Quote of the Day (Norman Mailer, Telling JFK How He Erred at the Bay of Pigs)

“Wasn't there anyone around to give you the lecture on Cuba? Don't you sense the enormity of your mistake – you invade a country without understanding its music. You listen to intelligence agents and fail to interpret the style of the prose in which they submit their reports. You, with your shrewd sense of character, neglect to see that none of your boys and men can tell you the truth about Cuba because it would flagellate them too psychically to consider the existential (that is, indescribable) quality of what they report. So they turn nuances into facts, and lose other nuances, and mangle facts into falsities. It keeps you perhaps from recognizing what all the world knows, that we have driven Cuba inch by inch into alliance with the Soviet, as deliberately and insanely as a man setting out to cuckold himself.”— Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and essayist Norman Mailer (1923-2007), “An Open Letter to John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Fidel Castro,” originally published in The Village Voice, Apr.27, 1961, reprinted in Collected Essays of the1960s (2018)

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 Nikita Khrushchev that his brother was "discreetly" placing Communist sympathizers in key government positions.)

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.

This Day in Latin-American History (Castro Seizes Power)

January 1, 1959—Not long after midnight, guerrillas under the direction of lawyer-turned-revolutionary Fidel Castro sent the hated regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista running to the airport. With future legend Che Guevera and Camilo Cienfuegos leading the way, the victorious rebels marched into Havana.

Though hopes ran high for the new government, an omen appeared in Castro’s first statement upon taking the reins of power: “This time the revolution will not be frustrated! This time, fortunately for Cuba, the revolution will achieve its true objective. It will not be like 1898, when the Americans came and made themselves masters of the country."

As The Who sings: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

The 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution is an occasion for grief and condemnation:

* grief, because an island that could have been an oasis of democracy turned into just one more Latin American nation led by a caudillo;

* condemnation, because to this day so much of the intelligentsia—including, shamefully, members of the international media and Hollywood celebrities—wears blinders concerning a regime that continues to perpetrate human rights abuses—including, according to Amnesty International, “restrictions on the rights to freedom of expression, association and movement; arbitrary arrests, detention without charge or trial, and unfair trials; intimidation of dissidents; the death penalty; [and] restrictions on human rights monitoring.” (Let it be noted that this report was issued after Raul Castro took control from his ailing older brother.)

The day after Batista’s overthrow, a New York Times editorial hailed his conqueror as “an extraordinary young man” and bid him good luck. The editorial followed regular news coverage of the guerrilla leader by editorial writer-correspondent Herbert Matthews that might charitably be characterized as benign and that not-so-charitably might be viewed as being in Castro’s hip pocket.

A later Times correspondent, Anthony DePalma, examined Matthews’ case in his biography The Man Who Invented Fidel. Unlike Walter Duranty, the Times Moscow correspondent who won a Pulitzer for dispatches that softpedaled Stalin’s terror famine, Matthews appeared to believe honestly that Castro would bring “a new deal for Cuba.” That initial assessment was shared by many—not just Cubans, but even the Eisenhower administration, which recognized Castro’s government on the same day he entered Havana.

Moreover, the Castro claim that hung like an albatross around the correspondent’s neck—i.e., that the rebel leader, at a low point, had his 18 remaining men walk in circles to fool Matthews—really did not hold water, believed DePalma, who thinks this was mischievous boasting on the part of a leader who had become annoyed at a newspaperman’s claim to having made him.

What remains incontrovertible, however, is that Matthews never reconsidered his comparisons of Castro to Oliver Cromwell and John Brown, long after the “Maximum Leader” had not only ordered 600 summary executions in the immediate aftermath of his triumph but after he had backed away from ever holding democratic elections.

For years, Western intellectuals were gulled by Castro’s manipulations and artful anti-U.S. rhetoric into overlooking his abuses. The late Harold Pinter, for instance, supported the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, which not only calls for an end to the U.S. embargo but airily dismisses concerns that the Castro regime is a dictatorship.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, another Nobel Prize laureate, has praised the dictator as “a man of austere habits and insatiable illusions, old-fashioned bearing, cautious words and fine manners whose ideas can't be less than extraordinary”—missing the irony that his longtime friend most resembles the protagonist of his second novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch, a Caribbean tyrant loath to retire because he’s come to enjoy the perquisites of power.

Perhaps worse than writers, however, have been screenwriters, directors and stars who have treated the Castro regime with kid gloves:

* Havana, directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Robert Redford, reached its apotheosis with the accession of Castro. Yet the Casablanca-influenced film never showed whether “Cuba Libre” ever turned out to be a reality—because it didn’t.

* Publicity materials for The Motorcycle Diaries describe this look at the young Che Guevara as “an inspiring and thrilling adventure that traces the youthful origins of a revolutionary spirit.” Left unmentioned was the fact that Guevara approved the summary executions of hundred of political prisoners at La Cabana prison in the first half of 1959, and that his ideal of revolution involved “hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine.”

* Oliver Stone produced a documentary about Castro, El Comandante, that HBO gagged on. His second try, Looking for Fidel, was not much of an improvement. Asked by a reporter for Slate about whether one scene, in which eight prisoners are brought before Castro, might involve those men having “hell to pay” afterward if they were honest, the director answered: “I must say, you're really picturing a Stalinist state. It doesn't feel that way. You can always find horrible prisons if you go to any country in Central America.” (In a follow-up that does not inspire confidence, he admits that he has never visited a prison in any other Latin American country.)

In fact, the first Hollywood film to tackle in any way Castro’s brutalitarian regime was Before Night Falls, which took him to task for his mistreatment of gays. The film was right to bring these abuses to light, but gays and lesbians were only one small part of the groups herded into prisons: dissidents, AIDS victims, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Afro-Cuban priests.

(Incidentally, even after presumably being sensitized to the plight of gays and lesbians by his starring turn in Milk, Sean Penn seems to have overlooked Castro's human rights abuses toward this group. In an interview with Raul Castro that formed part of a recent cover story in The Nation about his trip to Venezuela and Cuba, the Oscar-winning actor somehow neglected to ask Fidel's brother about the suffering of gays. Once again, Penn demonstrates that he should stick to acting instead of exposing his political naivete and awkwardly phrased writing submissions that would not be tolerated by most editors of any political stripe.)

One last group that has disappointed me profoundly is the American Library Association (ALA). Nat Hentoff, the recently fired Village Voice writer who has persistently flogged the Bush administration for its violations of human rights in the war on terror, wrote a powerful column several years ago in which he described how the ALA denied 10 independent Cuban librarians speaking spots on their program while allowing Cuban government-backed librarians nearly three hours to do so. As a librarian, I find the ALA stance one that will be impossible to justify to posterity—anymore than so many in the West will be able to explain how they let Castro’s smoke get into their eyes.

This Day in European History (Gestapo Arrests 'White Rose' Dissidents)

February 18, 1943 – The members of the “White Rose” anti-Nazi group, centered in the University of Munich, were apprehended and arrested by the Gestapo.

Since 1942, as the speed of atrocities had quickened and Germany had gotten bogged down in Stalingrad, these nonviolent activists, consisting mostly of medical students, had surreptitiously printed and distributed pamphlets calling for an end to Hitler’s regime, and even scrawled large graffiti all over Munich: “Down with Hitler! . . . Hitler the Mass Murderer!” and “Freiheit! . . . Freiheit! . . . Freedom! . . . Freedom!”

Yet for months, despite the most strenuous efforts, the Gestapo couldn’t locate the source of this insurrectionary activity, even though it correctly guessed that the group had access to a duplicating machine as well as large quantities of paper, envelopes and postage.

On this date, however, two members of the group, brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl—two former members of the Hitler Youth—were discovered. Four days later, the siblings, along with best friend Christoph Probst, were executed after a farce of a trial. Later, three other group members met the same fate.

Today, a square in the University of Munich is named after Hans and Sophie Scholl. A documentary on the group was released in the 1980s, and more recently the film Sophie Scholl: The Final Days earned a much-deserved Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. (The interrogation scenes were based on actual Gestapo records that became available only after reunification.) The group has taken its place of honor among those who set the face against Nazism, including the Jesuit Alfred Delp, the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the leader in the plot to kill Hitler, Count Claus von Stauffenberg (the subject of the upcoming Tom Cruise film that has caused such controversy).

Two of the finest foreign language films—two of the finest films, period—of recent years dealt with Germany’s experiences with 20th-century totalitarian regimes and the resistance formed against it: Sophie Scholl and The Lives of Others, last year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, on East Germany under Communism.

Why aren’t more such thoughtful, serious movies made? More to the point, why aren’t they made in Hollywood? Part of the problem might stem from the attitudes of Hollywood’s finest stars.

In a New Yorker profile last year, Julie Christie remarked, “I’m not sure I can bear to see a film they gave the Oscar to, that tells you what awful people Communists are.”

Having just watched her Oscar-winning performance in the 1965 film Darling, I know how superb an actress Christie is, and I’m waiting patiently to see how, four decades later, she has transformed herself into an Alzheimer’s patient in Away From Her.

But comments like these are simply fatuous—particularly from one such as Christie, who chose to appear in tripe like the Brad Pitt film Troy but somehow thinks it beneath her to watch a film that might say something essential about her times.

You have to wonder why she said this. Is it because there are already too many films on this subject? But by the same reasoning, why have another film about Alzheimer’s after the similarly themed Judi Dench film Iris?

This leads logically to the conclusion that the actress might be suffering from either an intellectual or moral deficit. But none of the interviews that Christie has given over the years, nor her longtime anti-nuclear and peace activism, can lead one to believe that she is anything but intelligent.

That leaves us with a moral deficit. How sad that a woman who came to personify all the allure of London in the 1960s possesses such a terrible blind spot. Clearly, she wasn’t paying attention to the part of the script in Doctor Zhivago where her character Lara's friend Pasha (Tom Courtenay), an idealistic revolutionary turned remorseless Communist functionary, says: “History has no room for personal feelings.”

But Christie is hardly unusual in the filmmaking community in her moral failure. Oliver Stone made an admiring documentary about Fidel Castro, Commandante, and has stated that he admires him “because he’s a fighter.” A few years ago, The Motorcycle Diaries related the evolution of Che Guevara’s political thought while on a journey, with no attention, except for a caption at the end, about his career with Castro. (This is a little bit like making a film about Josef Goebbels at the University of Heidelberg and his activities as poet, playwright and novelist without getting into that unfortunate association with Adolf Hitler.) The Robert Redford movie Havana also presented a highly romanticized, Casablanca-influenced version of the commandante’s rise to power.

In fact, the first film I can recall that took Castro to task was Before Night Falls, in which the Cuban dictator was criticized for his cruel anti-gay regime. Yet even before that, Castro had appropriated private property, interfered with religious institutions, refused to allow free and open elections, as well as jailed and, when the need arose, executed political opponents.

Why has the film community so rarely, if ever, covered this? It can’t have anything to do with lack of witnesses – my own elementary and second schools were filled with the children of refugees from his tyranny, and I’m sure there are hundreds of similar schools across the country.

The fact is that nearly 20 years after the end of the Iron Curtain (and more than 60 years after the so-called “Thousand-Year Reich” met its inglorious Gotterdammerung), the world needs to know all the history it can about totalitarian regimes of all kinds.

In his great elegy, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” W.H. Auden urged his fellow poets, “In the prison of his days,/Teach the free man how to praise.” That same responsibility – to tell the truth about totalitarianism, no matter what the cost, as the White Rose group did —falls to artists of all kinds, including Ms. Christie—and especially so in this land where today, we celebrate the two men who gave us a new republic and “a new birth of freedom.”