Cuba and the United States

This exchange appeared in the September 1961 issue of Monthly Review. The questions were submitted, in writing, to Comandante Guevara by Leo Huberman during the week of the Bay of Pigs invasion; the answers were received at the end of June.

Confronting the Youngest Revolution: Cuban Anti-Communists and the Global Politics of Youth in the Early 1960s

This article examines the transnational activism of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (Revolutionary Student Directorate, DRE), a group of exiled Cuban anti-Castro students. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion, with CIA funding, the DRE attempted to challenge student support for the Cuban Revolution in Latin America and elsewhere in the global South. This article uses the DRE's trajectory to rethink the 1960s as a period of anti-communist, as well as leftist, youth ascendancy. It challenges the idea that Cuba garnered universal youth support, stressing instead that the Cuban Revolution helped turn student politics into a key battleground of the Cold War.

Conformity

This chapter speaks about Asch’s classic study about how individuals will conform to the group even in the face of unambiguously true information. Similar trends were witnessed in the real world during the Bay of Pigs fiasco, where President Kennedy’s top advisors succumbed to groupthink and failed to recognize Cuba’s military strength and foresight in predicting the planned US invasion. Contrary to common sense, individuals tend to resolve the cognitive dissonance they experience when faced with group pressure by changing their deeply held (and objectively true) opinions. Conformity to work processes is necessary in any workplace environment, but when taken to the extreme, it can lead to false perceptions about agreement, a lack of speaking out, and ultimately poor decision-making.

The CIA and Cuba: The Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis

This chapter is concerned with the some of the CIA’s operations against Cuba. It examines the ill-fated invasion at the Bay of Pigs by CIA backed and trained Cuban exiles, and how the failure impacted the agency. President Kennedy chose to fire the Head of the CIA and his deputy Allen Dulles and Charles Cabell. This occurred a short while before another, far more serious, crisis. In October 1962 reconnaissance aircraft provided evidence of a Soviet missile base on Cuba. This prompted the Cuban Missile Crisis. During the crisis the CIA was called on to provide intelligence on matters of the highest significance, and to do so it used the material provided by a Soviet source, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky. Documents: Report on the Cuban Operation; The Inspector General’s Survey of the Cuban Operation; Oleg V. Penkovskiy.

The Dark Side of Neverland

Operation Pedro Pan is shown in this chapter to be both the result of and an integral part of the CIA’s covert action program to undermine and overthrow the revolutionary government in Cuba, beginning with the attempted invasion at the Bay of Pigs and later with Operation Mongoose. The author describes how the children’s departures were dependent on the anti-Castro movement networks run by Ramon Grau and others closely linked to the CIA. She also shows how the Pedro Pan children were used in Washington’s international propaganda war against the Cuban revolution and in the United States as a response to domestic resentment against Cuban refugees, as well as how the young Cubans were even regarded as potential “freedom fighters” or spies against Castro.

Operation Zapata: Cuba

This chapter explores one of the most infamous episodes of covert action during the Cold War: The Bay of Pigs. The operation, which was authorized by Dwight Eisenhower in March of 1960 and carried out by John F. Kennedy in mid-April of the following year, involved training and arming Cuban exiles with the aim of overthrowing Fidel Castro. America’s hand was not supposed to show. In the end, the mission was a failure. Consistent with the book’s argument, the evidence shows that decision makers were reluctant to openly violate the nonintervention principle by pursuing overt action against Fidel Castro. As a result, they opted for a covert operation they knew was less likely to succeed to avoid undermining America’s moral authority and to protect the credibility of its commitments. Decision makers were also willing to act overtly if a legal exemption to nonintervention materialized.

A Reputation for Irresolute Action

This chapter studies how Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev viewed the resolve of President John F. Kennedy, looking at Khrushchev's decision making surrounding the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. According to evidence made available from declassified and translated Soviet archives, as well as information drawn from additional sources, Kennedy quickly formed a reputation for irresolute action largely because of his repeated failure to back up his strong rhetoric with firm action and his wavering support of the Bay of Pigs invasion early during his tenure. While Kennedy rather quickly established a poor reputation for resolve, it was difficult for him to alter this reputation. Throughout the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and during the early stages of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Khrushchev continued to doubt Kennedy's firmness and determination, despite the president's repeated attempts to signal his resolve. Declassified Soviet documents further indicate that Kennedy was able to change this negative perception of his resolve during the Cuban Missile Crisis only by presenting a consistently resolute position and altering his signals of strategic interest. Thus, it was Kennedy's communication of high strategic interest in Cuba combined with his resolute behavior during the missile crisis that enabled him to alter his poor reputation.