Aggressing Against the "Communist Aggressors"

The US modus operandi for régime change has been applied to other countries besides Cuba. It can be described as follows:

• Heap criticism on the targeted government for imprisoning the oppressors and assassins of the previous US-backed reactionary free market régime.
• Denounce the newly installed revolutionary or reformist government as “dictatorial” for failing to immediately institute Western-style electoral politics or for showing friendly relations and trading with the then-Soviet Union.
• Demonize the revolutionary leaders, labeling them as fanatical, brutal, genocidal, power hungry, and even mentally imbalanced.
• Accuse the targeted country of posing a threat to regional peace and stability.
• Impose economic sanctions to cripple and destabilize its economy. Do whatever possible to “make the economy scream.” Give aid and money to subversive elements within the country.
• When the targeted government responds with angry criticisms about US aggression, treat such charges as evidence of hostility toward America.
• Deny harboring any aggressive designs; justify US actions as defensive measures against terrorism or communist aggrandizement or both.
• Attack the country with surrogate mercenary forces, trained, equipped, and financed by the US national security state or, if necessary, with regular US armed forces.

Not long after the Castro government took control of Cuba, Washington launched a campaign of CIA bombings and incendiary raids piloted by exiled Cubans stationed on American soil. Attorney General Robert Kennedy oversaw paramilitary operations, punitive economic measures, and sabotage aimed at undoing the new régime.⁵

As part of its campaign to overthrow Marxist rule in Havana, the United States launched an invasion of Cuba in April 1961. About 1,600 Cuban émigrés, trained and financed by the CIA, and assisted by hundreds of US military “advisors,” established a beachhead at Bahia de los Cochinos (Bay of Pigs). In the words of one of their leaders, Manuel de Varona, their intent was to overthrow Castro and set up “a provisional government” to “restore all properties to the rightful owners.”⁶

In the United States, with its reputedly free press, evidence of the coming invasion was suppressed by the Associated Press, United Press International, and all the major newspapers and news weeklies, seventy-five of which—in an impressively unanimous act of self-censorship—rejected a report offered by the editors of the Nation, a liberal weekly, detailing US preparations for the attack upon Cuba.⁷

Fidel Castro’s accusation that US rulers were planning to invade Cuba was dismissed by the New York Times as “shrill . .. anti-American propaganda,” and by Time magazine as Castro’s “continued tawdry little melodrama of invasion.”⁸ When Washington broke diplomatic relations with Cuba in January 1961, the New York Times explained, “What snapped US patience was a new propaganda offense from Havana charging that the United States was plotting an ‘imminent invasion’ of Cuba.”⁹ Yet in fact, the invasion was imminent and did happen.

The invaders failed to penetrate beyond the Bay of Pigs and were driven off with heavy losses within several days. Over 1,110 prisoners were taken by the Cuban government. These men, all Cuban émigrés, were returned to the United States about six months later in exchange for a $60 million indemnity (referred to in the US press as a “ransom”).

Such is the predominance of anticommunist orthodoxy that, after the Bay of Pigs invasion, there was no critical discussion in the United States regarding its moral and legal impropriety. Instead, commentary focused exclusively on tactical questions. There were repeated references to the disappointing “fiasco” and “disastrous attempt” to free Cuba from the “communist yoke.” No mention that the invasion failed not because of insufficient air coverage, as some of the invaders claimed, but because the Cuban people, instead of rising en masse to join the counterrevolutionary expedition as anticipated by US leaders, closed ranks behind their revolution.

Among the Cuban-exile invaders taken prisoner near the Bay of Pigs (according to the Cuban government) were men whose families between them had previously owned 914,859 acres of land, 9,666 houses, 70 factories, 5 mines, 2 banks, and 10 sugar mills in Cuba.¹⁰ They were the scions of the privileged class of prerevolutionary Cuba who had lived so comfortably under the Batista dictatorship, coming back to reclaim their substantial holdings. But in the US media they were hailed as nothing less than “freedom fighters.”

Why would the Cuban people stand by the “Castro dictatorship”? That was never explained to the American public. Nothing much was said in the US press about the advances made by ordinary Cubans after the revolution, the millions who for the first time had a guaranteed right to a job, medical care, sufficient food, housing, education, and other public services—all of which were far from perfect but still composing a better life than the free market misery endured under the US-sponsored Batista ancien régime.