CONTESTING CASTRO: US & TRIUMPH OF CUBAN REVOLUTION: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution

by Thomas G. Paterson

Today they stand as enemies, but in the 1950s, few countries were as closely intertwined as Cuba and the United States. Thousands of Americans (including Ernest Hemingway and Errol Flynn) lived on the island, and, in the United States, dancehalls swayed to the mambo beat. The strong-arm Batista regime depended on Washington's support, and it invited American gangsters like Meyer Lansky to build fancy casinos for U.S. tourists. Major league scouts searched for Cuban talent: The New York Giants even offered a contract to a young pitcher named Fidel Castro. In 1955, Castro did come to the United States, but not for baseball: He toured the country to raise money for a revolution.
Thomas Paterson tells the fascinating story of Castro's insurrection, from that early fund-raising trip to Batista's fall and the flowering of the Cuban Revolution that has bedeviled the United States for more than three decades. With evocative prose and a swift-moving narrative, Paterson recreates the love-hate relationship between the two nations, then traces the intrigue of the insurgency, the unfolding revolution, and the sources of the Bay of Pigs invasion, CIA assassination plots, and the missile crisis. The drama ranges from the casino blackjack tables to Miami streets; from the Eisenhower and Kennedy White Houses to the crowded deck of the Granma , the frail boat that carried the Fidelistas to Cuba from Mexico; from Batista's fortified palace to mountain hideouts where Rau'l Castro held American hostages. Drawing upon impressive international research, including declassified CIA documents and interviews, Paterson reveals how Washington, fixed on the issue of Communism,
failed to grasp the widespread disaffection from Batista. The Eisenhower administration alienated Cubans by supplying arms to a hated regime, by sustaining Cuba's economic dependence, and by conspicuously backing Batista. As Batista self-destructed, U.S. officials launched third-force conspiracies in a vain attempt to block Castro's victory. By the time the defiant revolutionary leader entered Havana in early 1959, the foundation of the long, bitter hostility between Cuba and the United States had been firmly laid.
Since the end of the Cold War, the futures of Communist Cuba and Fidel Castro have become clouded. Paterson's gripping and timely account explores the origins of America's troubled relationship with its island neighbor, explains what went wrong and how the United States "let this one get away," and suggests paths to the future as the Clinton administration inches toward less hostile relations with a changing Cuba.

Genres: History, International Relations, Latin American History, Nonfiction, College

352 pages, Paperback

First published April 21, 1994

About the author

Thomas Graham Paterson received his Bachelors degree from the University of New Hampshire in 1963, and his Masters and Doctoral degrees from the University of California at Berkeley in 1964 and 1968, respectively. Paterson is known primarily for his contributions to Cold War history with an emphasis on United States-Cuba relations, as well as the study of United States foreign relations in general.
A prolific author, Paterson has written and co-written numerous books and articles, and has also served as an editor for several books and scholarly journals, including Diplomatic History and the Encyclopedia of U.S. Foreign Relations (1997), for which he was a contributing editor. He has published several articles and book reviews in newspapers, magazines, and newsletters, as well as scholarly journals such as the Journal of American History, The New England Journal of History, Diplomatic History, the New England Quarterly, and the American Historical Review. He is a member of a multiple of historical and scholarly associations, including the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the New England Historical Association, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), the last of which he was president in 1987.
Paterson is the recipient of a number of fellowships and research grants. He has appeared on television and radio programs, and has delivered an impressive number of lectures throughout the United States, as well as Canada, China, Cuba, Venezuela, New Zealand, Great Britain, Colombia, and Russia. He taught both graduate and undergraduate level History courses at the University of Connecticut from 1967 through 1997. Aside from his teaching duties, Paterson was also a member of several different University and History Department committees. Paterson has been Professor Emeritus since his retirement from teaching at UConn in 1997.

Reviews

[Rhuff · Rating 5 out of 5]

If one needed rebuttal of the conservative trope - that the US supported Castro and put him in power - then Professor Paterson's book does that admirably. The only question permissible to American analysts was, "Is Castro a Communist? If so, why?" The right one was, of course, why was Castro a revolutionary in the first place? As answer, Paterson first recreates the squalid, recklessly corrupt world of 1950s Havana, with its grafting goons, mafiosi, sex tourism, insider dealing, and neo-colonial economy underpinning a lazy but brutal police state. A fertile ground for postwar Third World "national Marxism" based on the forgotten campesino. Given Cuba's insurgent history, the lack of a Castro would have been the real wonder.

Blinkered by cold war platitudes and business as usual, Washington could not cope with Castro's challenge except to ramp up military assistance to their satellite regime in Havana. Tactical "democracy promotion" was beyond the imagination of the likes of Richard Nixon or the Brothers Dulles, and tried in Cuba only after the fact when it was too late for such leverage. Here Paterson splendidly reveals the underhanded, dollar short/day late attempt to do just that when Batista was going down the drain, taking the old order with him.

Paterson's book makes an excellent counterpoint to the official Washington consensus of American trust and goodwill betrayed by the conniving Castro. He shows how the insurgency in eastern Cuba had, by 1958, escalated into a real war. No one could have seriously imagined that such a bitter conflict - given its protagonists - would be resolved with malice toward none and charity for all. The US still damns Castro for his "secret Marxism" while preaching freedom and democracy. Thus Washington must be judged for arming and aiding a sleazy, violent mafiocracy, leaving pro-democracy opponents little choice except Castro's charismatic if also-violent alternative.

Paterson's book is an excellent summation of chickens coming home to roost - a necessary corrective deserving the widest possible audience.

[Jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hyper focused on the years 1956-1959, Contesting Castro is more about American policy towards Cuba than the Cuban Revolution itself. For that reason, I would not make it the first book you read on the revolution, instead I would suggest Julia Sweig's Inside the Cuban Revolution or Fidel's autobiography.

Paterson says that the answer to all of the endless questions, rumours and conspiracies asking "How did the United States 'let' Cuba slip from their grasp?" can be answered with two words: imperial hubris. The US made countless blunders in this three year period because of their arrogance and ignorance. They refused to listen to the Cuban people and accept how unpopular Batista really was. The United States received all of their intelligence from the Cuban government, none of which was accurate because the government wanted to present stability and security to keep its cozy relationship with the US. It also didn't help that both US ambassadors to Cuba at this time, Gardner and Smith, were fawning fanboys and business partners of Batista.

The US did also did a very poor job of concealing the true nature of their relationship to Cuba. Officially they were always neutral in the Cuban conflict but in reality they supported Batista as much as they could. Paterson puts to rest the ridiculous revisionist theory that the US was pro-Castro by laying out countless documents and plots against him. The strongest evidence of this is the December conspiracies where the US tried to install many military generals or moderate politicians as a "third way" counterforce to both Batista and Castro. It wasn't that they helped the Movement of the 26th of July get into power, they just did a very bad job of stopping them.

Decent book, pretty short, too America-centric but helpful for understanding why the Cuban revolution didn't go the way of Guatemala.

[Marla McMackin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Contesting Castro is Thomas G. Paterson’s exploration of U.S.-Cuban relations during the 1950s through the victory of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary forces in 1959. In 22 chapters, Paterson “seeks not only to explain the origins of the U.S. collision with revolutionary Cuba and the reasons for the U.S. failure to block Fidel Castro’s rise to power, but also to tell the dramatic tale of the Cuban insurrection against the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship” (p. vii).

The U.S. had a stake in Cuba since after the 1898 Spanish American War, which freed Cuba from Spanish rule, but with a constitution written to protect U.S. interests. By the 1950s, the U.S. backed Batista’s military dictatorship, which kept Cuba stable for U.S. investments and tourists. Many Cubans were dissatisfied with Batista, including Castro. He and his followers – The 26th of July Movement – launched a revolution and by New Year’s Day 1959, had fought their way across the island into its capital, Havana, and Batista was forced to flee. While Castro was not a communist, he vocalized his desire to nationalize Cuba’s resources for the benefit of its citizens. With President Eisenhower still in office, the U.S. applied economic pressure and eventually cut all trade. The Soviet Union stepped in and by the time Kennedy was elected president in 1960, there was a total diplomatic break. Although tensions peaked during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the once close allies have yet to reach full accommodation.

Much of the work focuses on how Castro was able to drive Batista from Cuba. Paterson presents a clear case of a corrupt authoritarian leader who alienated his supporters – including U.S. foreign policy makers – while Castro’s nationalism captured rising anti-American sentiments and inspired unwavering loyalty. Paterson also sums up the answer to the work’s central question: How did the U.S. let Cuba get away? “Self-imposed restraint, poor leadership, sensitivity to public opinion, shallow analysis, miscalculation, incompetence, untoward timing, inhospitable terrain, a formidable, heroic opponent, and alliance with a corrupt, vulnerable ally – all derailed the U.S. effort to block Castro” (p. 251) despite a clear desire to maintain hegemonic control over the nearby island nation. In the concluding chapter, Paterson assesses the early years of Castro’s regime and U.S. efforts to subvert it, which he sees as the ultimate, localized cause of the missile crisis. “Had there ben no exile expedition at the Bay of Pigs, no destructive covert activities, no assassination plots, no military maneuvers and plans, and no economic and diplomatic steps to harass, isolate, and destroy the Castro government in Havana, there would not have been a Cuban missile crisis” (p. 260).

Reviews of this work laud Paterson’s multiarchival research. Richard Immerman of Temple University calls it outstanding, adding that although the U.S. government’s resistance to declassifying documents obstructed Paterson, his exploitation of the Freedom of Information Act bore fruit. Paterson uncovered new material in foreign and business archives and private collections and he interviewed or corresponded with players in both Cuba and the United States. Paterson himself states that exercising FOIA to open classified documents from a variety of institutions, “permitted an unusual opportunity to move back and forth between high-level policymaking, as in the National Security Council and the State Department, and the ground level of clandestine meetings, bombings, assassinations, mountain skirmishes, gun-smuggling, kidnappings, urban terrorism, political rivalries, consumer protests against electric and telephone rates, journalists’ scoops, FBI stake-outs, CIA conspiracies, casino gambling, baseball, diplomats’ debates and much more” (p. vii). It adds much rich detail to this persuasively written and highly instructive examination of U.S-Cuban relations.

[Christopher Hull · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thorough research from this expert historian