The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [315]
The CIA team exemplified the cultural arrogance that for decades Latins had considered the mark of the gringo. It was the same kind of parochial superiority that had rankled Kennedy when he saw it among American diplomats when he traveled through Asia in 1951. Among the officers working most directly with the brigade were men who felt superior to their Latin associates, whose character they knew only through ethnic stereotype, but there were others who bonded with their Cuban charges and respected their courage and patriotism.
The CIA operatives in Miami put together the Frente Revolucíonario Democratico (FRD) to provide the illusion of a united anti-Castro front, and then a five-man Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC) to provide the makings of the provisional government of a new Cuba. These Cuban leaders were nonetheless considered so indiscreet by their handlers that when the time of the invasion arrived, the plan was to put them under de facto house arrest. Yet these same men were supposed to be seen by their people, not as the tainted creatures of the CIA, but as worthy independent leaders of a new Cuba.
Kennedy probably did not know that so many of the initial attempts at sabotage, infiltration, and paramilitary airdrops had failed. Out of the sixty-nine thousand pounds of arms, ammunition, and equipment dropped to operatives on the island, between December 30, 1960, and April 21, 1961, forty-six thousand pounds ended up in the hands of Castro’s forces. These errors were attributed to the incompetent Cuban exile pilots, never to the strength of the pro-Castro Cubans.
The agency believed in March 1961 that the “hard core” of Castro adherents on the island of 7 million people consisted of “not more than 5,000 to 8,000 [who] would fight to the end for Castro,” while there were supposedly 2,500 to 3,000 anti-Communist guerrillas and insurgents whose numbers would grow “at least ten times that size once a landing is effected.” A month later the CIA’s figure had grown to “nearly 7,000 insurgents” actively fighting Castro.
The figures were little better than the wishful fantasies of operatives blinded by their mission. The CIA had other more realistic analyses of Cuba, but they did not reach Kennedy’s desk. CIA Director Allen Dulles kept the agency’s own intelligence chief and his operation out of the loop. “I was never in on any of the consultations, either inside the agency or otherwise,” Amory recalled. Although this was supposedly done for security reasons, Dulles and Bissell apparently did not want a more detached assessment on Cuba reaching the president.
Castro’s government was something more than a tyranny imposed on a hapless people. The upper class had left the island, much of the middle class was leaving, and Castro was promising schooling to those who had none, cheap medicine to those who went without, and work for those who sat idle. These Cubans had somber memories of Batista’s regime, during which time Americans had owned almost all of the country’s mines, most of its utilities, and close to half of its sugar industry. When Castro appropriated foreign properties, those Cubans left on the island for the most part thought it little more than the righteous return of their property. Nor did the one hundred thousand tenant farmers and squatters who had been given land pine for the return of their landlords.
When the CIA’s operatives set fire to three hundred thousand tons of sugar cane, forty-two tobacco warehouses, two dairies, four stores, and a sugar refinery, then bombed the Havana power station,