nitze, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, and consisted of representatives of the State, Defense, and Justice departments, as well as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and U.S. Information Agency (USIA).
At the same time, Kennedy asked Gen. Maxwell Taylor to chair a working committee charged with evaluating the invasion’s failure and providing new proposals for U.S. military and political action in situations like that of Cuba. The commission included Attorney General Robert Kennedy, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and Admiral Arleigh Burke, chief of naval operations.
The plans devised by the two groups marked the start of a new tide of aggression against Cuba, aimed at creating generalized unrest inside the country, which would lead to the overthrow of the revolutionary government and, if necessary, direct U.S. military intervention. Such aggression was considered fully justified in their eyes....
Counterrevolutionary groups shattered
At the time of the Bay of Pigs landing, units of the Cuban security forces, acting with popular support, had arrested hundreds of individuals suspected of involvement in the counterrevolution.2 This prevented the operational groups created for that situation by the CIA from functioning and broke up the actions planned by the fifth columnists. The counterrevolutionary organizations were thus shattered, and the CIA lost contact with most of its agents inside Cuba.
The heads of these groups both inside and outside the country, who had offered to serve as puppets to conceal direct U.S. involvement in the plans against Cuba, felt betrayed. Demoralization spread through their ranks. "The opposition has lost some of its strongest forces, its factionalism is greater, and its confidence in the United States has been shaken,"3 stated a paper prepared by the CIA to assess the situation at that time.
Taking this reality as its starting point, the Central Intelligence Agency drew up an action program against Cuba, submitted on May 19, 1961. According to C. Tracy Barnes, CIA assistant deputy director for covert action, this plan was a secret appendix to the paper that the Interagency Task Force drafted May 4 for the National Security Council.
In its authors’ estimation, the new CIA program was aimed at "weakening the Castro regime." This did not mean that the Agency had renounced its goal of overthrowing the revolution. As the document stated, "This plan should be viewed only as the covert contribution to an overall national program designed to accelerate the moral and physical disintegration of the Castro government and to hasten the day when a combination of actions and circumstances will make possible its replacement."4
The objective for that period was to achieve the reorganization of the forces within Cuba--agent and saboteur networks, armed bands, and others--so as to create conditions that would make possible more decisive actions. For this reason, the program was limited to exploiting the so-called "economic, political and psychological vulnerabilities"5 of the country, in order to create favorable conditions for new, longer-range plans. The CIA did not expect the internal situation to change over the next six months.
The first task of the CIA officials responsible for operations in Cuba was to reorganize clandestine activity inside the country. To do so, they sought more accurate data on the strength of the counterrevolutionary groups and their networks of agents. The directors of the "Cuba Project" hoped to use this information to relaunch and, if possible, step up subversive actions.
Many of these officials wanted to get quick revenge for the defeat they had suffered by carrying out operations that would bring immediate results, results going beyond the objectives approved for the program. One of their goals was to show President Kennedy that their estimates of the internal support that the invaders would receive had been correct and, at the same time, to force him into direct military action against Cuba. Thus was born one of the most dangerous operations organized by the CIA, which was given the code name Patty.6
The CIA’s ‘Operation Patty’
This project called for actions throughout Cuban territory intended to spark a general uprising. The date chosen to begin the uprising was July 26, 1961, in order to take advantage of the celebrations organized across the country--particularly in Havana and Santiago de Cuba, where Fidel and Raúl Castro, respectively, were targeted for assassination.
The plan in Santiago was to occupy one of the houses next to the stadium, as close as possible to the platform from which Commander Raúl Castro was to speak. A .30-caliber machine gun was to be set up in the house to carry out the assassination. Four men armed with grenades were to cover the retreat. In the event that this action failed, the conspirators assumed that Raúl would immediately travel to Havana to report what had happened, and so they planned to set an ambush on the road to the airport, using six men armed with submachine guns.
The assassination of Raúl was to be synchronized with a mortar attack on the "Hermanos Díaz" oil refinery in Santiago de Cuba. The plan included carrying out, at the same time, an attack seemingly directed against themselves--an assault on the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo. To carry out this action, they were to station a group of men on the "El Cuero" farm--next to the U.S. enclave--where they would deploy seven mortars. Six of these were to fire thirty projectiles at the naval base, and the other was to fire on a Cuban military camp located nearby. This action was meant to provoke a confrontation, as both forces would consider themselves under attack.
The CIA was to prepare a story on these events, saying that "Cuban military commanders, blinded by the assassination that had taken the life of Raúl Castro, had gone to the extreme of attacking the naval base." This would provide the pretext the United States was seeking for direct military intervention. It must be borne in mind that the CIA had included in its plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion a similar provocation, which was to be carried out by a group of mercenaries commanded by the traitor Higinio Díaz. He did not dare to land, however.7
The authors of this plan also proposed to undertake the assassination of Prime Minister Fidel Castro during a mass rally to be held that day at the Plaza of the Revolution in Havana. For this action an 82-mm. mortar was to be hidden at a spot near the platform and fired, in an attempt to kill as many as possible of the revolutionary leaders gathered there.
At the same time, armed bands in Las Villas province (now Villa Clara) and Camagüey province were to carry out assassinations and attacks on public facilities, blow up bridges, and so on. These plans also included the possible elimination of key political leaders and civilian and military officials, so that within a few hours of the start of Operation Patty, chaos would reign across the nation.
The CIA was kept abreast of the progress of preparations by its agents in Cuba. In the final days of June, the agency approved the operation and provided precise instructions to the plotters with regard to the provisioning of arms and military supplies to all the groups operating in the country.
Cuban security forces were kept informed of the conspiracy’s development by their agents who had infiltrated the ranks of the enemy. In mid-July, when the strands of this deadly operation’s complex web were fully in place, Cuban authorities decided to put an end to it, placing the main plotters under arrest.
This action brought in a large haul of weapons, explosives, and war matériel. A month later, on August 12, 1961, the Cuban government publicly denounced the new conspiracy.8
Despite the setback suffered by Operation Patty, CIA officials assigned to the Cuba project prepared new subversive actions. In late July 1961, two new programs were outlined at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The first was a covert program against Cuba; the second, a program of clandestine activity within the country. Both were discussed by the Cuba Task Force, chaired by Richard Goodwin, and also by the Special Group of the National Security Council.
According to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., special assistant to the president, the covert action program was to be the key element in overall U.S. policy toward Cuba. It received backing at the highest level, and a multimillion-dollar budget was approved. This program included intelligence and counterintelligence, political action, propaganda, and paramilitary activities.
The clandestine action plan was not essentially different from the covert program. It aimed to reorient the CIA’s work toward better supervision and control of counterrevolutionary organizations in Cuba. Increased support was to be provided to groups that showed more promise in carrying out clandestine actions. President Kennedy approved these two programs in early August.