Terrorism

The Cuban Connection

Roger W. Fontaine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000347524
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

First published in 1988, Terrorism: The Cuban Connection examines Cuba's involvement in terrorism.

With a focus on Havana, the book begins by looking at Cuba's history and the origins of terrorism. As it progresses, the book traces the development of terrorism and explores Cuba's connections with other parts of the world, including America, Russia, the Caribbean, South America, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Terrorism: The Cuban Connection is a detailed study, equipped with a wealth of key documents and photographs.

Chapter 1

Genesis

Antecedents

Although Fidel Castro imported his Marxist-Leninist ideology from abroad, he did not have to rely on foreign theory and practice when it came to terrorism.

For one thing, Cuban history is richly embroidered with acts of terrorism to achieve political ends. Terrorism as such became entangled in the island’s long struggle for independence from Spain. And unlike other countries where political terrorism was practiced, in Cuba it often achieved results.

That was the case a half-century ago, for example, with the ABC—no one knows precisely what the letters stood for—a secret organization modeled after a prototype in a Victor Hugo novel. Its members were well-meaning university students who founded the ABC in late 1931. They were dedicated to overthrowing the dictator General Gerardo Machado.

The ABC was created after an older generation of soldiers and politicians—the men who made the 1895 revolution against Spain-had failed repeatedly to dislodge Machado from power. The last attempt, a landing of 40 volunteers in northern Oriente province, ended in the revolutionaries being tortured and shot by Machado’s elite force that summer of 1931.

The ABC, whose members were all urban and middle class, agreed that Machado could not be defeated by conventional military means or through invasions of the island by a handful of would-be guerrillas.

The Machado regime, they felt, would have to be destroyed in the streets of Havana, and the instrument of his undoing would be carefully selected acts of terrorism.

For the most part, the target was Machado’s efficient police, the ABC’s favorite weapon, the bomb. But mere killing of policemen was not an end in itself. The ABC was perfectly aware that Machado’s main line of defense was the powerful, relatively well trained, and loyal army. A frontal assault on it was deemed suicidal.

Therefore, in the judgment of British historian Hugh Thomas, the ABC’s strategy “was the deliberate creation of terror to cause a breakdown in governmental activities, so they assumed, making action of some sort by Washington inevitable.”¹

Although using terror to induce the intervention of the United States now sounds odd, if not absurd, the leaders of the ABC knew what they were about. They fully appreciated the very special relationship that existed between the United States and Cuba-a relationship that long preceded the Platt Amendment or the Spanish-American War of 1898.

The ABC rebels were certain that they could prove Machado incapable of maintaining order; the disorder would inevitably provoke the Americans to take action. Nevertheless, the young men of the ABC would be denounced at home, most vociferously by the Cuban communists who, from their start, were completely loyal to Moscow.

Still, the ABC’s strategy worked, although it would not seize power for itself. It did succeed, however, in driving (literally) Machado from power after the Roosevelt administration demonstrated through its special ambassador Sumner Welles an utter lack of confidence in the 62-year-old general.

The very fact that the young revolutionaries in the ABC did not, for the most part, enjoy the fruits of victory shaped the attitudes and beliefs of the next generation of Cuban activists, among them Fidel Castro. Both he and they were convinced that the 1933 revolution was betrayed by, first, the army, soon to be led by a non-commissioned officer, Sergeant Fulgencio Batista, and, second, by the United States government.

Still, terrorism as a revolutionary weapon was by no means discredited. In fact, in the mid-1940s when the young Castro entered Havana University at the age of 19, it was still being practiced on a wide scale-within the university itself—and that would have a profound effect on the Cuban body politic.

Fidel’s First Taste of Terrorism

Fidel Castro is the illegitimate son of a self-made, Spanish-born millionaire who himself was a large landholder from Oriente province whose property was located at the extreme eastern end of the island. As such, Angel Castro could afford the best for Fidel. Consequently, the young Castro, after graduating from an elite, Jesuit preparatory school in Havana, entered the University of Havana in 1945.

In a climate of violence that no North American university would come close to duplicating in the 1960s, the future ruler of Cuba became almost immediately involved in “the politics” of the school.

Politics at Havana in the mid-and late-1940s meant a near ceaseless struggle for domination among armed student groups. Killings and counter-killings between them was the norm.

According to Ronaldo Bonachea and Nelson Valdes:

Gunmen lurked around every corner, and their games were deadly. Students and faculty alike were terrorized by a few groups of power-hungry gangsters, mostly nonstudents. In fact, Fidel remarked in 1959 that his four years at the University of Havana were much more dangerous than all the time he fought against Batista from the Sierra Maestra.²

Although the student gunmen were quick to hand out “revolutionary justice” with the help of the pistol and the bomb, the fighting had little to do with political ideologies.

Their politics [Bonachea and Valdes explain] were a strange mixture of anti-imperialism, a trigger-happy sort of anarchism, and anticommunism. Their anti-imperialism was passionate, yet they lacked any understanding of the real influence of the United States over the island. Their anticommunism stemmed from their low education level, aversion to serious thinking, and distrust of those who discussed theoretical issues without acting—which was generally the case of the communists. Although their vision of a new world may have been limited, action delighted them.³

The gunmen, moreover, achieved considerable influence. The weak, corrupt, albeit elected government of President Ramon Grau San Martin rewarded the bonches with jobs. Rival gangs were soon taking over ministries with many of the pistoleros now wearing police uniforms. In return, the gunmen killed communist cadres, which allowed Grau to retain control of the labor unions.

Fidel Castro himself has often been accused of being involved in the mayhem, and indeed, he was once arrested for the murder of a leader of an opposing student group but was later released “for lack of evidence.”

Sympathetic biographers of Castro rather casually dismiss the Cuban leader’s university activities as youthful adventures, but, with evidence long suppressed and the key player, Fidel Castro himself, silent on the subject, the best verdict is “not proven” rather than “not guilty.” Moreover, even if Castro never actually killed anyone, no one can deny he lived for years in a climate of violence and terror. No one, including Castro, has denied, for example, that he carried a gun. Nor is it any great leap of imagination to conclude that the atmosphere of violence was among his first political experiences, which most students of politics accept as primary and important in the shaping of a person’s political values and beliefs.⁴

As for the charge of murder and its dismissal, it should be remembered too that, as in all societies where law and order have vanished, the courts no longer render verdicts when judges live in fear of their lives, a common occurence in today’s El Salvador and Colombia.⁵

Meanwhile, Castro accused his enemies of the crime but, having done so, infuriated others. Prudence thus being the better part of valor, Fidel Castro skipped town for Bogota, Colombia.

Acting as an agent for the anti-American regime of Argentina’s Juan Peron, Castro in April 1948 was assigned the task of helping set up a student congress at the same time and in the same city as the Ninth Inter-American Conference-a meeting that would draft the charter creating the Organization of American States (OAS).

But Bogota would be the scene of far more than two international gatherings. The assassination of a popular politician, Jorge E. Gaitan, on April 9 led to mass rioting, which nearly destroyed the Colombian capital. In that wave of violence known ever since as the bogotazo, Fidel Castro participated in the revolt by, among other things, leading an attack on a police station and distributing arms to the rioters.⁶

Soon, the Colombian police were on his trail, and Castro took refuge in the Cuban embassy from whence he was spirited away to Havana on a Cuban government chartered plane.

But the violence of university politics continued unabated back home, and Castro was again accused of murder, this time that of a campus policeman. Castro, in turn, became the target of repeated assassination attempts throughout the rest of 1948 and 1949.

It would leave a mark on him, the first and, some argue, his most profound political experience, an experience that taught him that small groups of men bent on violence could paralyze a government and society. In short, political violence (really terror) became “as Cuban as the palm trees,” in the apt phrase of Bonachea and Valdes.⁷

Fidel Castro’s preference for action was something he also urged on the political party of his choice, the Partido del Pueblo better known as the Ortodoxos, who had formed in opposition to the corrupt politics of the Grau government and its successor led by Carlos Prio Socarras.

Typically, Castro organized a splinter group within the Ortodoxos that would exert pressure on the party leadership to go to the streets. In that, however, the young insurrectionist was not successful, only frustrated.

Nevertheless, when Castro had left Havana University with his law degree in 1950, the preference for action, especially violent action, to achieve political goals, no matter how vaguely defined, was deeply implanted. And he had developed a band of followers.

Whether Castro was directly implicated in any particular act of terrorism is not material. How the climate of violence shaped his beliefs and attitudes is.

“He developed,” Bonachea and Valdes conclude, “in an environment of turbulent political conflict with little relation to theoretical or ideological models borrowed from abroad.”⁸

That would come later. Meanwhile, Castro had not only learned that direct action got results under certain circumstances, but he also discovered a larger world outside Cuba, even at this early date.

By 1950, he had already participated in two foreign adventures. Thus, not only did he acquire a taste for urban insurrection in Colombia, but he also participated in a failed attempt at invading the Dominican Republic, via the aborted Cayo Confites expedition two years earlier.

Castro’s First Views on Terrorism

For Castro and many of his companions and enemies in the student action groups, the deed came before the word.

Nevertheless, Fidel even in his student days was no mere inarticulate thug. His powers of persuasion through the spoken word were already well-developed by the time he entered the University.

The event that finally forced Castro to define his revolutionary tactics would also lay the basis for his eventual seizure of power. That event was the return to power by Fulgencio Batista in March 1952. In fact, the coup was carried out by a handful of junior officers disgusted at the disorder surrounding them. Batista did not conspire to seize the reins of power; he merely accepted what had been given to him by the rebel officers.

More importantly for Castro, it was the end of a brief flirtation with electoral politics. With Batista once more in the National Palace, Fidel turned his attention to insurrection. But how?

After the March 10 coup, Castro displayed another of his talents, that of organization. Instead of wielding a pistol or throwing a bomb, Fidel began to coordinate all the groups of young men and women who wanted to end quickly another period of Batista rule.⁹

Castro proceeded carefully but made clear that he intended eventually to use force.

The fight will not be easy, [Castro told his followers in September 1952], and the road to be traveled will be long and arduous. We are going to take up arms against the regime.¹⁰

Castro was, if not prescient, at least accurate. His war against Batista beginning with the attack on the Moncada army barracks in Santiago on July 26, 1953, initiated a five-and-a-half year struggle against the dictatorship.

But although terrorism was employed by rebel groups in the cities (and by Batista’s police in return), Castro himself chose (for the most part after Moncada) another strategy: rural guerrilla warfare.

This choice of strategy was dictated by a set of (often) painful experiences. In the first place, the bloody fiasco at Moncada where most of his ill-equipped little army was either killed or captured (and subsequently murdered) taught Castro one lesson.¹¹

The regime could not be destroyed with one dramatic stroke, especially in an urban setting. That conclusion was ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Genesis
• Chapter 2 The Break with America, Romance with Russia
• Chapter 3 Terrorism in Full Flower
• Chapter 4 Cuban-Sponsored Terrorism in the Caribbean
• Chapter 5 South America: The Prospects for Terrorism in the 1980s
• Chapter 6 Cuba in the Middle East
• Chapter 7 The Cubans in Sub-Saharan Africa
• Chapter 8 Closer to Home: Cuban Terrorism in the United States
• Chapter 9 Conclusion
• Appendix A Documents
• Appendix B Photographs
• Acronyms
• Selected Bibliography
• About the Author