The Kennedy Administration, The Reason for Invading Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, April 3, 1961.

Upon narrowly winning the election, President Kennedy entered office with a cautious approach to the Cold War. However, fears of the missile gap were soon proved false, and Kennedy chose to expand other aspects of the United States' military strategy against communism. Recognizing the need to combat the influence of communism in Latin America, where social conditions made fertile ground for the ideology, Kennedy announced the Alliance for Progress program, aimed at furthering economic development in the region. However, the instability of Latin American governments persisted, and the Cuban government soon became the object of concern among U.S. policymakers because of its potential role in fomenting communist agitation. The Kennedy administration approved of a plan to invade Cuba in 1961, at the Bay of Pigs. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. attempted to justify the invasion by arguing that Castro had betrayed his promises for democracy, citing the alleged subservience of the Cuban government to Soviet dictates as further reason for U.S. intervention. The Soviets were responsible for the tremendous buildup in arms on the island, and Cuba served as a launching pad for spreading revolution throughout Latin America, he argued. These factors, among others, provided the rationale for the invasion, which turned into a disastrous failure.

The Kennedy Administration: The Reasons for Invading Cuba at the Bay of Pigs (April 3, 1961)

The present situation in Cuba confronts the Western Hemisphere and the inter-American system with a grave and urgent challenge.

This challenge does not result from the fact that the [Fidel] Castro government in Cuba was established by revolution. The hemisphere rejoiced at the overthrow of the [Fulgencio] Batista tyranny, looked with sympathy on the new regime, and welcomed its promises of political freedom and social justice for the Cuban people. The challenge results from the fact that the leaders of the revolutionary regime betrayed their own revolution, delivered that revolution into the hands of powers alien to the hemisphere and transformed it into an instrument employed with calculated effect to suppress the rekindled hopes of the Cuban people for democracy and to intervene, in the internal affairs of other American Republics.

What began as a movement to enlarge Cuban democracy and freedom has been perverted, in short, into a mechanism for the destruction of free institutions in Cuba, for the seizure by international communism of a base and bridgehead in the Americas, and for the disruption of the inter-American system.

It is the considered judgment of the Government of the United States of America that the Castro regime in Cuba offers a clear and present danger to the authentic and autonomous revolution of the Americas-to the whole hope of spreading political liberty, economic development, and social progress through all the republics of the hemisphere.

THE BETRAYAL OF THE CUBAN REVOLUTION

The character of the Batista regime in Cuba made a violent popular reaction almost inevitable. The rapacity of the leadership, the corruption of the government, the brutality of the police, the regime's indifference to the needs of the people for education, medical care, housing, for social justice and economic opportunity-all these, in Cuba as elsewhere, constituted an open invitation to revolution.

When word arrived from the Sierra Maestra of the revolutionary movement headed by Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz, the people of thehemisphere watched its progress with feeling and with hope. The Cuban Revolution could not, however, have succeeded on the basis of guerrilla action alone. It succeeded because of the rejection of the regime by thousands of civilians behind the lines-a rejection which undermined the morale of the superior military forces of Batista and caused them to collapse from within. This response of the Cuban people was not just to the cruelty and oppression of the Batista government but to the clear and moving declarations repeatedly made by Dr. Castro concerning his plans and purposes of post-revolutionary Cuba.

As early as 1953 Dr. Castro promised that the first revolutionary law would proclaim the Constitution of 1940 as "the supreme law of the land." In this and subsequent statements Dr. Castro promised "absolute guarantee of freedom of information, both of newspapers and radio, and of all the individual and political rights guaranteed by the Constitution," and a provisional government that "will hold general elections ... at the end of one year under the norms of the Constitution of 1940 and the Electoral Code of 1943 and will deliver the power immediately to the candidate elected." Dr. Castro, in short, promised a free and democratic Cuba dedicated to social and economic justice. It was to assure these goals that the Rebel Army maintained itself in the hills, that the Cuban people turned against Batista, and that all elements of the revolution in the end supported the 26th of July Movement. It was because of the belief in the honesty of Dr. Castro's purposes that the accession of his regime to power on January 1, 1959, was followed within a single week by its acceptance in the hemisphere-a recognition freely accorded by nearly all the American Republics, including the United States.

For a moment the Castro regime seemed determined to make good on at least its social promises, The positive programs initiated in the first months of the Castro regime-the schools built, the medical clinics established, the new housing, the early projects of land reform, the opening up of beaches and resorts to the people, the elimination of graft in government-were impressive in their conception; no future Cuban government can expect to turn its back on such objectives. But so far as the expressed political aims of the revolution were concerned, the record of the Castro regime has been a record of the steady and consistent betrayal of Dr. Castro's prerevolutionary promises; and the result has been to corrupt the social achievements and make them the means, not of liberation, but of bondage.

The history of the Castro Revolution has been the history of the calculated destruction of the free-spirited Rebel Army and its supersession as the main military instrumentality of the regime by the new state militia. It has been the history of the calculated destruction of the 26th of July Movement and its supersession as the main political instrumentality of the regime by the Communist Party (Partido Socialista Popular). It has been the history of the disillusion, persecution, imprisonment, exile, and execution of men and women who supported Dr. Castro-in many cases fought by his side-and thereafter doomed themselves by trying to make his regime live up to his own promises....

. . . . In place of the democratic spontaneity of the Cuban Revolution, Dr. Castro placed his confidence in the ruthless discipline of the Cuban Communist Party. Today that party is the only political party permitted to operate in Cuba. Today its members and those responsive to its influence dominate the government of Cuba, the commissions of economic planning, the labor front, the press, the educational system, and all the agencies of national power.

The Cuban Communist Party has had a long and intricate history. For years it had a working arrangement with the Batista government; indeed, Batista in 1943 appointed to his cabinet the first avowed Communist ever to serve in any cabinet of any American Republic. Later Batista and the Communists fell out. But the Communists were at first slow to grasp the potentialities of the Castro movement. When Castro first went to the hills, the Cuban Communist Party dismissed him as "bourgeois" and "putschist." Only when they saw that he had a chance of winning did they try to take over his movement.

Their initial opposition was quickly forgiven. Dr. Castro's brother, Major Raul Castro, had himself been active in the international Communist student movement and had made his pilgrimage to the Communist world. Moreover, Major Ernesto (Che) Guevara, a dominating influence on Dr. Castro, was a professional revolutionary from Argentina who had worked with Communists in Guatemala and Mexico. Through Raul Castro and Guevara, the Communists, though unable to gain control either of the 26th of July Movement or of the Rebel Army, won ready access to Dr. Castro himself. What was perhaps even more important, the Communist Party could promise Castro not only a clear-cut program but a tough organization to put that program into execution....

On one issue after another, the Castro regime has signified its unquestioning acceptance of the Soviet line on international affairs. After the termination of diplomatic relations with the United States, the Cuban Government turned over its diplomatic and consular representation to the Embassy of Czechoslovakia in Washington. In the United Nations, Cuba votes with the Communist bloc on virtually all major issues....

It is important to understand the detail and the magnitude of this process of takeover. Since the middle of 1960 more than 30,000 tons of arms with an estimated value of $5o million have poured from beyond the Iron Curtain into Cuba in an ever-rising flood. The 8-hour military parade through Habana and the military maneuvers in January 1961 displayed Soviet JS-2 51-ton tanks, Soviet SU-100 assault guns, Soviet 8 5 mm. field guns, Soviet 127 mm. field guns. Except for motorized equipment, the Cuban armed forces have been reequipped by the Soviet bloc and are now dependent on the bloc for the maintenance of their armed power. Soviet and Czech military advisers and technicians have accompanied the flow of arms. And the Castro regime has sent Cubans to Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union for training as jet pilots, ground maintenance crews, and artillerymen.

As a consequence of Soviet military aid, Cuba has today, except for the United States, the largest ground forces in the hemisphere-at least ten times as large as the military forces maintained by previous Cuban Governments, including that of Batista. Estimates of the size of the Cuban military establishment range from 250,000 to 400,000. On the basis of the lower figure, one out of every 30 Cubans is today in the armed forces as against one out of 50 in the Soviet Union and one out of 60 in the United States.

Soviet domination of economic relations has proceeded with similar speed and comprehensiveness. A series of trade and financial agreements has integrated the Cuban economy with that of the Communist world. The extent of Cuban economic dependence on the Communist world is shown by the fact that approximately 75 percent of its trade is now tied up in barter arrangements with Iron Curtain countries. The artificiality of this development is suggested by the fact that at the beginning of 1960 only 2 percent of Cuba's total foreign trade was with the Communist bloc. The Soviet Union, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland have permanent technical assistance missions in Cuba; and a Communist Chinese delegation will soon arrive in pursuance of the Cuban-Chinese agreement of December 1960. According to Major Guevara, 2,700 Cubans will be receiving technical training in bloc countries in 1961.

The same process is visible in the field of cultural relations.

The transformation of Cuba into a Soviet satellite is, from the viewpoint of the Cuban leaders, not an end but a beginning. Dr. Castro's fondest dream is a continent-wide upheaval which would reconstruct all Latin America on the model of Cuba. "We promise," he said on July 26, 1960, "to continue making the nation the example that can convert the Cordillera of the Andes into the Sierra Maestra of the hemisphere." "If they want to accuse us of wanting a revolution in all America," he added later, "let them accuse us."

Under Castro, Cuba has already become a base and staging area for revolutionary activity throughout the continent. In prosecuting the war against the hemisphere, Cuban embassies in Latin American countries work in close collaboration with Iron Curtain diplomatic missions and with the Soviet intelligence services. In addition, Cuban expressions of fealty to the Communist world have provided the Soviet Government a long-sought pretext for threats of direct interventions of its own in the Western Hemisphere. "We shall do everything to support Cuba in her struggle," Prime Minister Khrushchev said on July 9, 1960, ". . . Speaking figuratively, in case of necessity, Soviet artillerymen can support with rocket fire the Cuban people if aggressive forces in the Pentagon dare to start intervention against Cuba."

As Dr. Castro's alliance with international communism has grown closer, his determination to export revolution to other American Republics-a determination now affirmed, now denied -has become more fervent. The Declaration of Habana of September 2, 1960, was an open attack on the Organization of American States. Cuban intervention, though couched in terms designed to appeal to Latin American aspirations for freedom and justice, has shown its readiness to do anything necessary to extend the power of Fidelismo. . . .

No one contends that the Organization of American States is a perfect institution. But it does represent the collective purpose of the American Republics to work together for democracy, economic development, and peace. The OAS has established the machinery to guarantee the safety and integrity of every American Republic, to preserve the principle of nonintervention by any American State in the internal or external affairs of the other American States, and to assure each nation the right to develop its cultural, political, and economic life freely and naturally, respecting the rights of the individual and the principles of universal morality.

The Organization of American States is the expression of the moral and political unity of the Western Hemisphere. In rejecting the OAS, the Castro regime has rejected the hemisphere and has established itself as the outpost in the Americas for forces determined to wreck the inter-American system. Under Castro, Cuba has become the agency to destroy the Bolivarian vision of the Americas as the greatest region in the world, "greatest not so much by virtue of her area and wealth, as by her freedom and glory.