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class="header"> <b><small><small><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/28/cuba-notes-on-a-history-of-best-intentions/"
id="reader-domain" class="domain"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/28/cuba-notes-on-a-history-of-best-intentions/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/28/cuba-notes-on-a-history-of-best-intentions/</a></a><br>
<br>
</small></small></b><span class="post_date"
title="2015-09-28">September 28, 2015</span>
<h1 class="headline" itemprop="name"><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/28/cuba-notes-on-a-history-of-best-intentions/"
rel="bookmark">Cuba: Notes on a History of Best Intentions</a></h1>
<p class="post_meta"> <span class="post_author_intro">by</span>
<span class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/author/robert-sandels-nelson-p-valdes/"
rel="nofollow">Robert Sandels - Nelson P. Valdés</a></span>
</p>
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<blockquote>
<p>The only foreseeable means of alienating internal
support is through disenchantment and disaffection
based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship….every
possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken
the economic life of Cuba. If such a policy is
adopted, it should be the result of a positive
decision which would call forth a line of action
which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible,
makes the greatest inroads in denying money and
supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages,
to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of
government.</p>
<p>-Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American
Affairs Lester D. <a
href="https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v06/d499">Mallory</a>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In his Dec. 17, 2014 statement calling for
normalization of diplomatic relations with Cuba,
President Barak Obama paused to <a
href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/12/17/statement-president-cuba-policy-changes">speak</a>
directly to the Cuban people. “We believe that you
should be empowered to live with dignity and
self-determination,” he said. No mention was made of
Lester D. Mallory. [1]</p>
<p>Even while strenuously working to destroy the Cuban
revolution, US presidents like to say that Cubans should
decide their own future. But what if the Cuban people
decided to choose communism?</p>
<p>Alluding to the sordid history of US efforts to
dissuade Cubans from choosing communism, Obama said that
it was all “rooted in the best of intentions.” Here is
an example of one of those best intentions.</p>
<p><strong>The Cuban project</strong></p>
<p>From the early 1960s, sabotage and terrorist attacks
against Cuba were carried out as direct action by the US
government such as the guerrilla offensive in the
Escambray Mountains in 1960 organized by the CIA. When
it failed, the Eisenhower administration decided to arm
and train an exile invasion force to land at the Bay of
Pigs in April 1961.</p>
<p>After that failed, a more ambitious program of sabotage
and political propaganda continued under the Cuban
Project (Operation Mongoose), begun by order of
President John F. Kennedy in November 1961. The
operation was led by Air Force General Edward Lansdale
and directed by Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. The
objective was “to help the Cubans overthrow the
Communist regime from within Cuba and institute a new
government with which the United States can live in
peace.” [2]</p>
<p>Although the schedule of actions required precision
planning and execution with little room for error,
Lansdale acknowledged that “We still know too little
about the real situation inside Cuba,” but the Project
went forward anyway into official uncertainty.</p>
<p>The Project’s central strategy was the promotion of
civil discontent and social upheaval that would lead to
a coup, a provisional government and US intervention.
The United States would be justified in intervening
militarily because of having suffered “justifiable
grievances” from the false-flag operations it would have
set in motion.</p>
<p>Lansdale’s counterrevolutionary plan – intentionally or
not – mimicked the revolutionary strategy of Fidel
Castro’s July 26 Movement. Both are based on winning
popular support through “a strongly motivated political
action movement”; a military arm (“an action arm for
sabotage and armed resistance”) and communication with
the population (“its own voice for psychological
operations”).</p>
<p>Success depended on “the sympathetic support of the
majority of the Cuban people” to set in motion the
events leading to a revolt and foreign (US)
intervention. Nevertheless, the plan recognized that
such a popular movement did not exist and would have to
be created by outside pressures to weaken the economy
and enrage the population. Thus, “the political actions
will be assisted by economic warfare to include an
embargo and sabotage of Cuba’s sugar crop starting in
1961, to induce failure of the Communist regime’s
ability to supply Cuba’s economic needs.” This was the
Lester D. Mallory prescription.</p>
<p>To soften up Cuba for the Mongoose attack, the Joint
Chiefs of Staff planned Operation Northwoods, which was
an anthology of bizarre and odious false-flag <a
href="http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/news/20010430/northwoods.pdf.">operations</a>
designed to create real or faked terrorist incidents
that would justify armed invasion. Northwoods was never
implemented, but just think how the United States would
suffer Lansdale’s planned “justifiable grievances” if
one of these cunning plans had been carried out:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in
the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in
Washington.</p>
<p>We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and
blame Cuba.</p>
<p>We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida
(real or simulated).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Of course, any real Cuban killed in any of these
operations would not be “empowered to live with
dignity.”</p>
<p>Because of the intelligence failures in planning for
the Bay of Pigs invasion, the new project called for the
CIA to find hard information from Cuban exiles arriving
in Miami. The CIA will recruit assets from among these
Cubans at the Opa-locka Interrogation Center in Miami.
The lack of available “political action agents” –
saboteurs, assassins and other operatives – necessary
for operations inside Cuba, led the CIA to recruit 30
candidates from among Cuban exiles. These were necessary
to set up 20 bases inside Cuba to foment the required
“popular movement.”</p>
<p>“The climactic moment of revolt,” in Lansdale’s
fabricated popular movement of Cubans deciding their own
destiny, was to be the point at which they would react
in anger to some government action or process brought
about by the Project – open revolt would follow. The
“popular rebellion” would then take and hold areas of
the country giving “the free nations of the Western
Hemisphere” the opportunity to offer assistance.</p>
<p>Cubans and populations of other Latin American nations
were to be enlisted in the Project by closely
identifying the Soviet Union with the Cuban government.
The CIA was to generate public demonstrations in Latin
America against a Sovietized Cuba with the help of
psychological operations funded by the United States
Agency for International Development (USAID). The world
outside of Cuba would be encouraged to view actions of
the Cuban government as “foreign tyranny” imposed by the
Soviet Union on a puppet government. In this way, the
Project would redefine the Cuban revolution as an issue
of the Cold War and accuse the Soviet Union with doing
exactly what the United States was planning to do to
Cuba.</p>
<p>Lansdale issued a follow-up <a
href="https://www.marxists.org/history/cuba/subject/cia/mongoose/c-project.htm">report</a>
on February 20, 1962, proposing a more elaborate and
meticulous timetable culminating in the overthrow of the
Cuban government in October 1962. In ran from “Phase
I, Action, March 1962. Start moving in,” to “Phase
VI, Final, during month of October 1962. Establishment
of new government.”</p>
<p>There you have it — just eight months to empower Cubans
into a new government.</p>
<p>In the process, the plan lays out schedules for
sabotage, radio propaganda, development of an
underground, insertion of freedom fighters from abroad
(Hungary, Poland, Latin America) and assassination of
top Cuban leaders.</p>
<p>The United States would quickly grant recognition to a
provisional government, “To give legality to the moral
right of the Cuban revolt.” There would be an
interregnum of indefinite length, presumably under US
command.</p>
<p>The detailed schedule was of course never followed
because of the ensuing missile crisis in October, but
the general outlines of the Project will show up in a
more political form in the 1996 Helms-Burton Act and
reworked again in the proposals for Assistant to a Free
Cuba during the George W. Bush administration.</p>
<p>Manuel Hevia, director of the history section of
the Cuban State Security Archives, said in a 2002 radio
<a
href="http://cuba.cu/gobierno/documentos/2002/esp/m260502e.html">interview</a>
that Mongoose was not suspended after the Missile Crisis
but was “liquidated as a subversive operation by our
people, even without knowing the name with which our
enemies had baptized it.”</p>
<p>Lansdale’s expectation that a popular rebellion in Cuba
could be manufactured lived on after the Project was
dropped in the form of “democracy promotion” through
funding of civil society organizations and the creation
of a paid dissident movement. The George W. Bush
administration reworked the theme that the United States
did not intend to overthrow the Cuban government, but
that the Cuban people would one day do it in the name of
freedom and democracy.</p>
<p><strong>Death by illusion </strong></p>
<p>Had the Lansdale plan been fully successful and had
Fidel Castro been ousted and assassinated, it would have
been regime change by manipulation of illusions. Cubans
and friendly countries would have had to believe that
the Cuban revolution was a fiction disguising the
expansion of international communism.</p>
<p>There is nothing in the thinking of Lansdale and the
Joint Chiefs about what Cuba actually is — its history,
culture and aspirations. Even what Cubans thought about
their country was to be invented in Washington and
pasted on the cardboard Cubans of Washington’s
imagination.</p>
<p>In a sense, the US government and mass media have
refused to acknowledge that there is a real country
named Cuba. They deny the existence of the real country
while forging elaborate plans to “free” the imagined
one, where imagined Cubans are to be manipulated like
pieces on a board game.</p>
<p>And what about the future for the Cubans Obama wants to
empower? In 1988, Fidel Castro <a
href="http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1988/esp/f051288e.html">addressed</a>
the question of how some future renewed diplomatic
relations might play out:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Even if one day, relations between socialist Cuba and
the empire improve, that will not cause that empire to
give up its idea of crushing the Cuban Revolution, and
they do not hide it. Their theoreticians will explain
it; the defenders of the imperial philosophy will
explain it. There are some who say it is better to
make certain changes in policy toward Cuba in order to
penetrate it, to weaken it, to destroy it, if possible
even peacefully.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Notes.</strong></p>
<p>1 Use of the word “empowerment” should probably be
avoided. Anne-Emanuèle Calvès surveyed the term’s
erosion: “It has come to equate power with individual
and economic decision-making; it has de-politicized
collective power into something seemingly harmonious;
and has been employed to legitimize existing top-down
policies and programs.” Anne-Emanuèle Calvès,
“Empowerment: The History of a Key Concept in
Contemporary Development Discourse,” <em><a
href="http://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_RTM_200_0735--empowerment-the-history-of-a-key-concept.htm.">Revue
Tiers Monde</a>, </em>4/2009 (No 200), p. 735-749,</p>
<p>2 Program Review by the Chief of Operations, Operation
Mongoose (Lansdale), U.S., Department of State, <em>Foreign
Relations of the United States 1961-1963</em>, Volume
X Cuba, 1961-1962, Washington, DC, 18 January 1962.</p>
</div>
<p class="author_description"> <em><strong>Robert Sandels</strong>
writes on Cuba and Mexico.</em>
<em><strong>Nelson P. Valdés</strong> is Emeritus
Professor of Sociology, University of New Mexico.</em> </p>
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<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
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San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
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