American-British-Canadian Intelligence Relations, 1939-2000 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-135-27209-8
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

BUILDING TENSIONS: PRELUDE TO CRISIS (JANUARY TO SEPTEMBER 1962)

As 1962 began, then, the situation in and regarding Cuba seemed, for the moment, relatively stable. In his year-end review, sent to the Foreign Office in mid-January, Marchant reaffirmed his strong belief that the Bay of Pigs had been a godsend for Castro. It had handed him a perfect opportunity to consolidate control over his restive country, indoctrinate the masses under the banner of nationalism, justify past anti-American actions, repress domestic enemies both real and imagined, and lead Cuba into the Sino-Soviet bloc ‘against the wishes and instincts of the majority of his people’. All in all this was, ‘a tour de force which, I believe, not even the prodigious Fidel Castro could have brought off had it not been for that blue-print for disaster the April invasion – an operation which, as seen from here, made the Suez campaign look like a successful picnic’.91

Neither Marchant nor his Canadian colleague92 in Havana discerned any opposition figures in or out of Cuba who seemed to enjoy significant popular support, nor much evidence in any form of an indigenous anti-Castro movement capable of challenging the regime. In fact, Marchant later recalled the first months of 1962 as a comparatively placid time when most Cubans seemed to concentrate on going about their daily business and getting on with their lives, with political excitement confined to behind-the-scenes strains within the leadership in contrast to the tumultuous events of the previous two years.

With Castro momentarily in the background as the year opened (having criticized his own cult of personality and launched a short-lived experiment in collective leadership), the ‘government seemed determined as far as possible to get the country back to normal, to give it a more stable, less revolutionary look. The Militia was sent back to school and to work and there were fewer beards, guns and uniforms to be seen in the streets. After the plastic bombs, sabotage and the invasion scares of 1960 and the real invasion and mass arrests of 1961, life in the first six months [of 1962] seemed almost dull.’93

The calm was, of course, deceptive. Even if Cuba appeared for the moment to be on the back burner, Macmillan had received a reminder during his talks with JFK in Bermuda that the Americans still planned to settle scores with Castro, and that the issue might soon again be heating up – a prospect with implications for US-British relations as well as US-Cuban. When the Prime Minister had inquired about the Cuban situation, during a private chat after lunch at Government House on 21 December, Kennedy had answered tersely that he intended to ‘try to mobilise the Organisation of American States to bring pressure on Cuba because Castro’s regime was really intolerable’.94

The US president evidently did not tell Macmillan, however, that the diplomatic effort to increase hemispheric pressure on Cuba to which he alluded was but one public face of an ambitious secret program to topple Castro that his administration was gearing up.

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