JFK and Castro
The Secret Quest For Accommodation Recently Declassified U.S.
government Documents Reveal That, at the Height of the Cold War, John F.
Kennedy and Fidel Castro Were Exploring Ways To Normalize U.S.-Cuba Relations
Peter Kornbluh
From the Print Edition:
Susxn Lucci Sept Oct 99
In February 1996, Robert Kennedy Jr. and his brother,
Michael, traveled to Havana to meet
with Fidel Castro. As a gesture of goodwill, they brought a file of formerly
top secret U.S. documents on the Kennedy administration's covert exploration of
an accommodation with Cuba--a record of what might have been had not Lee Harvey
Oswald, seemingly believing the president to be an implacable foe of Castro's
Cuba, fired his fateful shots in Dallas.
Castro thanked them for the file and shared his
"impression that it was [President Kennedy's] intention after the missile
crisis to change the framework" of relations between the United
States and Cuba.
"It's unfortunate," said Castro, that "things happened as they
did, and he could not do what he wanted to do."
Would John F. Kennedy, had he lived, have been able to
establish a modus vivendi with Fidel Castro?
The question haunts almost 40 years of acrimonious U.S.
- Cuba
relations. In a Top Secret--Eyes Only memorandum written three days after the
president's death, one of his White House aides, Gordon Chase, noted that
"President Kennedy could have accommodated with Castro and gotten away
with it with a minimum of domestic heat"--because of his track record
"of being successfully nasty to Castro and the Communists" during the
1962 Cuban missile crisis.
Castro and his advisers believed the same. A CIA
intelligence report, based on a high-level Cuban source and written for
National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy in 1964, noted that "Fidel Castro
felt that it was possible that President Kennedy would have gone on ultimately
to negotiate with Cuba...[as an] acceptance of a fait accompli for practical
reasons."
The file on the Kennedy administration's "Cuban
contacts" that Robert Jr. and Michael took to Cuba (declassified at the
request of the author) sheds significant light on a story that has never been
fully told -- John Kennedy's secret pursuit of a rapprochement with Fidel
Castro. Along with papers recently released pursuant to the Kennedy
Assassination Records Act of 1992, the documents reveal the escalating efforts
toward negotiations in 1963 that, if successful, might have changed the ensuing
decades of perpetual hostility between Washington
and Havana. Given the continuing
state of tension with Castro's regime, this history carries an immediate
relevance for present policy makers. Indeed, with the Clinton
administration buffeted between increasingly vocal critics of U.S.
policy toward Cuba
and powerful proponents of the status quo, reconstructing the hitherto secret
record of Kennedy's efforts in the fall of 1963 to advance "the
rapprochement track" with Castro is more relevant than ever.
John F. Kennedy would seem the most unlikely of presidents
to seek an accommodation with Fidel Castro. His tragically abbreviated
administration bore responsibility for some of the most infamous U.S.
efforts to roll back the Cuban revolution: the Bay of Pigs
invasion, the trade embargo, Operation Mongoose (a U.S.
plan to destabilize the Castro government) and a series of CIA-Mafia
assassination attempts against the Cuban leader. Castro's demise, Seymour M.
Hersh argues in his book, The Dark Side of Camelot, "became a
presidential obsession" until the end. "The top priority in the United
States government--all else is secondary--no
time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared" is to find a
"solution" to the Cuba
problem, Attorney General Robert Kennedy told a high-level group of CIA
and Pentagon officials in early 1962. The president's opinion, according to CIA
minutes of the meeting, was that "the final chapter [on Cuba]
has not been written."
Unbeknownst to all but his brother and a handful of
advisers, however, in 1963 John Kennedy began pursuing an alternative script on
Cuba: a secret
dialogue toward an actual rapprochement with Castro. To a policy built upon
"overt and covert nastiness," as Top Secret White House memoranda
characterized U.S.
operations against Cuba,
was added "the sweet approach," meaning the possibility of
"quietly enticing Castro over to us." National Security Council
officials referred to this multitrack policy as "simil-opting"--the
use of disparate methods toward the goal of moving Cuba
out of the Soviet orbit.
By April 1963, alongside proposals for covert sabotage,
diplomatic pressure and military contingency plans, "gradual development
of some form of accommodation with Castro" was listed in high-level NSC
option papers. In a memorandum on "The Cuban Problem," Kennedy
adviser McGeorge Bundy provided the rationale for this type of initiative:
There is always the possibility that Castro or others currently high in
the regime might find advantage in a gradual shift away from their present
level of dependence on Moscow. In
strictly economic terms, both the United States
and Cuba have
much to gain from reestablishment of relations.
A Titoist Castro is not inconceivable, and a full diplomatic
revolution would not be the most extraordinary event in the 20th century.
For the Kennedy White House, there was nothing incongruous
about such a policy turnaround, Bundy explained in an interview shortly before
his death, in 1996. "We wanted to make a reality check on what could or
could not be done with Castro," he said. President Kennedy, according to
Bundy, "clearly thought this was an exploration worth making because it
might lead to something." Kennedy was "strong enough to explore it in
a politically nondangerous way."
Then, as now, the dangers of domestic politics mitigated
against any open effort at a dialogue. With the president already thinking
ahead to the 1964 elections, the key problem, Bundy recalls, was "finding
a way to do it" that was secure and reliable. "We didn't have a
department of peaceful tricks," he noted cryptically. By mid-1963, the
Kennedy White House was waiting for what Bundy referred to as "a target of
opportunity" to talk to Fidel.
It is a historical irony that the opportunity to communicate
with Castro arose from the two most hostile episodes in U.S.-Cuba relations:
the CIA-directed invasion at the Bay
of Pigs and the missile crisis. Negotiations for the ransomed
return of 1,200 Bay of Pigs prisoners provided the
contacts and confidences under which the first messages could be passed; and
the Kremlin's unilateral decision to withdraw its nuclear missiles appeared to
provoke a Cuban-Soviet breach that the United
States could exploit.
Castro's anger at Khrushchev for failing to consult him on
the end of the missile crisis caught the attention of U.S.
policy makers. An intelligence report on "Future Relations with
Castro" prepared by the State Department in June 1963 noted that the
"Soviet refusal to run the quarantine and its acquiescence in withdrawing
the missiles shook the foundation of Cuban foreign policy." Since the
missile crisis, the report stated: Castro has indicated, sometimes
vaguely, sometimes rather clearly, through various channels, public as well as
private, that he is interested in an accommodation with the United
States. His immediate disillusion over the
Soviet missile crisis posture probably prompted him to grope for a policy which
would diminish his dependence upon the Soviet Union.1 In March 1963, Cuban
minister Raul Roa Garcia sent a letter to U.N. Secretary General U Thant hinting
that Cuba was
interested in friendly relations with the United
States. European businessmen returning from Havana
told CIA sources that Castro wanted to deal
with Washington. By June 5, the CIA
had accumulated a half-dozen intelligence reports, according to a secret
summary by Deputy Director Richard Helms, "suggesting Cuban interest in a
rapprochement with the United States."
The first private channel through which Castro directly
transmitted this message was James Donovan, a New York
lawyer negotiating the release of the Bay of Pigs
prisoners. In the late fall of 1962, Donovan became the first American emissary
to gain Castro's ear, and his trust. Secretly representing the Kennedy
brothers, Donovan arranged a trade of $53 million in food and medicine for the Bay
of Pigs captives; in early 1963, he continued his trips to Havana
to secure the release of two dozen American citizens, including three CIA
operatives, held in Cuban jails.
Debriefed by U.S.
intelligence officials after each trip, Donovan described his meetings with
Castro as "most cordial and intimate." In late January 1963, as he
was boarding his plane to return to the United
States, Donovan reported, Castro's physician
and aide-de-camp, Rene Vallejo, "broached the subject of re-establishing
diplomatic relations with the U.S."
Vallejo also extended Castro's
invitation for Donovan to return to Havana
for further talks "about the future of Cuba
and international relations in general."
In early March, a State Department official suggested that
Donovan be instructed to tell Castro that breaking Cuban relations with the
Sino-Soviet bloc was a nonnegotiable U.S.
demand for improved relations. But Kennedy overruled him. "The President
does not agree that we should make the breaking of Sino/Soviet ties a
non-negotiable point," stated a Top Secret/Eyes Only memorandum recording
Kennedy's instructions to security adviser Bundy. "We don't want to
present Castro with a condition that he obviously cannot fulfill. We should
start thinking along more flexible lines."
Kennedy's surprising position "must be kept close to
the vest," the memo advised. "The President, himself, is very
interested in this one."
The "Special Group"--the highest-level interagency
committee responsible for Cuba
policy--did not evaluate the issue of Donovan's talks with Castro, and the
other intelligence reports on Cuba's
interest in better relations, until June 6. According to minutes of their
meeting, Bundy, CIA Director John McCone,
State Department Deputy Undersecretary U. Alexis Johnson and others
"discussed various possibilities of establishing channels of communication
to Castro," and the group agreed that this was "a useful
endeavor."
The CIA sources indicated
that the Cubans would probably accept Donovan as a back-channel negotiator, but
they also indicated that the United States
would have to take the first step. The CIA's
Helms quoted one Cuban source as stating that "Latin pride" would not
permit Cuba to
humiliate itself in the eyes of the world by making the first overture, but
that the United States
could "afford to be charitable and take the initiative."
Which country initiated the secret dialogue in the fall of
1963 remains a subject of historical dispute. The feelers toward a
rapprochement "originally came, one might say, from their side,"
testified William Attwood, the key U.S.
official involved in the subsequent talks, in a top secret deposition in 1975.
In an interview, Cuba's
former ambassador to the United Nations, Carlos Lechuga, insisted that
"this was a Kennedy initiative, not Cuba's."
In fact, the immediate catalyst for the talks appears to
have been a reporter for ABC News named Lisa Howard. A onetime actress and
soap-opera star--in the late 1950s she was a regular on CBS's "Edge of
Night"--Howard emerged on the media scene in 1960 as a correspondent for
Mutual Radio Network. Covering the United Nations, she became the first
journalist to score an interview with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. After
ABC News hired her to cover the 1961 Vienna
summit between Khrushchev and Kennedy, she became one of the first women to
anchor a television news program--"The News Hour with Lisa Howard."
In 1962, Howard began peppering Cuba's
U.N. mission for permission to go to Havana.
"I am the woman who interviewed Khrushchev," she reminded Cuban
officials in her correspondence. The American public wanted to know more about
the Cuban revolution, she wrote; an ABC interview with Castro would serve the
interests of both countries. In April 1963, she finally received permission
to bring a TV crew to Cuba.
To meet Castro, however, she had to prevail upon James Donovan to make the
introduction. Castro granted her an exclusive televised interview--his first
with a U.S.
network since 1959, and a major journalistic coup for Howard and ABC.
Howard's Castro interview aired on May 10, 1963. The White House received a
transcript of the program more than a week in advance and considered trying to
block its broadcast. "Public airing in the United States of this interview
would strengthen the arguments of 'peace' groups, 'liberal' thinkers, Commies,
fellow travelers, and opportunistic political opponents of present United
States policy," as well as provide Castro with a wide audience for his
"reasonable line," warned a May 3 analysis provided to Bundy. On the
other hand, "denial of ABC 'rights' to report the news would raise the
question of 'managed' news."
Among the issues the Cuban premier addressed was the
potential for better relations with Washington.
He stated that a rapprochement was "possible [if] the United
States government wishes it. In that case we
would be agreed to seek and find the basis" for normalizing relations. A
few months later, in a cover story, "Castro's Overture," in the
liberal journal War/Peace Report, Howard wrote that in eight hours of
private conversations Castro had been "even more emphatic about his desire
for negotiations with the United States": In our conversations he
made it quite clear that he was ready to discuss: the Soviet personnel and
military hardware on Cuban soil; compensation for expropriated American lands
and investments; the question of Cuba as a base for Communist subversion
throughout the Hemisphere.
In her article, Howard urged the Kennedy administration to
"send an American government official on a quiet mission to Havana
to hear what Castro has to say." A country as powerful as the United
States, she concluded, "has nothing to
lose at a bargaining table with Fidel Castro."
Behind the scenes, Howard assertively positioned herself as
the key back-channel intermediary to facilitate such negotiations. Upon return
from Cuba in
late April, she briefed the CIA in detail on
the substance of her lengthy talks with Castro. In a secret memorandum given to
President Kennedy,2 CIA Deputy Director
Richard Helms reported on Howard's view that "Fidel Castro is looking for
a way to reach a rapprochement with the United
States." After detailing her
observations about Castro's political power, disagreements with his colleagues
and Soviet troops in Cuba, the memo concluded that "Howard definitely
wants to impress the U.S. Government with two facts: Castro is ready to discuss
rapprochement and she herself is ready to discuss it with him if asked to do so
by the U.S. Government."
CIA Director John McCone
adamantly opposed Howard's approach to Cuba,
arguing that it would leak and compromise a number of CIA
operations against Castro. In a recently declassified May 2, 1963 memorandum to Bundy, McCone stressed
that the "Lisa Howard report be handled in the most limited and sensitive
manner," and "that no active steps be taken on the rapprochement
matter at this time."
Indeed, nothing happened on this track until September, when
Howard established her own trustworthy back channel into the Kennedy White House
through William Attwood, an adviser to the U.S.
mission to the United Nations. A former journalist who, as editor
of Look magazine, had interviewed Castro in 1959, Attwood knew Howard
and shared her belief that improved U.S.-Cuba relations were possible--and from
the perspective of U.S.
interests, preferable. At the United Nations he had heard from the Guinean
ambassador to Havana, Seydon
Diallo, that Castro was unhappy with Cuba's
Soviet satellite status and "would go to some length to obtain normalization
of relations with us." Howard's War/Peace article, which Attwood
read, seemed to convey the same sentiment. On September 12, Attwood discussed
the story with her by phone--a conversation during which the two set in motion
a plan to initiate secret talks between the United
States and Cuba.
In a two-page "memorandum on Cuba,"
dated September 18, 1963,
and written for Under Secretary of State Averell Harriman and U.N. Ambassador
Adlai Stevenson, Attwood laid out an argument for being given permission to establish
discreet, indirect contact with Cuban authorities. The impact of present U.S.
policy, he wrote, "is mainly negative: a. It aggravates Castro's
anti-Americanism and his desire to cause us trouble and embarrassment. b. In
the eyes of a world largely made up of small countries, it freezes us in the
unattractive posture of a big country trying to bully a small country."
Since the United States
was not going to overthrow Castro by overt force, other options could include a
dialogue. "It would seem that we have something to gain and nothing to
lose by finding out whether in fact Castro does want to talk and what
concessions he would be prepared to make," Attwood concluded.
On September 20, Stevenson obtained the green light from
President Kennedy to authorize Attwood's direct contacts with Carlos Lechuga,
the Cuban ambassador to the United Nations. "I then told Miss Howard to
set up the contact, that is to have a small reception at her house so that it
could be done very casually, not as a formal approach by us," Attwood
would later recall. In the middle of the U.N. delegates lounge on September 23,
Howard approached Lechuga and, according to Lechuga's recollection, said that
Attwood "wanted to talk to me and that it was urgent." Howard invited
Lechuga to come to a party at her Park Avenue apartment
that night to meet Attwood.
In the midst of cocktails, finger foods and several dozen
members of New York's high
society, the first bilateral talks on the potential for a U.S.-Cuba
accommodation took place. Standing in a corner of Howard's spacious living
room, Attwood and Lechuga conferred on the interest of their respective leaders
in what Attwood called "an exchange of views." Castro, Lechuga told
Attwood, "had hoped to contact or get in touch with President Kennedy in
'61 and then came the Bay of Pigs and that was
that." Lechuga "hinted that Castro was indeed in a mood to
talk," Attwood reported in a secret account of his meetings, and
"thought there was a good chance that I might be invited to Cuba
if I wished to resume our 1959 talks." As Lechuga remembers the
conversation, it was Attwood who suggested going to Havana,
stating that he was about "to request authorization from the President to
go to Cuba to
meet with Fidel Castro and ask about the feasibility of a rapprochement between
Havana and Washington."
Both made it clear to the other that they did not yet have instructions from
their governments on how--or whether--to proceed with this plan.
The next day, September 24, Attwood met with Robert Kennedy
in Washington, gave him his memo
and reported on the talks with Lechuga. The attorney general promised to pass
along the information to Bundy, the national security adviser. Robert Kennedy,
as Attwood would later testify in a top secret hearing, believed that a trip to
Cuba would be
"rather risky." It was "bound to leak and...might result in some
kind of Congressional investigation." Nevertheless, the attorney general
did think the matter was "worth pursuing."
So, too, did John Kennedy. In a meeting with Attwood on
November 5, Bundy stated that "the President was more in favor of pushing
towards an opening toward Cuba than was the State Department, the idea
being--well, getting them out of the Soviet fold and perhaps wiping out the Bay
of Pigs and maybe getting back into normal."
Throughout the fall of 1963, the Kennedy administration
secretly expanded its back-channel dialogue with Cuba.
Bundy designated his assistant, Gordon Chase, to be Attwood's direct contact at
the White House. At the United Nations, Attwood informed Ambassador Lechuga
that it would be difficult to go to Cuba, but that the United States was
interested in meeting with Castro or a "personal emissary" wherever
such a meeting could be set up.3 And Lisa Howard offered her home as a
communications center for Attwood to converse directly to Castro through Rene
Vallejo. A series of phone exchanges took place in October. Vallejo
conveyed the following message through Howard to Attwood: Castro would very much like to talk to the U.S.
official anytime and appreciated the importance of discretion to all concerned.
Castro would therefore be willing to send a plane to Mexico
to pick up the official and fly him to a private airport near Veradero where
Castro would talk to him alone. The plane would fly him back immediately after
the talk.
Castro wanted to "do the talking himself," Vallejo
told Howard, but he did not rule out sending an emissary to the United Nations
"if there was no other way of engaging a dialogue." Howard suggested
that Vallejo come to New
York. Castro's concrete invitation set off a
flurry of discussion inside the administration. Would such a trip be secure?
Should the United States
find out first what Castro was willing to talk about? Was Castro sincere, or
was he trying to manipulate a reduction of U.S.
pressure? What were the political dangers of an accommodation with Cuba?
Should a dialogue even be attempted?4
John Kennedy's position, as conveyed from Bundy to Attwood,
was that "it did not seem practicable" to send an American official
to Cuba
"at this stage," but he remained open to the idea. "The
President decided that it might be useful for me to go down to Cuba
and see Castro," Attwood recalled in an oral history statement in 1965,
"but first we'd have to know what the agenda was." Kennedy preferred
to begin the secret talks with a meeting between Vallejo and Attwood at the
United Nations. The White House expected Vallejo
to speak to a change in Cuba's
position on the issues that concerned the United
States--an end to Soviet influence and to
subversion in the Western Hemisphere. As Bundy indicated
in a Secret/Sensitive memorandum of the record, "without an indication of
readiness to move in these directions, it is hard for us to see what could be
accomplished by a visit to Cuba."
On November 14, Lisa Howard conveyed this message to Vallejo
and set up a phone date for him to talk to Attwood at her home, a conversation
that took place five days later at 2 a.m..
When Vallejo reiterated Castro's
invitation, Attwood replied that a "preliminary meeting was essential to
make sure there was something useful to talk about."
According to Attwood, Vallejo
said he could not come to New York
at this time, but that "we"--meaning he and Fidel--"would send
instructions to Lechuga to propose and discuss with me an agenda for a later
meeting with Castro." When Attwood passed this information on to
Bundy, he was told that after the agenda was received, "the President
wanted to see me at the White House and decide what to say and whether to go
[to Cuba] or
what we should do next." As Attwood testified behind closed doors to a
special Senate committee in 1975, "that was the 19th of November, three
days before the assassination."
In those last three days, President Kennedy himself sent two
messages to Castro. The first came in the form of a speech before the
Inter-American Press Association in Miami
on November 19. The foundation of the speech was a top secret strategy paper,
"The Future of Cuba," which listed "the 'conversion' of Castro"
as a possibility for meeting U.S.
policy objectives. Cuba
had become "a weapon in an effort dictated by external powers to subvert
the other American republics," Kennedy stated. "This and this alone
divides us. As long as this is true, nothing is possible. Without it,
everything is possible." According to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a special
assistant to the president who helped write the speech, Kennedy's language was
intended to convey to Castro the real potential for normalization between the
two countries.
Kennedy's second message was delivered to Castro by French
journalist Jean Daniel on November 22. Daniel had met with Kennedy in late
October--a meeting arranged by Attwood to focus the president's attention on Cuba--on
his way to Havana. Kennedy
expressed some empathy for Castro's anti-Americanism, acknowledging that the United
States had committed a "number of
sins" in pre-revolutionary Cuba.
He told Daniel that the trade embargo against Cuba
could be lifted if Castro ended his support for leftist movements in the
hemisphere. When Daniel observed that the president seemed to be "seeking
a way out" of the poor state of relations with Cuba,
Kennedy told him to "come and see me on your return from Cuba."
Daniel met with Castro on November 19, and again on the
22nd. "I interpreted Daniel's visit as a gesture to try to establish
communication, a bridge, a contact," the Cuban leader would later recall.
Before learning of the assassination, Castro told Daniel that Kennedy could
become "the greatest president of the United
States, the leader who may at last
understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists,
even in the Americas."
When an aide interrupted their conversation during their second meeting to
report that Kennedy had been shot, Castro turned to Daniel and said, "This
is an end to your mission of peace. Everything is changed."
In the aftermath of John Kennedy's death in Dallas,
the status of the "Attwood-Lechuga tie-line" was put on hold at the
National Security Council. Kennedy aides, now serving Lyndon Johnson, worried
that Lee Harvey Oswald's reported pro-Castro sympathies would make an
accommodation more difficult; that, unlike Kennedy, Johnson risked being
accused of "going soft" on Communism. In early December, Ambassador
Lechuga told Attwood that he had received a letter from Fidel Castro approving
detailed talks and an agenda, and asked whether the dialogue would still go
forward. "The ball is in our court," Gordon Chase reported in a Top
Secret memo to Bundy. "What to do?"
During December, Johnson was brought up to speed on the Cuba
initiative. When the new president visited the U.S.
delegation to the United Nations at New York's
Waldorf-Astoria hotel on December 17, he told Attwood that he had "read my
Cuban memo recapitulating the events or discussions in the fall with
interest." But at a December 23 staff meeting, Bundy told White House
officials that Johnson's concern about appearing sufficiently anti-Communist
during the 1964 election--he expected the Republican candidate to be Richard
Nixon--would prevent any initiative toward Cuba. According to Attwood, Bundy
told him that "the Cuban exercise would probably be put on ice for a
while."
Recently declassified records reveal that the back-channel
contacts between the United States
and Cuba
continued in 1964--and even escalated in substance and significance. With
Attwood assigned to be ambassador to Kenya,
Gordon Chase became the main advocate of continuing the secret accommodation
diplomacy. Ongoing talks would "tend to keep Castro's temperature and the Caribbean
noise-level at a low pitch between now and November," Chase wrote in one
Top Secret/Eyes Only report to Bundy, attempting to turn the 1964 elections
into an argument for continuing the exploration with Cuba.
News headlines such as "U.S. Accommodates with Castro" would not be
good for Johnson's election prospects, Chase noted in another memo, titled
"Talks with Castro." But Johnson "might live superbly with a
headline which reads: USSR Ejected from Cuba."
A U.S.-Cuba deal, "if consummated," Chase argued, "would
constitute a magnificent victory for the U.S.--the
ejection of the Soviets from the W. Hemisphere."
Once again, the ever tenacious Lisa Howard played the part
of intermediary. In early February, Howard traveled to Havana
to make another ABC TV news special on Cuba.
When she returned, she carried a rather extraordinary memorandum--a
"verbal message given to Miss Lisa Howard of ABC News"--addressed to
Lyndon Johnson from Fidel Castro. It read:
1. Please tell President Johnson that I earnestly desire his
election to the Presidency in November...though that appears assured. But if
there is anything I can do to add to his majority (aside from retiring from
politics), I shall be happy to cooperate.... If the President wishes to pass
word to me he can do so through you [Lisa Howard]. He must know that he can
trust you; and I know that I can trust you....
2. If the President feels it necessary during the campaign
to make bellicose statements about Cuba
or even to take some hostile action--if he will inform me, unofficially, that a
specific action is required because of domestic political considerations, I
shall understand and not take any serious retaliatory action.
3. Tell the President that I understand quite well how much
political courage it took for President Kennedy to instruct you [Lisa Howard]
and Ambassador Attwood to phone my aide in Havana for the purpose of commencing
a dialogue toward a settlement of our differences....I hope that we can soon
continue where Ambassador Attwood's phone conversation to Havana left
off...though I'm aware that pre-electoral political considerations may delay
this approach until after November.
4. Tell the President (and I cannot stress this too strongly)
that I seriously hope that Cuba and the United States can eventually sit down
in an atmosphere of good will and of mutual respect and negotiate our
differences. I believe that there are no areas of contention between us that
cannot be discussed and settled in a climate of mutual understanding. But
first, of course, it is necessary to discuss our differences. I now believe
that this hostility between Cuba
and the United States
is both unnatural and unnecessary--and it can be eliminated.
5. Tell the President he should not interpret my
conciliatory attitude, my desire for discussions, as a sign of weakness. Such
an interpretation would be a serious miscalculation....
6. Tell the President I realize fully the need for absolute
secrecy, if he should decide to continue the Kennedy approach. I revealed
nothing at that time....I have revealed nothing since....I would reveal nothing
now.
Bundy's office did not officially respond to this message,
but Castro and Howard nevertheless conducted themselves as if this back channel
had been approved. In June 1964, Howard turned, once again, to the United
Nations--communicating directly with U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson and
establishing what Chase called a "Castro/Lisa Howard/Stevenson/President
line." During a visit by Howard to Havana,
Castro told her that he would refrain from taking any action that would cause a
crisis before November, including shooting at U-2 surveillance planes. In a
"Secret and Personal" June 26, 1964, memo to the president,
Ambassador Stevenson reported that Castro felt that "all of our crises
could be avoided if there was some way to communicate; that for want of
anything better, he assumed that he could call [Howard] and she call me and I
would advise you."
When a Marine at Guantánamo shot a Cuban on the base, Castro
used this channel to inquire if the incident had been an isolated act or a
provocation. After informing President Johnson, Bundy authorized Stevenson to
tell Howard to tell Castro that there was no plan of provocation at the base,
and the episode was contained.
In the early summer of 1964, the Cubans expanded their
efforts to achieve a modus vivendi with Washington.
Castro representatives asked the Franco dictatorship in Spain
to play a role as a mediator. When that feeler failed to achieve a response
from the Johnson administration, Castro went public with what the State
Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research described as Cuba's
"strongest bid to date for a U.S.-Cuban rapprochement." In a July
interview with The New York Times, the Cuban premier proposed
"extensive discussion of the issues" dividing Cuba
and the United States.
He offered to halt assistance to Latin American revolution if the United
States halted exile operations against him
and his government, and to release political prisoners and eventually indemnify
U.S.
corporations for expropriated properties if an accommodation with Washington
could be reached.
In December, Castro, with the help of Lisa Howard, tried
again to confer with U.S.
officials, this time during the visit of Cuban Minister of Industry Ernesto
"Che" Guevara to the United Nations. "Lisa Howard called me this
morning," Chase informed Bundy on December 15. "She said 'Che has
something to say to us' and that she is in a position to arrange a
meeting." The White House and State Department were interested in what
Guevara had to say, but the logistics of meeting secretly with him were
troublesome.
"The mechanics of talking to Guevara is the tough
part," Chase reported to Bundy. "He is a real center of attention in New
York (e.g. police, crowds) and it would be extremely
awkward to try to get together with him privately." Still, the
State Department decided to approach Guevara through a British intermediary at
the United Nations--"my own very strong view is that we should keep Lisa
Howard out of it as a middleman," Chase argued in one memo--to see if the
Cuban minister had something substantive to share with Washington. This
approach fell through when, to the consternation of Johnson administration
officials, Howard invited Senator Eugene McCarthy to her apartment to meet with
Guevara on December 16.
In a meeting at the Department of State the next day, Under
Secretary George Ball debriefed McCarthy. According to a secret memorandum of
the conversation, McCarthy reported that Guevara's purpose was "to express
Cuban interest in trade with the U.S.
and U.S.
recognition of the Cuban regime." Ball "emphasized the danger of
meetings such as that which the Senator had had with Guevara," because
there was "suspicion throughout Latin America that
the U.S. might
make a deal with Cuba
behind the backs of the other American states." It was essential, Ball
admonished, "that nothing be publicly said about the McCarthy-Guevara
meeting."
With that, the U.S.-Cuba contacts begun under the Kennedy
administration came to an anticlimactic end.
Years later, William Attwood returned one more time to his
role as an intermediary in U.S.-Cuba relations. After Jimmy Carter's election
in 1976, Castro invited Attwood and his family to visit Cuba.
Before leaving, Attwood informed Secretary of State-designate Cyrus Vance and
National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brezinski of his trip, and wrote a
comprehensive confidential report for Vance when he got back. His three-hour
conversation with Castro covered a variety of issues, from Africa
to Vietnam to
U.S.-Cuba relations. Castro "recalled my exploratory talks with Lechuga at
the U.N. that fall," Attwood reported. Future diplomatic relations were
"up to us," according to the memorandum. "If we want to be
friends, they'll be friends. If we want to continue being their enemy, they'll
be our enemy. They've grown used to it."
Thirty-five years after Kennedy's assassination, the list of
historical imponderables on Cuba
is a long one. Had Kennedy been able to finish what he started with Castro,
could the Cold War clashes--the conflicts over the Soviet military presence in Cuba,
Cuban troops in Africa, Havana's
support for revolution in Central America--have been
avoided? Would the multiple immigration crises, including the Mariel boat lift
in 1980 and the balsero crisis in 1994, ever have taken place? Might
the scandals of CIA/Cuban exile efforts to
assassinate Castro that now haunt the history of U.S.
foreign policy never have occurred? Could the acrimonious conflict with U.S.
allies over punitive trade policies toward Cuba
have been averted? If Washington
had worked out a modus vivendi with Havana
and lifted the external threat that has united and mobilized Cubans for nearly
40 years, might Cuba's
political system have evolved differently?
To be sure, the "what ifs" of history are
speculative. But the lesson of the aborted Kennedy-Castro initiative toward a
rapprochement is clear: at the apex of the Cold War, and the height of tensions
between Washington and Havana,
diplomacy and dialogue were still possible. Amidst the charged international
conflicts of the early 1960s, a U.S. president appeared willing, as one
National Security Council memo put it, to "live with Castro personally and
to assist Cuba"--albeit only "under certain circumstances."
Those circumstances--an end to Cuba's
ties to the Soviet Union and support for Third
World revolution--now exist due to the extraordinary changes in
the international environment over the past decade. And recent events have
created considerable opportunity for reevaluating a policy stuck in the time
warp of the Cold War. Pope John Paul II's visit to Havana in January
1998--during which he urged Washington to "change, change, change"
its hostile posture by ending the embargo--gave the United States the moral
cover it needed to begin to reconsider its posture of diplomatic isolation
toward Cuba.
After a comprehensive intelligence review, the Pentagon's
unequivocal conclusion, released this May, that Cuba
"does not pose a significant military threat to the United
States or to other countries in the
region," eliminated the national security justification for the policy.
The decision last fall by 24 Republican senators along with three former
secretaries of state--Henry Kissinger, Lawrence Eagleburger and George
Schultz--to formally call upon the Clinton
administration to conduct a bipartisan reassessment provided the political
space for a new national dialogue. This January, the report of the elite
Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on Cuba--made
up of conservative and liberal foreign policy luminaries--provided numerous
creative ideas for abandoning the policy of old and moving in a new direction.
President Clinton, however, has ignored the policy
opportunities and political openings. In January, he rejected the Republican
proposal for a bipartisan national dialogue on Cuba
policy, as well as any notion of an international dialogue with the Cuban
government. Several small modifications were made in the U.S.
posture--expanded remittances and flights, restricted licenses for the sale of
agricultural products to Cuba--in
order, as Clinton put it, "to
provide the people of Cuba
with hope in their struggle." But the antagonistic framework of the policy
remains entrenched and, for the most part, unchanged. The most symbolic
"people-to-people" gesture that the White House can muster: allowing
the Baltimore Orioles to play two exhibition games with Cuba.
With the Cold War long over and tensions with Cuba
at a minimum, serious diplomacy and dialogue on mutual interests would seem not
only possible, but highly preferable to continuing a long-standing policy of
unmitigated hostility. Clearly, high-ranking members of the Kennedy White
House, and even Kennedy himself, thought a dialogue toward coexistence was
possible--in a far more dangerous world than today. "All we have to do is
simply to decide to treat Cuba
like any other 'socialist' country and then sit down and resolve a few
unresolved issues," Ambassador Attwood observed years after the Kennedy
initiative. "I think it's about time we did, in our own interest as well
as Cuba's."
Peter Kornbluh writes frequently on U.S.-Cuba relations. He
is a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, a nongovernmental
institute and library located at George Washington
University, Washington, D.C. He
is the editor of Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA
Report on the Invasion of Cuba (The New Press, 1998).
1. Cuba's
first message of potential reconciliation actually came after the Bay
of Pigs invasion. In August 1961, Che Guevara held an unscheduled
meeting with White House aide Richard Goodwin in Punta del
Este, Uruguay,
and proposed a modus vivendi between Washington
and Havana. This now famous
meeting [see Cigar Aficionado, October 1997--ed.] constituted the
first high-level contact with Castro's government after the break in diplomatic
relations in January 1961. In a secret August 22 memo for the president,
Goodwin reported that the conversation was "free of propaganda and
bombast." Among other proposals, Guevara said that Cuba
was willing to pay for expropriated U.S.
properties in trade, and was willing to discuss its revolutionary operations in
other nations. Goodwin recommended "continuing the below ground dialogue
Che has begun," and even assigned the CIA
to come up with "a precise, covert procedure" for sustaining those
communications. Until negotiations involving New York
lawyer James Donovan more than a year later, however, no further talks took
place.
2. The May 1, 1963,
memorandum, "Interview of U.S. Newswoman with Fidel Castro Indicating
Possible Interest in Rapprochement with the United
States," bears Kennedy's scrawl,
"Psaw"--a notation that the president had seen the document.
3. During this conversation on September 27, Lechuga took
the opportunity to forewarn Attwood that he would be making a "hard"
anti-U.S. speech at the United Nations on October 7. "I remarked that it
wouldn't help reduce tensions," Attwood noted in a secret chronology of
his meetings. Lechuga "replied he couldn't help making it because of the
'blockade'."
4. Gordon Chase addressed the anti-rapprochement position in
a comprehensive November 12, 1963,
memorandum, "Some Arguments Against Accommodation--A Rebuttal."
Chase noted that "there are numerous advantages which
accrue from a discreet approach to Castro. First, an approach will make it
clear to Castro that he has an option which he may not be sure exists--i.e., to
live with the U.S.
on U.S. terms.
Second, even if he rejects our offer, we will still learn a lot.
Will he attempt to bargain on terms? Which terms?
It would be interesting and useful to know what his sticking
points are.
Third, assuming Castro can't accept the terms, the mere fact
that there were U.S./Cuban discussions about accommodation will tend to drive a
further wedge between Castro and the hard-core Cuban communists, Che [Guevara]
and Raul [Castro]."
