Eisenhower, that charming grandfather

By Elíades Acosta Matos

Half a century has passed since the rebel column entered Havana and a sea of frenzied people greeted the arrival of “the Caravan of Peace.” Few people then imagined what those heroic and quiet peasants, with their necklaces made of seeds, their religious medals and the carbines taken from the soldiers, smiling and confused by the kisses of young women and the height of the buildings, would mean to the island.

Far from that sea of flags and jubilant shouts, perhaps from the top floors of air-conditioned buildings, a handful of men in shirtsleeves looked with concern upon the events. We can imagine that, between cigars, they were writing for their bosses in Washington the account of one of those feared revolutions whose triumph was shown in the Cold War maps with a fallen tower.

Those were Manichean times. The confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, two systems in struggle, had exerted a dangerous mental reduction in the opponents. There was no room for shadings. Nobody needed them.

The assemblage of this new combat machine had demanded an arduous job of preparation. It was not easy to convince millions of people to remain in their trenches and be ready to repel their former ally.

On the capitalist side, to build the foundations of those impressive ideological and cultural structures, not altogether dismantled, a call went out for the services of Winston Churchill and presidents like Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower; diplomats and ideologues like George Marshall, Dean Acheson, George F. Kennan and Paul Nitze. Also spies, like Allan W. Dulles.

Once innocence had definitely been lost, once two irreconcilable worlds had confronted each other in a deadly battle, once all weapons were accepted as fair (including coups d’état, subversion, political assassination and low-intensity wars, espionage and the encouragement of defections), the politicians adopted a mentality of siege, combined with the zeal of crusaders on a mission to remove the infidels from the Holy Sepulcher.

One cannot understand those years, or many of the political decisions adopted at the time if one doesn’t delve into the secrets of psychoanalysis and the fog of atavism and irrational phobias.

How can we today understand that nationalist governments like Prio Socarrás’ in Cuba (1952), Mossadegh’s in Iran (1953), Arbenz’s in Guatemala (1954) and Perón’s in Argentina (1955) fell, one after the other, although they were so different from each other, fatally wounded by the Cold War syndrome, by the hysteria of containing communism, by the need to send a warning to the alleged Soviet advances, and that the same local forces and the same foreign methods were used for their liquidation in every instance?

To understand the nervousness of those men who, from the U.S. Embassy in Havana, watched the arrival of columns of rebel vehicles escorted by the people, we would have to recall the two major presidential doctrines formulated by Harry S. Truman in March 1947 and by Dwight D. Eisenhower in January 1957.

The former simplified the complex world that emerged from the ruins of World War II and considered a confrontation with the Soviet Union not only inevitable but also desirable, and explained that totalitarian regimes imposed upon free peoples undermine the principles of international peace and the security of the United States.

At this precise moment in world history, Truman asserted, each nation will have to choose between these two ways of life. There is no third alternative. The United States will have to assist the free peoples who fight for their future.

Of course, Truman did not include his own totalitarian regimes – like those of the Reza Shah Pahlavi’s, or Somoza’s, or Trujillo’s – among the threats to the national security of the United States.

For its part, the Eisenhower Doctrine called for supplying aid and military assistance to any nation that fell victim to the aggression of another nation “controlled by the communists.” It was formulated as a result of the growing Arab nationalism, symbolized by the figure of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Suez Canal crisis. It attempted to isolate the Egyptian government from the other governments in the region, to prevent imitations and ensure their loyalty.

Formed in the mental frameworks of confrontation, exacerbated (like Pavlov’s dogs) by the ideological hysteria of the Cold War and McCarthyism, which found communists under the beds, and even in the bathtubs of the blithe American citizens, the diplomats, military advisers and CIA spies who were witness to that impressive parade of rebel forces up the Malecón could not react otherwise.

To them, the men who had just entered Havana after defeating the bloody “nontotalitarian” tyranny of Fulgencio Batista were not the armed people but the Bolshevik hordes, the armored divisions of Marshal Zhukov.

Those people didn’t raise the flag of the lone star, the same that had flown in the jungle and flatlands, but the flag of the hammer and sickle. And, horror! this happened barely 90 miles from Florida, where the hotels were full of blond newly-weds from Kansas.

Barely one month after those events, described from tall buildings, the ineffable Rafael Díaz-Balart, a man who made a timely departure from the island before Batista’s inevitable downfall, founded The White Rose, the first counter-revolutionary organization, no doubt one of those “free, antitotalitarianist fronts” deserving of U.S. funding and assistance that were contemplated in the Truman and Eisenhower doctrines.

The later history is known by all. It has cost the Cuban people (and continues to cost) unending suffering and more than 5,000 lives. Those who watched us parade up the Malecón with the Cuban flag that morning in January, half a century ago, didn’t understand us then and don’t understand us now.

In an effort to hold back the alleged advance of the enemy, they have impeded our own advance. They continue to block it. We remain the last bastion of the Cold War. Only for Cuba, the doctrines of two dead American presidents, designed to confront a nation that hasn’t existed for 19 years, remain in effect like a never-ending curse.

In the records of the March 17, 1960, meeting of the U.S. National Security Council, that charming, ever-smiling grandfather named Eisenhower set the essential guidelines for the covert war launched by his government against Cuba.

Form a Cuban organization in exile as a CIA cover; initiate an international propaganda offensive; develop (outside the island) a military force to invade it; and propitiate an increasing isolation of the small rebel nation.

He also told Allen W. Dulles “not to present, not even to the National Security Council, the secret reports of actions against Cuba.”

Not even the operative, geopolitical or national security arguments are enough to explain these attitudes, this persistence. Insufficient are the habitual reasons to explain the long survival of the Cuban Revolution, faced with such powers. As it was half a century ago, this nation, we and our destiny continue to be an undecipherable enigma.

Should we be surprised that we weren’t understood by those who saw us then as what we weren’t? Or by that smiling and Machiavellian grandfather eager to strangle us with silk gloves?

And Obama – half a century later and also smiling – does he understand anything?

Elíades Acosta Matos, a philosopher, doctor in political sciences and writer is a member of the Progreso Semanal/Weekly team.