La Manzana de Havana: Cuba’s Role in the 2008 Election

With Florida primaries looming and — judging by the polls — hotly contested on all sides, Florida means way more than oranges, Disney World and Gators. Florida and Cuba are linked at the hip. Understanding this contentious pair and how the Florida tail wags the U.S. presidential dog should be a priority for every American. Do the names Teddy Roosevelt, John Kennedy or George Bush (how’d he get in here?!) mean anything to you? How about Fidel Castro?!

Few Americans realize the outsized impact that Cuba, Fidel Castro and the Cuban-American community have had on U.S. policy and politics since the late 1890s. The American obsession with Cuba goes back a long way, at least to the days of the Monroe adminstration, when then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams intoned:

There are laws of political as well as physical gravitation; and if an apple severed by the tempest from its native tree cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only toward the North American Union, which by the same law of nature cannot cast her off from its bosom.

Adams was more prescient, in one sense, than he realized. Today, the Cuban apple – while manifestly capable of “self-government” (which is not to say democratic self-government) – has indeed gravitated northward, flying right past the U.S., to Ottawa. At the same time, the U.S. political apple has been drawn inexorably south toward Havana. Manzanas that pass in night, I guess. All the while, bless their hearts, U.S. policy makers have consistently failed to comprehend or account for the nuances of Latin American sentiment and politics.

Consider, for example, that President Eisenhower waited until after Castro took control of Cuba, in February 1959, to appoint a Spanish-speaking ambassador, Philip Bonsal, to Havana. Up until then, the American ambassador was a political friend of Eisenhower’s, E.T. Smith, who spoke no Spanish and, from all accounts, didn’t give a damn about Latin America.

As to evidence of Cuba’s impact on the U.S., we could go on all day, but we’ll settle for this at the moment:

Teddy Roosevelt’s 1898 exploits in Cuba with the Rough Riders propelled him to the New York Governor’s mansion and, shortly thereafter, to the Presidency of the United States following McKinley’s assassination.

The Cuban Missile Crisis did as much as anything (besides Lee Harvey Oswald) to raise John F. Kennedy to legendary status. It’s not out of the question that Castro himself may have pulled Oswald’s strings. Given Kennedy’s blatant attempts to have the same done to Castro, it would be hard to fault Castro for at least making the attempt. (That should get some Kennedyphiles going!)

In terms of U.S. electoral politics, the Cuban American community arguably decided the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, delivering the margin needed to push GW over the top in both contests. Other groups may have equal claims to this distinction, without reducing the significance of the Cuban vote.

Speaking of Kennedy and Castro, uncomfortably revealing U.S. government documents have been declassified since the mid-90s. They paint a picture of U.S. deception and intimidation against Cuba little noticed by ordinary Americans. For example, two Kennedy administration memos linked below reveal both a sense of remorse and a detailed set of “Cover and Deception plans” designed to

Lure or provoke Castro, or an uncontrollable subordinate, into an overt hostile reaction against the United States; a reaction which would in turn create the justification for the US to not only retaliate but destroy Castro with speed, force and determination.

Here are the memos. This one pushes aggressive deception and violence:

Feb 19, 1962 Memorandum for the Chief of Operations, Cuba Project

And this, written to Kennedy’s National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, suggests cozying up to Castro as a way to get close enough to knife him in the back:

Apr 11, 1963 Cuba Policy Memorandum from Gordon Chase to McGeorge Bundy

An audio recording of a related phone call between Kennedy and Bundy is available here.

The Kennedy-Castro show-down (the festivities began during the Eisenhower administration, but were greatly exacerbated by the foreign-policy naivete of John F. and Robert Kennedy) has colored U.S. foreign policy and relationships for the past 50 years.

For current insights, try Fora.tv’s rebroadcast of Castro and Cuba: The Inside Story from the 4^th Annual International Spy Conference.

It will be interesting to see what role Cuba plays in the 2008 presidential contest. How should the rest of America view the disproportionate influence wielded by this relatively small slice of the country? And don’t you find it odd that we refuse to trade with Cuba while (a) all of our trading partners do and (b) we continue trading with notorious civil rights violators China and Russia? What gives?