Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [57]
For the U.S., it was a humiliating trauma. It was like losing your elegant, beautiful, easygoing mistress to a sweaty, hairy lout. The Americans were very sore about it. When John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, Castro was high up on his list of Things to Take Care Of. The Central Intelligence Agency created Operation Mongoose, dedicated to getting rid of Fidel. It planned acts of sabotage inside Cuba: propaganda, subversion, assassination attempts. Kennedy’s younger brother Robert was given the task of overseeing the operation. The truth is, though, that Mongoose was a crackpot, cowboy organization. It came up with some highly imaginative plans to unseat Castro. They would put explosives into his cigars. They’d spray LSD into the radio studio from which Fidel broadcast his endless speeches to the nation; the tripped-out leader would start burbling about turning into a flying peacock or some such, and the Cubans would think he’d gone insane. They’d doctor Fidel’s clothes with a chemical that caused total hair loss; without a beard, the leader of the Bearded Ones would also lose his credibility. Maybe those gullible Cubans would see his denuded chin as a sign from God.
The CIA also tried a more direct approach. Thousands of anti-Castro Cubans had gone into exile in the U.S. The CIA recruited fifteen hundred of them, armed them, and trained them (in secret, and not very well) to reinvade Cuba. The adventure turned into a disaster. When, in 1961, this amateur army landed on the island, Castro’s forces overwhelmed them at a place called, rather unfortunately, the Bay of Pigs. The Americans had ships offshore and warplanes on standby. But President Kennedy, wanting to conceal his government’s involvement in the plot, refused to send them to the rescue. The survivors of the invading force ended up in Castro’s jails.
Two things that are important to our story came out of this sorry episode. The first is that among the high command of America’s military, Kennedy instantly acquired a reputation for being “gutless.” The word haunted him. When, a year later, he found himself in a showdown with the world’s other superpower, the Soviet Union, he needed to show that he did have guts actually. And since nuclear missiles were involved, that was dangerous. The second thing is that after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Castro announced that he was not just a nationalist but also a Communist and that Cuba would be governed much like the Soviet Union and would consider itself an ally of the Russians.
This was too much. This was a major upping of the temperature of the “cold war” between the West and the Soviet Union. America yelled, “What? A Communist state just off Florida? A Russian outpost in the goddamn Caribbean? No way!”
The U.S. military and the CIA got busy working on plans for the conquest of Cuba. And it would be no Mickey Mouse boat operation this time. This time, Fidel Castro and his hairy henchmen would find out what it felt like to have American fighter-bombers drop the fires of hell on their heads three hundred times a day.
As it turned out, things were not going to be that simple.
The leader of the Soviet Union, Kennedy’s counterpart in that divided world back then, was Nikita Khrushchev. He’d been delighted, of course, when the crazy guy Castro had chucked out Batista and given America a bloody nose. Seeing as how the Soviets and the Americans were locked into a battle for world domination,