Cuba may be an island, but the man who put it at the center of so much 20th century drama certainly wasn't. Here's a round-up of select books that investigate Castro's dealings with JFK, the CIA, the Soviets, the Mob, and more.
Castro’s Secrets: The CIA and Cuba’s Intelligence Machine
Latell (After Fidel), senior research associate at the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies, draws on his nearly four decades of tracking Castro for the CIA for this authoritative exposé of “the mysteries and crimes of Cuban intelligence over the last half century.” To augment his extensive knowledge of Castro’s Cuba, the author conducted extensive interviews with defectors from Cuba’s elite intelligence and security services, interviewed CIA officers, and read thousands of pages of declassified CIA documents. Much of what he reports confirms existing knowledge: the details of Kennedy’s “bloody covert war against Fidel”; the CIA’s efforts to assassinate Castro; and Castro’s support for guerrilla movements in Latin America. Latell also uncovers some occasionally shocking new information: that Castro quickly developed an elite spy agency and managed to keep the CIA “ignorant of Cuban capabilities” for decades; that Castro himself was Cuba’s “supreme spymaster”; and that Castro knew about Lee Harvey Oswald’s plan to assassinate Kennedy. Despite his best efforts to link Castro to the assassination, however, Latell manages only to show that the dictator knew more about Oswald than he has admitted. While he documents Kennedy’s obsession with Castro, he fails to ask why. Even so, Latell provides a lively and revealing account of the long intelligence war between the U.S. and Cuba.
The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America's Doomed Invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs.
As John F. Kennedy greeted guests at a White House reception for members of Congress, 1,400 Cuban exile-fighters waited in vain for a round of American air strikes to help launch an invasion to topple Fidel Castro, Cuba's communist leader. Journalist Rasenberger marks the fiftieth anniversary of the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion attempt with a gripping narrative about the genesis of the doomed covert action. With new documents at his disposal, including a declassified CIA inspector general's report, Rasenberger upends the "conventional wisdom" that a naïve young president was misled by an overconfident CIA. The CIA operatives and JFK come in for equal measures of blame: the CIA for failing to strongly oppose JFK's refusal to give the go-ahead for the air strikes that the agency believed were integral to giving the fighters any hope of success on the ground, and Kennedy for failing to stop the operation given his growing misgivings about the plan. Rasenberger provides interesting details about the aftermath, including the Christmas-time release of the captured fighters several years later, his attorney father's role in that episode, and sums up how the Bay of Pigs continued to reverberate from the Cuban Missile Crisis to Watergate.
The Cuban Connection: Nixon, Castro, and the Mob
Turner (Hockey Mom: Sarah Palin's Shot at Glory), an FBI agent turned investigative reporter, draws on decades of experience, first-hand interviews, and in-depth research to paint a thorough picture of the complicated relationship between Cuba and the United States. While his main focus is the volatile era following Castro's rise to power, he branches out, examining previous Cuban presidents Prio and Batista, the influence of the National Crime Syndicate, and the wild card that was Richard Nixon. Turner's approach is free-wheeling yet insightful, illuminating a series of pivotal moments as he aims to provide "a shot over the bow of American foreign policy in the Caribbean region." His examination of Castro's 1959 visit to America, and how a less-than-satisfactory reception by Nixon forever tanked US-Cuban relations, is both damning and eye-opening. An extensive look at the CIA's many attempts to kill or discredit Castro reads like Cold War slapstick; backed up by nearly 100 pages of declassified documents regarding CIA plots, it's a fascinating series of revelations. Turner draws together crime, politics, revolutions, assassinations, and conspiracies to make this a fascinating read. The more controversial elements can be taken with a grain of salt, but the underlying narrative remains solid.
One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964
The Cold War now seems like a dim memory, but it really wasn't that long ago that the two superpowers came to the brink of nuclear war over the Caribbean island of Cuba. The diplomacy in the years immediately preceding and during this crisis is the fodder for this evenhanded, thorough study. Using a slew of recently declassified documents from Russian archives, Fursenko, the history chair at the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Naftali, who teaches history at Yale, emphasize the ignorance and uncertainty that haunted all three countries during Castro's rise to power. After showing how the Cuban leader (pushed by U.S. and Soviet pressure, his brother and his own anti-imperialist urges) embraced Moscow, the authors then examine how the dominos fell: increasing Soviet-Cuban cooperation led to American military efforts (the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion), which led to Khrushchev's missile shipments to the Cubans, which, in turn provoked the U.S. to impose a ""military quarantine,"" thus beginning the terrifying days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Most importantly, the authors detail the evolving relationship between Castro and the Soviets, as well as the 40 secret meetings between Robert Kennedy and Soviet leaders that eventually allowed Kennedy and Krushchev to stand down. If the writing is a little academic, the authors do illuminate and confirm past suppositions about the build-up to this nuclear confrontation--and how disaster was avoided.
Deadly Secrets: The CIA-Mafia War Against Castro and the Assassination of J.F.K.
President John Kennedy put his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, in charge of the U.S. government's secret plan to assassinate Fidel Castro and overthrow his government. This explosive chronicle also contends that RFK cut private deals with the Mafia which solidified the mob's ties with the Central Intelligence Agency. Furthermore, the authors charge, the CIA was involved in at least a dozen attempts on Castro's life through 1987, and the agency recruited thousands of anti-Castro Cubans for military adventurism and political and economic sabotage. Hinckle, founding editor of Ramparts, and Turner, an ex-FBI agent, weave a complex narrative featuring key players like CIA spy E. Howard Hunt, active in assassination attempts on Castro, and mobster Johnny Roselli, whom the CIA drafted to kill the Cuban dictator. First published in 1981 as The Fish Is Red, the book has been updated to include a powerful introductory chapter detailing George Bush's dirty tricks from Iran-Contra through recent schemes to revive the war on Castro. A timely expose, it supports current speculation that the murderers of JFK were part of a CIA-Mafia hit team.
In the Eye of the Storm: Castro, Kruschchev & Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis
Lechuga details the potentially disastrous Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 from the rare Cuban perspective. As then ambassador to the UN, he brings frightening perspectives to the provocations between the Soviets and U.S. as they escalated beyond Cuban influence. U.S. missiles siloed in Turkey prompted Soviet premier Khrushchev to even the playing field by establishing a continental nuclear threat in the Western Hemisphere. For his part, Castro accepted Soviet missiles to reduce the risk of another American invasion after the Bay of Pigs fiasco a year before. But with the missiles en route, Kennedy ''quarantined'' (i.e., embargoed) Cuba, making it a pawn in a battle between superpowers. Cuba, Lechuga asserts, ''didn't know what was going on'' and wasn't consulted on key issues. On October 27, Khrushchev made a deal offering to dismantle Cuban missiles if the U.S. would do the same in Turkey, and though the missiles and bombers were removed, Cuba was left with a 30-year legacy of U.S. political and economic belligerency. Besides a coolly analytical narrative of this terrifying moment, Lechuga has assembled intriguing documents, many never before published. He reveals his involvement with Kennedy officials in improving American-Cuban relations prior to the President's November 1963 assassination, which he strongly suggests was orchestrated by the CIA.
Fidel and Gabo: A Portrait of the Legendary Friendship Between Fidel Castro and Gabriel Garca Mrquez
There's no romance in the relationship between the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and the Nobel-winning Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, argues this stinging j'accuse. On the surface their friendship is chummy and literary: Castro drops by García Márquez's Havana mansion—a gift from Castro himself—for endless conversation and critiques his manuscripts. But the authors view the men's bond as corrupt and neurotic: García Márquez, obsessed with power in both his fiction and real life, gets political influence; Castro, in turn, gets cultural prestige and a matchless propagandist. The authors condemn García-Márquez's public silence over Cuban censorship and human rights violations. Almost compulsive in their point scoring, the authors jeer at the novelist for going to American rather than Cuban hospitals. More polemic than biography, their study tellingly rebukes the Left's propensity for blinding itself to the failings of the Cuban revolution by glamorizing its leaders.
