Cuban dictator Raul Castro’s alternately affable and defiant denial of human rights violations at his brief “press conference” with President Obama in Havana reminded me of a similar performance by his brother here in the U.S.—probably the only other time a Castro has submitted to even cursory questioning from foreigners.
The first occasion was in April 1959 when Fidel, Cuba’s new revolutionary leader, visited America. He made a stop at Harvard because, he said, “That is where you find the real military spirit: in students, not in the barracks.” So many of us wanted to see and hear him that Harvard’s auditoriums could not accommodate the event. His speech was delivered in an amphitheater erected outside Harvard Stadium and 10,000 students and residents packed into the fenced-off area for the event.
Dean McGeorge Bundy apologized to Castro for Harvard’s rejecting his application a decade earlier. Fidel went into his rambling, broken-English monologue for well over an hour as those of us without seats stood waiting restlessly for a chance to ask questions. When the opportunity finally came, someone confronted Castro about reports of firing squads gunning down members of the ousted Batista dictatorship, as well as ordinary Cubans who criticized some aspects of the revolution.
With Harvard’s large Veritas banner draped on the platform before him, Castro denied the reports and mocked the question as a fabrication of his revolution’s opponents. He also declared the Cuban state’s right to appeal any civil trial verdicts that went against it. Despite occasional hissing at such answers, which also troubled me, the crowd was overwhelmingly favorable and gave Fidel a rousing ovation at the end.
When I returned home that night and shared the exciting experience with my family, my kid sister, then in junior high school, annoyed me by curtly pronouncing: “Oh, Castro’s just a Communist.” Displaying my newly acquired Harvard superiority, I told her she didn’t know what she was talking about. Within two years, Castro had declared himself a Marxist-Leninist and proclaimed “socialist” Cuba an ally of the Soviet Union.
A year after his visit, just up the street in Harvard Yard, we were visited by another historic figure whose fate would be inextricably linked to Castro and Cuba. On Commencement Day, tanned and handsome in his top hat, senator and Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy processed by us waiting graduates.
Six months later, Kennedy’s inaugural speech, with its sweeping vision committing America to “pay any price, bear any burden in the defense of liberty” was particularly meaningful to those of us who had entered the military after college.
Then on April 19, 1961, came news of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion when Kennedy’s failure to provide promised air cover for the Cuban exiles helped doom the operation. This drained the administration’s self-assurance and Kennedy’s confidence in the military and intelligence advisers he had inherited from Eisenhower. It raised some doubt in our minds as well.
In the following year, Cuba again tested Kennedy’s mettle. For months, his administration dismissed New York senator Kenneth Keating’s public warnings that the Soviet Union was sending arms to Cuba and even building offensive missile bases there. On October 22, 1962, the president addressed the nation and acknowledged the gravity of the situation, in terms that were both inspiring and chilling:
“The 1930s taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, leads to war . . . The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender or submission.”
Kennedy acted with courage and cool determination over the next two weeks and seemed to have stared down Khrushchev—though at the cost of committing the U.S. not to invade Cuba or overthrow Castro. This assured the Communists there would be no further Bay of Pigs adventures no matter how bad things got for the Cuban people.
We learned only later that the episode was even less the unalloyed American victory than had been portrayed. In exchange for the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba, American missiles were removed from Turkey and Italy, something Moscow had long vainly demanded but now won.
Two months later, Kennedy made another of his stirring speeches, this time to the Cuban-American community in Miami which presented him with the flag of the Cuban Invasion Brigade. The president decried Castro’s “police state” and told his audience: “I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana.”
Less than a year later, someone rushed into our administrative law class and handed a note to the professor. Stricken and stunned, he told us the president had been assassinated and dismissed the class. As we stood shocked outside the lecture hall, I turned to a friend and said the Dallas shooting must have been the act of “a right-wing nut.” We soon discovered that Lee Harvey Oswald was in fact a left-wing, pro-Soviet, pro-Castro fanatic.
I felt the need to pay a visit to St. Paul’s Catholic Church. It happens to be situated about midway between Harvard Yard where, three years earlier, I had seen JFK in person for the first and only time; and Harvard Stadium where, a year before that, Fidel Castro, Oswald’s revolutionary hero, had regaled us with his defiant tale of Cuban “liberation.”
Raul Castro spoke fondly of the fruits of that liberation in advance of Obama’s visit. “We will not allow ourselves to be pressured in regards to our internal affairs. We have won this sovereign right with great sacrifices and at the cost of great risks,” he was quoted as saying in Cuba’s state newspaper.
His public performance in Havana this weekend showed just how little the family dictatorship has changed.
President Obama says that is why a change in America’s Cuba policy was needed. Raoul offered an immediate test for the new policy: he told a pesky Cuban-American reporter to provide a list of political prisoners held by Cuba and they would be released by sundown. The sun has set and risen a couple of times since then and there have been no reports of such releases, nor even that Obama directed the State Department to accept Castro’s challenge (or call his bluff).
Joseph A. Bosco worked in the office of the secretary of defense, 2002-2010.
