The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [441]
Castro was attempting to foster what he called a people’s revolution throughout Latin America and what the United States considered a subversion of sovereign states. While the Cuban leader fostered revolution elsewhere, his own people were imprisoned for their ideas. In contemplating censorship or staging an incident to set off an invasion, the United States was flirting with the same tools of totalitarianism that Castro employed.
The president had first noted this dilemma as a young man when the European democracies faced Hitler’s brutal regime. But Cuba was a pipsqueak of a nation, hardly set on a course of world domination. Castro’s attempts to subvert Latin governments were no more than irritating. The best attack against Castro was a foreign policy aimed at fostering democracy among America’s neighbors and aid programs that reached the desperate masses listening to Castro’s message. In the end the administration’s obsession with Cuba was fueled primarily by the Kennedy brothers’ anger over the Bay of Pigs and Castro’s taunts, the exaggerated rhetoric of American anticommunism, and the loud shouts of the Cuban exile community and the American right wing.
Operation Mongoose was dead. In its place had arisen what amounted to a private guerrilla army of Cuban exiles, of which Bobby was the architect and champion. These men were patriots, but they were equally what Castro called them, mercenaries, paid for by American coin. Manuel Artime, their leader, received $225,000 a month to run what was known as the Second Naval Guerrilla, or, by the CIA’s own estimate, a total of nearly $4,933,293, an amount that the Cubans claim was twice that size. This organization purchased two major ships, eight smaller boats, three airplanes, and tons of weapons.
They did most of their training in Central America, particularly Nicaragua, where the Americans had made an arrangement with President Luis Somoza, son of the murderous dictator Luis Somoza. And they ran their own operations, without scrutiny, the kind of daring ad hoc adventures that Bobby admired.
“I had many chances to talk with Bob Kennedy,” reflected Rafael Quintero, Artime’s deputy in Central America. “Bob Kennedy was obsessed—obsessed with the idea that they had been beaten by Castro, that the Kennedy family had lost a big battle against a guy like Castro. He had to get even with him. He mentioned that to me often and was very clear about it. He was not going to try to eliminate Castro because he was an ideological guy who wanted to do right in Cuba. He was going to do it because the Kennedy name had been humiliated.”
Bobby was the great patron of the anti-Castro Cubans, descending on them for secret visits, relishing their dangerous exploits, celebrating their courage. He showed up at their parties and drank with them, saluting a brotherhood of fearless men facing an implacable foe. It did not matter that so many of their actions risked hurting the innocent as well as their acknowledged enemies and did little more than stiffen the vigilance of Cuban Communists. They were on a sacred quest.
Bobby gave these men the illusion of equality, but there was always a moment when it became clear that he was a Kennedy and they were not. One of the men to whom Bobby was closest was Pepe San Roman, the brigade’s military leader. San Roman was more suited for poetry than war, and he had struggled emotionally after his release. Bobby had set him up in a small house near his own home in McLean, Virginia. One Sunday morning Bobby rode by San Roman’s home in riding clothes, looking a grand seignior. He dismounted to chat for a while, and when it came time for him to leave, he clicked his fingers, thrust his boot forward, and signaled San Roman to help him back into the saddle.
The CIA ran its own covert operations parallel to what the Cuban exiles were doing ostensibly on their own. On June 19, the president approved a plan of dramatically increased