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"Mi
Casa, Your Casa 2.0" is an interactive artwork, a series of open,
house-shaped frames, each roughly 8 feet wide and nearly 10 feet tall. Designed
by Mexico-based studio Esrawe + Cadena, it’s open to the public as part of
Lincoln Center’s Big Umbrella Festival.
The piece
only lasts as long as the festival, through April 26. On the warm, sunlit afternoon
when I took this photo, many visitors were taking advantage of the installation
while they still could at this New York entertainment and cultural mecca.
Sixty-five
years ago this week, a CIA-backed brigade of exiles attempted to take back
their country from Fidel Castro, landing at the Bay of Pigs on the
southwestern coast of Cuba. Within two days, the invaders were overwhelmed by
Castro’s army.
JFK’s
authorization of the invasion (concocted in the waning days of White House
predecessor Dwight Eisenhower) led Norman Mailer to reevaluate his prior
appreciation for the young President as a candidate the year before in the Esquire
essay “Superman Comes to the Supermarket”:
“I think
it is not impossible he will become a great President, but I also think he
could lead us into dictatorship. It is not only up to him, but to many of us,
whether he becomes a good leader or a bad one. The question is whether he has a
mind deep enough to comprehend the size of the disaster he has inherited here.”
Suffice it
to say that in his short tenure in the White House, Kennedy, no matter his
faults, showed no signs of leading America into a dictatorship.
But it is doubtful that Mailer—within a few years, and certainly by the end of his long life—could still labor under the illusion, as he put it in his post-invasion “Open Letter” to the caudillo, that the Cuban leader evinced “some sense that there were heroes left in the world.”
Like other intellectuals who were
part of the “Fair Play for Cuba Committee,” he could only cling to the belief
that American foreign policy had driven Castro towards Communism. (Documents released in 2022 show that, as early as July 1960, Raul Castro told Soviet premier
Dennis
Wrong’s February 1962 Commentary post-mortem on Castro’s December 1961 announcement that he was,
in fact, a “Marxist-Leninist” predictably took to task Mailer, other members of
the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and the burgeoning “New Left” movement in
general for naivete.
That
pronouncement was not without justice, especially in the case of Mailer, who,
in addition to his still somewhat starry-eyed view of Castro in the wake of the
Bay of Pigs, urged him to invite Ernest Hemingway—who had just left Cuba and
was in precarious physical and psychological health—to come back to the island,
meet with the new leader, and write about what he saw.
But Mailer was right about one thing: JFK’s “boys and men”—i.e., the CIA—had planned a scheme with little to no chance of success, even if Kennedy had authorized more than the limited air support provided.
The exile brigade totaled 1,500 against
Castro’s regular army of 25,000; there was no real groundswell of support
within the island; and the Castro regime was aware in advance that an operation
would be coming.
To JFK’s astonishment, his assumption of responsibility for this fiasco only three months into his administration boosted rather than lowered his approval ratings.
But the shadow of that operation’s failure haunted the rest of his
thousand days in office—most dramatically, in the Cuban missile crisis a year
later—as well as, to an only somewhat lesser degree, those of the 11 men who
succeeded him in the Oval Office.
In her 1987 impressionistic portrait Miami, Joan Didion noted that embittered Cuban exiles—conspicuously missing from the chorus of approval for JFK, because of his late refusal for additional support for the landing force—had been involved in multiple foreign and domestic misadventures, including assassination plots against Castro, the Watergate burglary, Chile, Nicaragua, Angola, and Iran-contra.
In no small measure, they have also anchored GOP
support as Florida migrated from being a purple to a red state at election
time.
Though
even Kennedy court historians like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. acknowledged early on
that the exiles had been forgotten in the crush of events, I doubt that any
policymakers at the time could have imagined that Cuba would remain a Marxist
regime today.
Both Cuban
exiles and those still living on the island used to joke that even Castro was
mortal. Yet even after his death, control of the government remained in the
hands of his aging brother Raul, and now his designated successor, Miguel
Diaz-Canel.
But how
much longer that continues is very much a live question.
Late last
year, as New Yorker contributor Jon Lee Anderson noted in late March,
“[T]he
island had faced daily electricity blackouts owing to a lack of fuel, along
with severe shortages of food, water, and medicine. Economic activity had all
but stopped, and the government, which was essentially broke and unable to
secure new loans, had been incapable of providing solutions. Even garbage
collection was virtually nonexistent, with huge mounds of refuse piling up on
street corners.”
Starting
in January, encouraged by the successful extraction of the Cuban regime’s
post-Soviet benefactor, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the Trump
Administration decided to exert maximum pressure on the government of
Diaz-Canel, issuing an executive order that declared it a national security threat in terms not even used by Dwight Eisenhower and JFK at the height of the
Cold War. The administration also authorized tariffs on goods from third
countries that sell or provide oil to the island.
Even if
the Trump administration succeeds in destabilizing the government of
Diaz-Canel, it has operated under wishful thinking reminiscent of both Mailer’s
and the JFK-era CIA, an amnesia about history that brings to mind the legendary
remark about the benighted Bourbon restoration in France: “they had learned
nothing and forgotten nothing."
A change
in regime will not by itself bring political freedom or economic opportunity,
especially considering the lack of clearly defined goals for Trump’s military
operations against Venezuela and Iran. Indeed, new leaders under American aegis
may only revive for a new generation resentment towards yanqui
exploitation.
In the Reagan administration, as Iran-contra came to light, Didion harked back to the post-Bay of Pigs atmosphere of the Kennedy administration, believing that again it was “time to talk about runaway agencies, arrogance in the executive branch, about constitutional crises and the nature of the presidency, about faults in the structure, flaws in the process."
The need for that
“talk” is certainly even more urgent now.
In contrast to the costumed characters that have come to populate (or, if you prefer, litter) this center of the Manhattan entertainment world, this musician was intent not on sight but on sound, blowing sweet notes into the rapidly warming air.
It felt like such a blessing and relief, amid the high
temperatures and the annual presence of the IRS, that I just had to take his
photo.
