Cuba in the Caribbean Cold War: Exiles, Revolutionaries and Tyrants, 1952-1959 [1st ed.] 9783030463625, 9783030463632

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii
Introduction: The Caribbean Legion Revived (Nicolás Prados Ortiz de Solórzano)....Pages 1-16
A Caribbean Cold War, 1947–1955 (Nicolás Prados Ortiz de Solórzano)....Pages 17-41
The Internationalization of the Cuban Revolution, 1955–1956 (Nicolás Prados Ortiz de Solórzano)....Pages 43-65
The Caribbean Legion Supplying the Sierra Maestra, 1957–1958 (Nicolás Prados Ortiz de Solórzano)....Pages 67-88
Conclusion: The Demise of the Caribbean Legion, 1959–1961 (Nicolás Prados Ortiz de Solórzano)....Pages 89-100
Back Matter ....Pages 101-113

Citation preview

ST ANTONY’S SERIES

Cuba in the Caribbean Cold War Exiles, Revolutionaries and Tyrants, 1952–1959 Nicolás Prados Ortiz de Solórzano

St Antony’s Series Series Editors Dan Healey St Antony’s College University of Oxford Oxford, UK Leigh Payne St Antony’s College University of Oxford Oxford, UK

The St Antony’s Series publishes studies of international affairs of contemporary interest to the scholarly community and a general yet informed readership. Contributors share a connection with St Antony’s College, a world-renowned centre at the University of Oxford for research and teaching on global and regional issues. The series covers all parts of the world through both single-author monographs and edited volumes, and its titles come from a range of disciplines, including political science, history, and sociology. Over more than forty years, this partnership between St Antony’s College and Palgrave Macmillan has produced about 400 publications. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15036

Nicolás Prados Ortiz de Solórzano

Cuba in the Caribbean Cold War Exiles, Revolutionaries and Tyrants, 1952–1959

Nicolás Prados Ortiz de Solórzano St Antony’s College University of Oxford Oxford, UK

ISSN 2633-5964 ISSN 2633-5972  (electronic) St Antony’s Series ISBN 978-3-030-46362-5 ISBN 978-3-030-46363-2  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46363-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Hufton+Crow-VIEW/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

This book stems from two years of research at the University of Oxford. I want to thank my supervisor Eduardo Posada-Carbó for all his help, guidance and support; to the faculty, librarians and staff at the Latin American Centre that made me feel at home; to the Latin American Centre itself for the travel grant that allowed me to visit Cuba in the summer of 2018 and write this book; and to all my classmates and friends during the past years, especially to Daniel Barker Flores for his feedback and revisions. I also want to thank Dr. Aaron Coy Moulton for all his enthusiastic support and encouragement, and Dr. Juan Pablo Fusi for his kind comments and advice on an early draft. I want to thank everyone who helped me during my fieldwork in La Habana. I am indebted to Belkis Quesada from the Instituto de Historia de Cuba, who opened the doors of the archive to us; Rosana at the Instituto de Historia; Martha and Alain for hosting us; and Claudia, Alain and Sebastián for their generosity. I want to thank all my friends and family; especially Leandro and Blanca, my sister Lucía and my parents Isabela and Luis, who would help me with my homework when I would confess late on a Sunday that it was due for the next morning. I hope this book shows that all their efforts were worth it. This book would not have been possible without the help, hard work and unconditional support from Mariana Quaresma, who worked in the Cuban archives with me and has been a constant source of encouragement in the past years. vii

Contents

1 Introduction: The Caribbean Legion Revived 1 The Rise of Caribbean Transnational Networks 6 Historiography and Sources 9 Structure 15 2 A Caribbean Cold War, 1947–1955 17 Origins of the Caribbean Legion 19 Democracy Is Overthrown in Cuba 27 Cuba’s Political Landscape 32 La Transnacional de La Mano Dura 34 Conclusion 40 3 The Internationalization of the Cuban Revolution, 1955–1956 43 The M26/7 in Exile: Tapping into the Caribbean Legion 46 The Complicated Batista–Trujillo Relationship 56 Conclusion 63 4 The Caribbean Legion Supplying the Sierra Maestra, 1957–1958 67 Costa Rican Support for the Guerrilla 70 Venezuela Joins the Rebels 77 Conclusion 86 ix

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CONTENTS

5 Conclusion: The Demise of the Caribbean Legion, 1959–1961 89 Bibliography 101 Index 109

About

the

Author

Nicolás Prados Ortiz de Solórzano (Madrid, 1992) is a doctoral candidate reading History at the University of Oxford. He is currently researching the relationship between democracy and transnational, revolutionary networks operating in Latin America and the Caribbean from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s.

xi

Acronyms

AD Acción Democrática APRA Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana DR Directorio Revolucionario M26/7 Movimiento 26 de Julio OA Organización Auténtica OAS Organization of American States ORIT Organización Regional Interamericana de Trabajadores PLN Partido de Liberación Nacional PRD Partido Revolucionario Dominicano PRI Partido Revolucionario Institucional PSP Partido Socialista Popular

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Caribbean Legion Revived

Abstract   This chapter introduces the concept of transnational ­revolutionary networks, and lays out the argument of this book: Cuban revolutionaries in the 1950s tapped into a previously existing revolutionary network dubbed by the press “the Caribbean Legion”. With the help of this network, the Cuban conflict became entangled in a larger, region-wide cold war between dictatorial regimes and democratic republics. Prados explains the transnational methodological approach, before making the case for its relevance to the specific region of the ­Circum-Caribbean and its history and geography. This is followed by an analysis of the existing historiography concerning the Caribbean Legion, the Cuban Revolution, the Cold War in Latin America and the exiles in the region. The chapter closes with a summary of the book’s structure. Keywords  Transnational history Cuban revolution

· Networks · Exile · Cold war ·

In the early months of 1959, journalists from all over the world rushed to the tropical island of Cuba to report on the unfolding revolution. On 1 January, dictator Fulgencio Batista had fled Cuba and a small group of rag-tag rebels under the inspiring command of a young, bearded lawyer called Fidel Castro, had taken over the government. Writing from Havana, veteran New York Times correspondent, Ruby Hart Phillips, © The Author(s) 2020 N. Prados Ortiz de Solórzano, Cuba in the Caribbean Cold War, St Antony’s Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46363-2_1

1

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warned that revolution was on the loose in the Caribbean. Under the headline “A Revolt in Haiti Urged from Cuba”, Hart pointed at something that only someone with her over 20 years of experience in the Caribbean could be aware of: Caribbean Legion Revived. Familiar faces of the Caribbean Legion, sometimes called the ‘phantom army’ of the Caribbean, have appeared in Havana. The legion came into being in 1947 when the Cuban Cayo Confites Expedition was getting ready to attack Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic.1

The return of this mysterious legion seemed significant, since Fidel Castro himself had participated in that 1947 Cayo Confites expedition when he was a student. Hart kept reporting on this “phantom army” throughout the spring of 1959, which she described as “an o ­ rganization of exiles and adventurers” focused on deposing every dictatorship in the Caribbean.2 Her colleague Herbert Matthews reported that June: “(…) revolutionaries in Cuba called for the overthrow of Generalissimo Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, François Duvalier in Haiti and the Somoza brothers in Nicaragua. Exiles were welcomed in Cuba, got arms and went into training”.3 What was the Caribbean Legion, this “organization of exiles and adventurers”, why had it reappeared in Cuba and what connection did it have to the recent revolution? The “Caribbean Legion” was the name the press had given to a loose, transnational, revolutionary network of politicians, adventurers, idealists, exiles and mercenaries, joint by the common aim of deposing the dictatorships of the Caribbean. Since the 1940s, it coordinated exiles from different Caribbean countries under the auspice of democratic governments to launch invasions against the dictatorial regimes of the region. During the Cuban Revolution,4 Cuban fighters such as Fidel Castro and his Movimiento 26 de Julio (M26/7) turned towards this network of

1 ‘A

Revolt in Haiti Urged from Cuba’, New York Times, 1 March 1959. is Cautious on Aid to Risings’, ibid., 18 March 1959. ‘Nicaragua Rebels Arrested in Cuba’, ibid., 20 April 1959. 3 ‘Trujillo Now Centre of Caribbean Unrest’, ibid., 28 June 1959. 4 Understood as the fight against Fulgencio Batista, 1952–1958. 2 ‘Cuba

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experienced revolutionaries for help. Over the course of the insurrection, the rebels received the backing of members along the Caribbean Legion network, which included influential figures of Latin American politics, such as Venezuelan Rómulo Betancourt, Costa Rican José Figueres, Cuban Carlos Prío, Guatemalan Jacobo Árbenz or Dominican Juan Bosch. The aid received by the Cuban revolutionaries from this network was vital for their success. As we shall see, patrons from the Caribbean Legion furnished the rebels with crucial military, financial and diplomatic aid, entangling the Cuban revolutionaries in a larger regional struggle between democratic regimes and military dictatorships. As a participant in this “regional cold war”, Castro and his M26/7 movement received a legitimizing boost from those democratic leaders aligned with the Legion against dictatorship. Once in power, the M26/7 would be asked to reciprocate the aid they had received, and support Nicaraguan, Dominican or Iberian anti-dictatorial guerrillas. However, the revolutionary regime would move in an unexpected direction for their wartime democratic partners like Figueres or Betancourt. This transnational involvement in the Cuban conflict shaped the revolutionary regime of 1959, brought long-lasting consequences to the larger geopolitical dynamics of the region, and even to the Cold War at large. This book has four broad aims: first, to expand the neglected historiography of the Caribbean Legion by defining this “phantom ­ army” as a network, anchoring it in tangible terms, and by unearthing the movements of its participants during the 1950s. This disproves previous interpretations in the literature that argue that the Legion disappeared in 1950. Second, to provide an additional narrative of the Cuban Revolution, focused on its place within its contemporary international context. This book will not trace the motives of the Revolution to the nineteenth century nor to its relations with the United States, and it will not view it as an exceptional event unparalleled in the region: instead, we will see how the Cuban Revolution was a successful revolution in the midst of several failed attempts in the surrounding countries, all linked by a common, transnational, revolutionary network. Third, to contribute to recent historiographical trends that propose to study the Caribbean during the 1950s as part of a regional “cold war” between two ideologically opposed blocs: democratic governments against dictatorial strongmen. This re-interpretation seeks to add nuance to Cold War histories which might underestimate the regional divides that failed to neatly align with Soviet–Western power struggles. Finally, the fourth aim of this book

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is to make a contribution to histories of exiles in Latin America, highlighting their influential role in shaping the politics not just of their own countries, but of a transnational conscience that transcended national boundaries. Transnationality is a theme that lies at the heart of this book. The Cuban Revolution will be approached through the lens of transnational history, focusing particularly on those “ideas, things, people, and practices which have crossed national boundaries”.5 The purpose of transnational history is to move beyond the nation state as the unit of analysis in history. As Jeremy Adelman argued, “until very recently, the practice of modern history centred on, and was dominated by, the nation state. Most history was the history of the nation”.6 Nation builders often drew from the past in order to create a common identity, arguably relegating history to the position of “handmaiden to the nation state”.7 This nationalist use of the discipline was particularly salient in Latin America, where racially, culturally and ethnically diverse populations were unified through historical narratives into allegiance to the state.8 In this process of dividing history into a set of national histories, we might have overlooked the connections that bound different, seemingly unrelated events and how they mutually shaped each other. The focus of this book will be placed in these connections. The transnational approach is necessary in order to understand the revolutionary network of the region during the 1950s for a series of reasons. The Circum-Caribbean as a region has been since the 1500 s a site of transnational contact, with porous or often absent borders, easily navigated through physical proximity, fluid migration patterns, and bound mainly by the Spanish language. Furthermore, the region and Latin America at large have long participated in a common “public sphere”

5 Ann Curthoys and Marylin Lake, “Introduction”, in Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, eds. Curthoys and Lake (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2005), 17. 6 Jeremy Adelman, ‘What Is Global History Now?’ Aeon magazine, available at https:// aeon.co/essays/is-global-history-still-possible-or-has-it-had-its-moment. Accessed April 20, 2019. 7 Curthoys & Lake, “Introduction”, 17. 8 Max Paul Friedman and Padraic Kenney, “History in Politics”, in Partisan Histories: The Past in Contemporary Global Politics, eds. Friedman and Kenney (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 4.

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where cultural and linguistic affinities have circulated dynamically mainly through the works of political exiles, migrants and artists.9 Evidently the focus on exiles also calls for a transnational approach, since they naturally transcend national borders. For all these reasons which will be developed further in the next section, the transnational lens is necessary to analyse events which go beyond the national mould. In writing a transnational history of the Cuban Revolution, we will discover valuable insights that would have gone missing in a book focused on what occurred solely within the Cuban island. The findings of this book will prove relevant to those interested in gaining a better understanding of revolutionary movements and insurgencies at large. By comprehending the network from which Cuban revolutionaries (and more particularly, Fidel Castro and his movement) emerged, we will gain a better understanding of the Castro-headed revolutionary government and the hectic years that followed the triumph of the barbudos. After all, as Paul Staniland explains, “pre-existing networks provide the underpinnings for new insurgent groups”.10 In this book we will see how Fidel Castro’s movement tapped into a previously existing revolutionary network to oust Batista. This network provided the means for the Cuban revolutionaries to wage war, but also influenced, and at times constrained, their politics. A transnational support network provided material, logistic, financial, and propagandistic benefits, as well as international legitimacy, on which the Cuban revolutionaries heavily relied during the war against Batista and in its immediate aftermath. It also however, created a political debt that had to be repaid. As this book will show, the foreign relations of revolutionary movements, an often overlooked topic, will help explain, in the words of Skocpol, “as much about the structure and orientation of social-revolutionary regimes (…) as analysis of their class basis or propositions about the inherent logic of modernization and the violence and disruptiveness of various revolutions”.11

9 Íñigo ­García-Bryce, Haya de la Torre and the Pursuit of Power in Twentieth-Century Peru and Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 17. 10 Paul Staniland, Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 17. 11 Quoted in Odd Arne Westad, ‘Rethinking Revolutions: The Cold War in the Third World’, Journal of Peace Research, 49:4 (1992), 455.

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The Rise of Caribbean Transnational Networks In the 1950s, the Caribbean basin was swarming with exiles. Dictators in countries like Cuba, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic or Nicaragua were banishing their political rivals into exile. These “forced political migrants”, came from different strata of society, and ranged from politicians to student activists, intellectuals, workers, professionals and artists.12 Among the more prominent politicians spending years in exile during this period, we find influential former and future presidents like Fidel Castro, Rómulo Betancourt, Juan Bosch, Jacobo Árbenz and Carlos Prío. Politicians such as these were joined in exile by a cohort of other “revolutionary wanderers and exiles”, as Barry Carr defined them.13 Country of origin varied, and spanned from Cubans and Puerto Ricans to Guatemalan, Spanish or Venezuelan. Many of these revolutionary exiles came from the armed forces, or had military experience from the Spanish Civil War or local guerrilla attempts in their home countries. Together they formed a “militant travelling culture” that adopted a profoundly anti-dictatorial character during the late 1940s and 1950s, and became bound by a revolutionary network.14 However, this is not a story of individuals. As historian E. H. Carr noted, “all effective movements have a few leaders and a multitude of followers; but this does not mean that the multitude is not essential to their success. Numbers count in history”.15 Indeed, these exiles found their strength in numbers. They received a considerable degree of support from the local population. In the cases of Cuba or Nicaragua, for example, many of the anti-dictatorial activities were supported by local labour and student organizations. In places like Honduras, Costa Rica or Venezuela, the proponents of anti-dictatorial action were backed at the polls by a majority of voters. These ideas circulating in the transnational revolutionary networks were seconded by a significant proportion of the population in the region. Therefore, despite the number of first 12 Luis Roniger, ‘Political Exile and Democracy’, in Exile & the Politics of Exclusion in the Americas, eds. Luis Roniger, James N. Green and Pablo Yankelevich (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2012), 330. 13 Barry Carr, ‘Across Seas and Borders: Charting the Webs of Radical Internationalism in the Circum-Caribbean’, in ibid., 218. 14 Ibid., 217. 15 E. H. Carr, What Is History? (London: Penguin Classics, 2018, first published 1961), 46.

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names that will appear in this book, this is not a recollection of individual adventures. The setting is key to understanding the Legion. This book will refer to the “Circum-Caribbean” as the region including the insular Caribbean, the northern coast of South America, Central America and the Mexican Gulf.16 This region already enjoyed a rich tradition of transnational networks which shaped the Legion into existence. Since the nineteenth century, the Circum-Caribbean had been a “pioneer site of transnational capital” dealing in primary commodities for export, exploited by transnational companies such as the United Fruit. The Second Industrial Revolution drastically transformed the Caribbean, with innovations in transport and communication accelerating capital and labour flows. These movements “shaped the political-economic and cultural forms that would eventually transpire in transnational resistance and exile networking”.17 Prosperity and financial opportunity during a time of crisis in Europe also attracted large numbers of Spanish immigrants in the early decades of the twentieth century. As Samuel Farber notes, a significant amount of leaders in the Cuban Revolution against Batista were first generation Cubans, the children of Spanish migrants.18 The experience of the Spanish Civil War heavily politicized these future revolutionaries. Furthermore, the United States’ interventions in the region during the opening decades of the twentieth century helped build movements of national liberation, as well as shape ideologies which emphasized common elements of hispanidad, indigenismo and mixed ancestry. These ideas, perhaps best embodied in the writings of Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodó in Ariel, gave the Caribbean and Latin America at wide a shared sense of identity in opposition to the United States and ­Anglo-Saxon culture.19 Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío encapsulated 16 Ileana Sanz, ‘Early Groundings for a ­ Circum-Caribbean Integrationist Thought’, Caribbean Quarterly, 55:1 (2017), 1. 17 B. Carr, ‘Across Seas and Borders’, in Exile & the Politics of Exclusion, eds. Roniger, Green and Yankelevich, 222–223. 18 Among these were the Castro brothers, Camilo Cienfuegos, Frank País, Abel and Haydee Santamaría and almost a quarter of the generals of the future Revolutionary Armed Forces. Samuel Farber, Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 51–52. 19 García-Bryce, Haya de la Torre, 20.

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this feeling in his 1905 poem “A Roosevelt”, where he wrote against incipient US imperialism: “Eres los Estados Unidos, / eres el futuro invasor / de la América ingenua que tiene sangre indígena, / que aún reza a Jesucristo y aún habla en español”.20 One of the ideological products of this setting was the doctrine of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, a Peruvian politician who lived in exile in Mexico during the 1920s and travelled extensively across Latin America in the 1930s. Banished from his native Peru, Haya created a political ideology called Aprismo, named after the initials of the party he founded in exile: APRA, Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana. APRA was a radically different party to its contemporaries: it was the first transnational party to emerge in the Americas. Its purpose was to unite the Latin American nations in a common front against US imperialism, which would allow them to redistribute the wealth of natural resources and achieve greater levels of development and social justice. Aprismo was simultaneously nationalist and internationalist: it combined a nationalistic defence of land resources with a transnational, Pan-American vision of uniting Latin America in the mould of Bolívar and previous thinkers. It supported non-Communist revolution, deeply influenced by Marxist analysis. This ideology gained widespread following in the ­Circum-Caribbean during the late 1920s and 1930s, with many parties of the region subscribing to Aprista doctrine. These parties would later on constitute key nodes of the Caribbean Legion network.21 A major cornerstone underpinning the intellectual make-up of the transnational revolutionaries of the 1940s and 1950s was the experience of the Mexican Revolution. Many influential figures of the time, such as the aforementioned Haya and his contemporaries, were deeply impressed by it, and sought to export its model to the rest of Latin America. As a result, revolution and revolutionary tactics grew to enjoy wide prestige in the region, reinforced by the success of Sandino’s guerrilla campaign in Nicaragua against the United States (1927–1933).22 Several leading parties of the region established in the first half of the twentieth century included the “Revolutionary” label in their name, such as the Mexican Partido Nacional Revolutionario, the Cuban Partido Revolucionario 20 Rubén Darío, A Roosevelt, available at https://poemario.org/roosevelt/. Accessed April 20, 2019. 21 For more on Aprismo see García-Bryce, Haya de la Torre. 22 García-Bryce, Haya de la Torre, 14.

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Cubano—Auténtico, the Venezuelan Agrupación Revolucionaria de Izquierda, the Dominican Partido Revolucionario Dominicano or the aforementioned APRA. Finally, another key experience that shaped the mindset of participants in the Caribbean Legion was the Second World War. As Ameringer notes, the war “converted antitotalitarianism”, firmly espoused by the revolutionary exiles populating the region, “into an international cause” which “led to the adoption of an interventionist foreign policy for the eradication of dictatorships”.23 This notion of anti-dictatorial intervention would become a crucial tenet of the Caribbean Legion network. The Second World War “was releasing the forces of social revolution throughout the world”, according to Puerto Rican politician Luis Muñoz Marín, and the victory of the Allies severely undermined the image of Latin American dictators. In 1945, democratic governments of Latin America were drawing-up international laws to eradicate dictatorships: Guatemala proposed withholding recognition of governments established by coup d’état, and the Uruguayan foreign minister proposed to allow international intervention against authoritarian regimes. Both proposals however were unsuccessful.24 Revolutionary exiles were undaunted by these setbacks. By 1947, Dominican exiles with the backing of the Cuban, Guatemalan and Venezuelan governments were preparing an invasion of the Dominican Republic. The assembled army gave itself the name “Ejército de Liberación de América”; the press however, would eventually refer to them as “the Caribbean Legion”.

Historiography and Sources The Caribbean Legion has remained an elusive subject in the historiography. Its study has confronted several problems, mainly the fact that it was a transnational, clandestine network which left a scant paper trail, and whatever traces it left are disseminated among archives across the Caribbean basin, from Miami to Caracas and from San José to Santo

23 Charles Ameringer, The Democratic Left in Exile: The Antidictatorial Struggle in the Caribbean, 1945–1959 (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1974), 30–31. 24 Ibid., 52–53.

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Domingo.25 Historian Charles Ameringer wrote, to the best of my knowledge, the only monograph on the Legion. The Caribbean Legion: Patriots, Politicians, and Soldiers of Fortune, 1946–1950, published in 1996, recomposed the activities of the Legion in the second half of the 1940s from US sources.26 Historian Piero Gleijeses additionally shed light on the Legion in his 1991 article Juan José Arévalo and the Caribbean Legion, focusing on the participation of Arévalo’s government as a patron of the network between 1944 and 1949.27 Both of these works date the Legion’s disappearance to 1950. The first analyses to go beyond the 1940s are found in the work of Aaron Moulton, who is working extensively on the Legion and transnational activism in the Caribbean during the post-World War II years. In his articles from 2014 and 2015, Moulton analyses the Legion through a transnational lens, placing its activities in the context of an international solidarity movement among the region that transcended the limits of the nation-state.28 This book picks up this line of enquiry to locate the Caribbean Legion network in the context of the Cuban Revolution: to trace the participation of those exiles who came to be in contact through the Legion and participated in the fight against dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1952 and 1958. In doing so, Caribbean Legion literature will be put in contact with wider studies of the Cuban Revolution and vice versa. Cuban historiography has been a fertile terrain for historians for decades. However the difficult access to Cuban sources and the polit­ icization of its topics has driven the field into a paradoxical situation: as scholars Michael Bustamante and Jennifer Lambe describe it,

25 This issue is highlighted in Tanya Harmer and Alberto Martín Álvarez, ‘Introduction: Writing the History of Revolutionary Transnationalism and Militant Networks in the Americas’, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, 28:2 (2017), 8. 26 Charles Ameringer, The Caribbean Legion: Patriots, Politicians and Soldiers of Fortune, 1946–1950 (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1995). 27 Piero Gleijeses, ‘Juan José Arévalo and the Caribbean Legion’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 21:1 (1989), 135–145. 28 Moulton, ‘Building their own Cold War’, 135–154; ‘Militant Roots: The Anti-Fascist Left in the Caribbean Basin, 1945–1954’, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, 28:2 (2017), 14–29.

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Cuban historiography has become “simultaneously overpopulated and underdeveloped”.29 Cuban history has been hindered partly by mythology: as historian Louis A. Pérez points out, the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro appropriated Cuban history, tying the origin of their Revolution to the nineteenth-century struggles for independence, thus claiming “historical authenticity” to their movement. This “official” line of analysis of Cuban History sees the fight against Batista and the successive decades of revolutionary rule as the culmination of a long process that began in 1868, in an example of what Max Paul Friedman dubbed “partisan histories”.30 This book will not look back into the nineteenth century to find the motives of the anti-Batista struggle, but instead to the events taking place simultaneously in the neighbouring Caribbean nations. The study of Cuban history has unfortunately been hindered by a second obstacle in the field: the difficult access to Cuban sources and the consequent over-reliance on US archives. There is a temptation by scholars and Cuban officials alike to reduce the Cuban Revolution to its conflict with the United States: from the birth of the United States to our present days.31 The availability of North American sources versus the “hiding of information” in Cuba has but fuelled this US-centric take on Cuban history.32 However, new exciting work is being published in the field that is reliant on Cuban archives and reduces the dependency on its Northern neighbour. Recent books by Julia Sweig, Heberto Norman Acosta, Steve Cushion, Elíades Acosta and Jonathan Brown all draw from different Cuban archives to provide valuable and previously unknown insights into the Revolution.33 29 Michael J. Bustamante and Jennifer L. Lambe, “Cuba’s Revolution from Within: The Politics of Historical Paradigms”, in The Revolution from Within: Cuba, 1959–1980, eds. Michael J. Bustamante and Jennifer L. Lambe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 4. 30 Ibid.;

Partisan Histories, eds. Friedman and Kenney. ‘Border Crossings’, 6; Bustamante and Lambe, “Cuba’s Revolution from Within”, 13. 32 Fernando Martínez Heredia, ‘¿Cómo Investigar la Revolución Cubana? Cinco problemas para la investigación (I)’, La Tizza, 27 March 2018, available at https://medium. com/la-tiza/c%C3%B3mo-investigar-la-revoluci%C3%B3n-cubana-i-2d5a9c18ce7a. Accessed April 20, 2019. 33 Julia Sweig, Inside The Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Heberto Norman Acosta, La Palabra Empeñada (Havana: Oficina de Publicaciones del Consejo de Estado, 2005); Steve 31 Joseph,

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This recent trend in Cuban historiography is reflecting a wider movement within Cold War histories, one in which scholarship is becoming more decentred and looking beyond “the machinations of the contending superpowers”.34 This book is part of a new strand of Cold War historiography which locates the region’s Cold War in a wider historical context. As historian Gilbert Joseph notes, in the early twenty-first century, the analysis of foreign relations in Latin America during the Cold War remained fixed in the frame of a bipolar superpower conflict. Again, scholar Mark Gilderhus complained that Latin American literature remained “narrowly focused and dependent upon the records of the United States”.35 However, there is a shift occurring during the past few years. Many historians are taking a transnational approach to histories of the region as a way of “removing the Cold War lens” which reduced Latin American actors to pawns in the wider US–Soviet struggles.36 One of the main ways of achieving this is by “restoring Latin America to the equation in terms of both agency and archives”.37 There is work being done in this aspect by the aforementioned Moulton, Tanya Harmer, Robert Karl, Kirsten Weld or Barry Carr to name a few.38 This new Cold War

Cushion, A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped the Guerrillas’ Victory (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016); Eliades Acosta Matos, La Telaraña Cubana de Trujillo (Santo Domingo: Archivo General de la Nación, 2012); Jonathan C. Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). 34 Joseph,

‘Border Crossings’, 8. 6. 36 Robert A. Karl, ‘Reading the Cuban Revolution from Bogotá, 1957–1962’, Cold War History, 16:4 (2016), 339. 37 Max Paul Friedman, ‘Retiring the Puppets, Bringing Latin America Back in: Recent Scholarship on United States-Latin American Relations’, Diplomatic History, 27:5 (2003), 636. 38 Moulton, ‘Building Their Own Cold War’ and ‘Militant Roots’; Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Karl, ‘Reading the Cuban Revolution’; Kirsten Weld, ‘The Spanish Civil War and the Construction of a Reactionary Historical Consciousness in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 98:1 (2018), 77–115; Barry Carr, ‘Pioneering Transnational Solidarity in the Americas: The Movement in Support of Augusto C. Sandino, 1927–1934’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, 20:2 (2014), 141–152. 35 Ibid.,

1  INTRODUCTION: THE CARIBBEAN LEGION REVIVED 

13

historiography places its emphasis on the transnational character of its participants, the multi-archival source of its evidence and the primacy of regional struggles for local actors, which were not always in line with wider US–Soviet Cold War concerns. The overarching aim of this recent literature is to emphasize a specific point: “the Cold War in Latin America” is not the same as “the Latin American Cold War”.39 During the decades following World War II, Latin America was divided among its own regional lines, enmeshed in regional conflicts which did not necessarily align with US–Soviet divides. As it will be detailed in this book, during the late 1940s and 1950s, the Caribbean basin was immersed in a “Cold War of its own”.40 Two blocs had been formed after the war, one favouring democracy versus another bent on maintaining authoritarian rule. This “ferocious dialectic” between reformist and sometimes revolutionary projects, against the reactionary responses it provoked, shaped the decades following the World War II.41 It wouldn’t be until 1961, when the United States attempted an invasion of Cuba which triggered a subsequent adherence from Castro’s government to Marxism–Leninism, that this regional conflict would be subsumed into the wider, global Cold War. The main subject in this book are exiles, coordinating transnationally through a network created for the purpose of revolutionary activity. Unfortunately, despite its ubiquity throughout history, the phenomenon of exile in Latin America has been under-researched until recent years.42 Luis Roniger, James N. Green and Pablo Yankelevich have recently edited a survey of exile and politics in the Americas; and Mario Sznajder and Roniger also wrote a socio-political analysis of exile in Latin America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.43 The analytical framework created by these scholars serves to explain the situation of the Caribbean during the late 1940s and 1950s. As 39 Joseph,

‘Border Crossings’, 9. ‘Building Their Own Cold War’. 41 Joseph, ‘Border Crossings’, 2. 42 Luis Roniger and Pablo Yankelevich, ‘Exilio y política en América Latina: nuevos estudios y avances teóricos’, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, 20:1 (2009), 8. 43 Roniger, Green and Yankelevich, Exile & the Politics of Exclusion; Mario Sznajder and Luis Roniger, The Politics of Exile in Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 40 Moulton,

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Sznajder and Roniger argue, exile during the nineteenth century was fairly restricted to elites banished by political rivals. From exile, a three-tiered interplay was created, between the exile’s adoptive coun­ try and the exile’s home country. Dynamics worked along this triangle, with some of the most frequent cases involving the adoptive country hosting the exile to further an antagonism towards the exile’s nation, for example.44 However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, exile underwent a process of “massification”, with a growing number of political refugees from the middle and working classes. Increased numbers allowed for more effective efforts to capture international attention, in an increasingly evolved international arena p ­ ost-World War II, with a growing number of international organisms. The transnational arena was added to the previous triangular interplay to create what Sznajder and Roniger call “four-tiered exile”.45 One of the earliest examples of this four-tiered exile at play, in which exiles coordinated transnationally through support networks and alliances, was the Caribbean during the late 1940s and 1950s. During these years, “political dynamics were characterized by recurrent shifts between democracy and dictatorship, redefining lines of alignment and generating streams of political exiles”.46 This book will add to the historiography from which socio-political analysts such as Sznajder, Roniger or Yankelevich can draw from. The sources for this book are drawn from the aforementioned secondary literature and from a wide array of archival material, in line with transnational analyses. In Cuba, I examined the Archivo del Instituto de Historia Cubana. This archive holds the records of the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar: the reports on threats to Batista’s regime, both inside and outside Cuba. Additionally, I visited Cuba’s foreign ministry archive, the MINREX, where diplomatic correspondence from Batista’s ambassadors to the Caribbean is stored. This book will rely heavily on these Cuban sources, given the limited secondary literature available on the Caribbean Legion. In Europe I visited the UK’s National Archives in London; in Spain I consulted the archive of the Francisco Franco Foundation, containing

44 Ibid.,

73–76. 152–155. 46 Ibid., 158. 45 Ibid.,

1  INTRODUCTION: THE CARIBBEAN LEGION REVIVED 

15

diplomatic reports from Franco’s diplomats in the Caribbean, and the archive of the Federación Universitaria Española, which contains records from the Spanish Republican government in exile. Finally, I have consulted some records from US agencies and departments. Diplomatic records from the Foreign Relations of the United States series available online, as well as diplomatic cables from the Havana embassy available at latinamericanstudies.org. Additionally, FBI and CIA files from their archive websites and the John F. Kennedy Assassination Collection records, which were made public and digitally available in 2017, were used. The overall aim is to reconstruct the secretive activities of the Legion from a broad, multinational perspective.

Structure This book will be divided in three chapters. The first will provide a new definition of the Caribbean Legion as a transnational network. It will briefly trace its origin and history up to 1952, as well as provide a sketch of its form. It will then show how after Batista’s coup d’état in Cuba, the ousted Auténtico government turned to the Legion for help. We will then briefly survey the political landscape in Cuba during the first years of Batista’s dictatorship, before moving on to show how the Legion’s counterpart, the Transnacional de la Mano Dura mobilized during the early 1950s to repress the wave of democracy threatening to spread through the region. Chapter 2 will deal with the emergence of Fidel Castro and his Movimiento 26 de Julio in the anti-Batista fight. It will analyse how the M26/7 in exile got in contact with Auténtico exiles and through the latter, with the Caribbean Legion. Examples will be provided of how the M26/7 sealed alliances with prominent members of the Legion. Additionally, this chapter will trace the changing relationship between Batista and Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic and perhaps the main patron of the Transnacional. It will show evidence of an unlikely and pragmatic collaboration between Trujillo and anti-dictatorial Cuban exiles such as Castro himself. Finally, Chapter 3 will cover the last two years of the a­nti-Batista struggle, 1957–1958. The first half of this chapter will explain how the Costa Rican government of Caribbean Legion patron, José Figueres, provided military and financial supplies to Fidel Castro’s guerrilla.

16  N. PRADOS ORTIZ DE SOLÓRZANO

Additionally it will show how this support was enmeshed in larger attempted revolutions taking place simultaneously in Nicaragua. The second half will look into the events unfolding in Venezuela during 1958, when the dictatorial regime of Marcos Pérez Jiménez was ousted and democracy returned to the country. During this year, prominent Legionnaire Rómulo Betancourt became one of the main backers of Castro. The conclusion will bring the findings of the book together, while offering an account of the influence of the Caribbean Legion in the first months of revolutionary rule in Cuba and explaining the eventual dissolution of the Legion.

CHAPTER 2

A Caribbean Cold War, 1947–1955

Abstract  This chapter provides a much-needed examination of the Caribbean Legion: a loose, transnational network of revolutionaries that operated in the Circum-Caribbean during the late 1940s and 1950s, and has received scant attention in the historiography. Focusing on this network, this chapter draws attention to how shortly after the military coup against Cuba’s democratic government, resistance to the dictatorship became structured through the channels of the Caribbean Legion. Prados establishes the links between the incipient Cuban Revolution and a wider, regional anti-dictatorial struggle supported by transnational networks of exiles and revolutionaries. This chapter shows how in the 1950s, the Caribbean had descended into a regional cold war between two opposed blocs: democratic governments against military dictatorships. Keywords  Revolutionary networks Cold war · Democracy

· Caribbean · Exiles · Dictatorship ·

On 10 March 1952, Fulgencio Batista overthrew the democratic government of Cuba. Ousted was president Carlos Prío from the Auténtico party, a weary president almost at the end of his term, battered by corruption scandals. During his four years in power, Prío had openly sided with the Caribbean Legion and with the democratic governments of the region, offering military and diplomatic support to Guatemala, © The Author(s) 2020 N. Prados Ortiz de Solórzano, Cuba in the Caribbean Cold War, St Antony’s Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46363-2_2

17

18  N. PRADOS ORTIZ DE SOLÓRZANO

Costa Rica and Venezuela. Batista was promising to return Cuba to the orderly rule of a strongman, ceasing any foreign adventures and support for rebellious exiles. In the week that followed the coup, Batista’s government was first recognized by dictatorial regimes: the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Haiti, Spain and Honduras.1 Meanwhile Guatemala played a crucial role as a safe haven for conspiratorial activity during the first years of Batista’s rule (1952–1958). Linked by the Caribbean Legion network, Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz was willing to support the deposed Prío and his cohort in their aspiration to overthrow the Cuban dictatorship. This chapter will first offer a brief account of the Caribbean Legion up until 1952, establishing the nexus between the different Caribbean politicians who were joined by their anti-dictatorial aims. It will also explain who the main agents of this network were: the men and women who travelled back and forth between the different capitals securing weapons, diplomatic support and acting as couriers for high-profile politicians trying to preserve a veneer of neutrality. This will be followed by an examination of the initial attempts made by deposed president Carlos Prío to retake control of Cuba. From his exile in Miami, Prío designed several schemes to oust Batista. This meant seeking the support of the allied governments of Guatemala and Costa Rica, allied through the contacts forged in the Caribbean Legion network. Additionally, we will delve into Cuba’s political landscape during the early years of Batista’s dictatorship to understand the different political groups and alliances that shaped the anti-dictatorial struggle. Meanwhile, the Caribbean dictators—Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza, Santo Domingo’s Rafael Trujillo, Venezuela’s Marcos Pérez Jiménez and Cuba’s Fulgencio Batista—were not going to sit idly by as the enemies of their regimes plotted their downfalls. The last part of this first chapter turns its attention to the Transnacional de la Mano Dura, the network of counter-revolutionary operations led by the Caribbean dictators to retaliate against conspirators. They gained a major victory in the deposition of Guatemala’s democratic government in 1954, followed by a defeat, a failed attempt to oust the Costa Rican government in 1955. The overall aim of this chapter is to explain what the Caribbean Legion was, how it operated and how it participated in the early years 1 ‘Countries that have recognised the BATISTA regime’, 1 April 1952, US Havana Embassy to State Department, available at www.latinamericanstudies.org.

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of the fight against Batista, from 1952 to 1955. During these years the role of the Guatemalan government in aiding the exiles was key, thus the 1954 coup against it represented a shattering blow to the Legion. However, on 26 July 1953, two events became crucial for the democratic exiles: In Cuba, Fidel Castro’s attack on the Moncada barracks revitalized the struggle against Batista, just as a succession of aborted attacks were tempering opposition to the strongman; and in Costa Rica, the election of notorious Caribbean Legion supporter, José Figueres, gave the Legion an additional patron.

Origins of the Caribbean Legion At the outbreak of World War II, most Circum-Caribbean countries were ruled by dictatorship. From Cuba to Santo Domingo, Guatemala to Venezuela, except for Costa Rica and Colombia, all countries lived under the boot of dictatorship. Modernization processes during the beginning of the century had seen the creation of middle and working classes, pushing for economic and political reforms that would bring about a fairer distribution of resources. However, the turmoil succeeding the Great Depression saw many autocrats rise to power in order to guarantee the stability of the economies.2 Many of these dictators counted on the backing of the United States.3 When the United States joined World War II, Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic followed suit. The anti-dictatorial, anti-fascist rhetoric pushed by the Allies eventually backfired on the dictators of the Caribbean, who saw their populations turn against them as the defeat of the Axis drew closer. In Cuba, former sergeant Batista governed the country constitutionally since 1940, following six years of autocratic rule through puppet presidents. In 1944 he lost the presidential election and for the first time in a decade, Cuba was not ruled by Batista. That same year, a military-civilian junta overthrew the dictator of Guatemala and elections were called. The following year, something similar happened in Venezuela: another military-civilian junta staged a coup and called elections. As Huntington 2 Charles Ameringer, The Democratic Left in Exile: The Antidictatorial Struggle in the Caribbean, 1945–1959 (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1974), 19. 3 Lillian Guerra, Heroes, Martyrs & Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946–1958 (London: Yale University Press, 2018), 49.

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and Ameringer observed, a small democratic opening was sweeping the region.4 The parties undertaking these revolts, as defined by Alan Angell, were nationalist-populist, heirs of the doctrine of Peruvian politician Haya de la Torre.5 Haya had developed a particular ideology in the 1920s called Aprismo (after the initials of his party, Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana, APRA) which incorporated elements of Marxism but adapted them to the history and culture of Latin America.6 The appeal of Aprista parties, unlike the Communists, was not restricted to the working class and advocated for a multi-class society. The emphasis was not on ideological dogma but on a certain tactical ambiguity, designed to incorporate the broadest base possible, especially the middle classes. These parties were anti-capitalist but simultaneously anti-Communist, and internationalist: they shared a continental conscience in opposition to foreign imperialism. They competed with the Communists for the allegiance of labour and relations with the orthodox Left varied from outright enmity to close collaboration.7 In Cuba, Haya helped found Havana’s university in the early 1930s. Students there, at the time opposing the dictatorships of Gerardo Machado (1928–1933) and Fulgencio Batista (1934–1940), founded the Partido Revolucionario Cubano—Auténtico (known as the Auténticos) in 1934, drawing heavily from Haya’s ideas. So much so that the Cuban branch of APRA merged with the Auténticos in 1937.8 Similarly, Venezuelan university students fighting the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez (1908–1935) founded the Acción Democrática (AD) party, using Marxism to arrive at “Venezuelan” solutions.9 Its founder, 4 Ameringer, The Caribbean Legion: Patriots, Politicians and Soldiers of Fortune, 1946–1950 (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1995), 1–5; Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 18–19. 5 Alan Angell, “The Left in Latin America Since c. 1920”, in The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 6: 1930 to the Present, Part 2: Politics and Society, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 165. 6 Ameringer, Democratic Left, 20–21. 7 Angell, ‘The Left in Latin America’, 171. See also, Íñigo García-Bryce, Haya de la Torre and the Pursuit of Power in Twentieth-Century Peru and Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 12–49. 8 García-Bryce, Haya de la Torre, 31. 9 Ameringer, Caribbean Legion, 2–5.

2  A CARIBBEAN COLD WAR, 1947–1955 

21

Rómulo Betancourt, had met Haya during his exile and was influenced by his ideas.10 In the Dominican Republic, the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (PRD) was founded in exile in 1939 along similar lines and in Guatemala, elected president Arévalo followed a similar ideological path, advocating for a “spiritual socialism” that was ideologically elusive.11 As Sznajder and Roniger defined them, these parties were all “creatures of exile”.12 Given the improvements in communications and travel, plus the increasing focus on international cooperation following World War II and their shared ideological base, it is unsurprising to find that these parties were closely knit by alliances, helping each other out in the face of regional dictatorships.13 This help mainly consisted in providing asylum to those exiled by dictators. In 1945, dictatorship remained in Nicaragua, Honduras, and in the Dominican Republic. If the range of cooperation was spilling beyond countries’ borders, so was repression. Given the increasingly transnational character of opposition to dictatorship, repression took the same nature, with dictatorial governments ordering the assassinations of rivals in foreign soil.14 Cuba, Venezuela and Guatemala hosted the exiles of the Nicaraguan, Honduran and Dominican dictatorships, supporting their agenda in a Caribbean, anti-dictatorial crusade. In the light of this, Trujillo decided to play the same game and invited to the Dominican Republic those military officers ousted by the democratic governments of Cuba and Venezuela. As Luis Roniger notes, providing asylum to exiles was not an activity limited to democracies. Several strongmen of the region provided asylum to “forced political migrants” in hopes to boost their international image, or use the exiles against a rival government.15 In 1946, Trujillo sponsored these officers in two attacks: a group of Venezuelan officers tried to stage an unsuccessful revolution in the Táchira region, 10 García-Bryce,

Haya de la Torre, 16–17. Sznajder and Luis Roniger, The Politics of Exile in Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 174; Ameringer, Caribbean Legion, 4. 12 Sznajder and Roniger, Politics of Exile, 156. 13 Ameringer, Democratic Left, 17; Sznajder and Roniger, Politics of Exile, 153. 14 Ibid., 154. 15 Roniger, ‘Political Exile and Democracy’, in Exile & the Politics of Exclusion in the Americas, eds. Roniger, Green and Yankelevich (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2012), 335–336. 11 Mario

22  N. PRADOS ORTIZ DE SOLÓRZANO

and following this fiasco, the Cuban plot by disgruntled officers to stage a coup in Havana’s military headquarters, was discarded.16 The Caribbean had descended into a regional “cold war” of sorts, with two opposed blocs: democracy versus dictatorship. The ­ physical proximity between the countries and the widespread use of banishment as a tool for the exclusion of rivals meant that the Caribbean was swarming with political refugees, courted by a host of governments who could use them for their international agendas. The aims of the exiles aligned with the political considerations of their host countries against the expelling homeland. This triangular interplay, characteristic of the nineteenth-century Latin American exile, was defined as “3-tier exile” by Sznajder and Roniger. However by 1945, this structure incorporated a new angle, the transnational domain. In this 4-tiered exile, the triangular interplay was now structured by transnational support networks, which afforded exiles a greater capacity to act against their home countries.17 In the late 1940s Caribbean, this transnational network of support for the democratic exiles was called the Caribbean Legion. The Caribbean Legion has several cited origins. According to British intelligence, it began in 1944 in Colombia, when former Liberal president Eduardo Santos met with Nicaraguan and Dominican exiles and agreed to harbour and finance them, as a way of countering ­extreme-right political parties in Colombia which were receiving support from Trujillo and Somoza.18 Ameringer, meanwhile, points to 1946 Cuba, when Juan Bosch, the Dominican leader of the exiled PRD party sought the support of the Cuban and Venezuelan governments against Trujillo.19 In both cases, the Legion came into existence through the funding of democratic leaders to Dominican exiles seeking to oust Trujillo. As a network, the Caribbean Legion had no formal structure or hierarchy to speak of, and that makes it hard to pinpoint its exact origin. The exile world was a deeply factional and personalistic realm. Banished politicians demanded allegiance from their followers and organized in clientelistic networks which expected reward upon the success of their 16 Ameringer,

Caribbean Legion, 8. and Roniger, Politics of Exile, 73–76, 152–161. 18 Leslie Boas, ‘The Caribbean Legion’, 2 March 1957, National Archives, London (NA from hereon), file FO371/119802. 19 Ameringer, Caribbean Legion, 10. 17 Sznajder

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patron.20 Personal considerations such as friendship or enmity played a decisive role.21 The Caribbean Legion network was thus organized as a wide network of personal contacts between like-minded politicians with the same ambitious goal in mind: to depose the dictatorships of the region. Since the network was revolutionary, secrecy was imperative and everything possible was done to keep plans hidden. The preservation of communications for future historians was not a pressing concern.22 To begin to grasp the extent of the network, we must briefly dabble in social network analysis, which focuses on connections between individuals and the regularity and patterns of their interactions.23 We can begin to uncover the Caribbean Legion by tracing the movements and contacts of ­anti-dictatorial exiles. The Legion network consisted of a nucleus of patrons who provided the funds for operations. These patrons were presidents in power, with access to the vast logistical, military and financial resources of a head of state, or exiled millionaires, willing to donate considerable sums. These patrons included Carlos Prío, president of Cuba (1948–1952); Rómulo Betancourt, head of the Venezuelan democratic junta (1945–1948); Juan José Arévalo, president of Guatemala (1944–1950), and his political heir, Jacobo Árbenz, president from 1950 to 1954. Additionally, Juan Rodríguez, a wealthy Dominican cattle rancher and retired general went into exile with much of his fortune and agreed to devote it to the liberation of the Dominican Republic in the late 1940s. These patrons were joined by personal acquaintance, common ideological roots and a shared regional objective: the removal of dictatorship in the Caribbean. To achieve this, they relied upon a wide array of agents. Spies, mercenaries, exiled military officers, smugglers or politicians, were hired by the patrons to provide certain resources such as surplus weaponry, military training, manpower; or to perform the task of couriers and diplomats. Communication was both ways however, and sometimes these 20 Sznajder

and Roniger, Politics of Exile, 75. 188. 22 Tanya Harmer and Alberto Martín Álvarez, ‘Introduction: Writing the History of Revolutionary Transnationalism and Militant Networks in the Americas’, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, 28:2 (2017), 8. 23 Brian Reed, ‘A Social Network Approach to Understanding an Insurgency’, Parameters, 37:2 (2007), 19–30; Tanja A. Börzel, ‘Organizing Babylon—On the Different Conceptions of Policy Networks’, Public Administration, 76:2 (1998), 253–273. 21 Ibid.,

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agents could lobby the patrons for support for a specific action they had planned. More often than not, exiles were employed as agents. They weren’t directly linked to the supportive government, allowing the latter to deny any relationship if they got caught, and were obviously extra-motivated to fulfil the task at hand. Furthermore, life in exile was financially strenuous, and many struggled to make ends meet. Exiles needed to earn a livelihood and working as an agent in the Caribbean Legion was a suitable fit.24 This also meant however that political refugees were susceptible to bribes by rivals and thus betrayal and double-crossing were not uncommon.25 Many Spanish Republican veterans of the Civil War, such as Alberto Bayo, a figure that will feature prominently in this book, became entangled in the Caribbean Legion. They had combat experience and valuable skills: they knew how to run training camps, feed an army, design strategy or identify the adequate planes to be purchased for a specific operation. Another type of agent, very common in the Cuban case, were figures associated with the criminal underground. Hired gunmen belonging to action groups were used as liaisons in Caribbean Legion activities. These agents owed their loyalty personally to the politicians that paid them. Some of these gangsters were politically motivated, but more often than not they also sold their services to the highest bidder. These elements blurred the line between political subversion and organized crime: sometimes marijuana or people smugglers were “enlisted” by a patron to smuggle weapons to an ally. These criminals had the expertise and means to move illicit contraband around the Caribbean undetected. The Caribbean Legion network had no permanent feature but a core group of exiled officers with no country to return to. This flexible character meant that the Legion could seemingly disappear without a trace after an operation and quickly regroup for the next one months later; there was no standing army to speak of. The name “Caribbean Legion” was given to this group of officers by the press. Initially, in the Cayo

24 Ameringer,

Democratic Left, 18. first-hand account of these problems is given by exile Alberto Bayo. Bayo to Marcelino Iñurreta, 11 June 1950, Archivo de la Fundación Universitaria Española, Madrid, Spain (FUE from hereon), colección Gobierno de la II República en el Exilio (CGRE from hereon), file MEX 85-3. 25 A

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Confites expedition, the revolutionaries adopted the name “Ejército de Liberación de América”. In the Costa Rican Civil War however, a correspondent from Time magazine dubbed the exile army supporting Figueres as a “Caribbean Legion”. The name became widespread and it was informally adopted by the group of exiled officers. In this book, I will use the name to refer to the revolutionary network which traces its origins to the expeditions of the 1940s. The name is used abundantly in the primary sources, with Batista’s secret services referring multiple times to the “Legión del Caribe” throughout the 1950s as a credible and dangerous threat to their regime. From these materials, there appears to be no doubt that such an entity existed and was plotting against Batista. The dictator himself mentioned the Caribbean Legion several times in his biographical account Cuba Betrayed.26 The network coordinated its first military action in 1947, a seaborne invasion of the Dominican Republic by an army of around 1200 mostly Cuban and Dominican volunteers. The expeditionary army managed to gather an impressive arsenal (including airplanes and warships) thanks to coordination between the Cuban, Venezuelan and Guatemalan governments, bankrolled primarily by Dominican millionaire Juan Rodríguez. This action, known as Cayo Confites, was a failure, due to infighting between different factions and international pressure. However, it was successful in introducing a new generation of Cuban university students to the anti-dictatorial fight. As Lillian Guerra notes, “Cayo Confites proved how easily Cubans could respond to a seemingly ingrained call to defend Caribbean freedom and shared national sovereignty even to the point of arms when the opportunity came knocking”.27 Among this new generation recruited for the expedition was a young Fidel Castro and many from his university cohort that would go on to fight in the Cuban Revolution a decade later.28 In 1948, the network assembled again to support an exiled Costa Rican politician called José Figueres. Figueres successfully lobbied the patrons for support to launch an attack against the Costa Rican government, which was turning increasingly authoritarian. Like his peers,

26 Fulgencio

Batista, Cuba Betrayed (New York: Vantage Press, 1962). Heroes, Martyrs & Political Messiahs, 49. 28 Ameringer, Caribbean Legion, 29–46. 27 Guerra,

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Figueres was at the helm of the Partido de Liberación Nacional (PLN), another Aprista-populist outfit.29 The Caribbean Legion provided material support and the logistics to transport it, as well as the experience of a group of exiled military officers, mainly Nicaraguans, Dominicans and Hondurans. With this help, Figueres proclaimed victory after a short Civil War in the spring of 1948. He went on to rule a provisional junta and call for presidential elections. Following this success, a second attack was made against the Dominican Republic in 1949, which received the name of Luperón. This time the Caribbean Legion network could not count with the support of Venezuela, after the AD party had been overthrown by a military coup in 1948. Guatemala and Cuba bore the brunt of the operations and an international army of Cubans, Dominicans, Nicaraguans, Mexicans, Guatemalans, Hondurans and Spaniards was assembled to attack Santo Domingo. The plan was a three-pronged attack, by sea, land and air. However, due to technical issues, bad weather and bad luck, the aerial invasion, which was supposed to kick-start the attack, failed. Only one plane made it to its destination and the Dominican army shot or arrested all expeditionaries.30 After this failure and as the 1950s dawned, the Caribbean Legion remained undaunted. Its chief of staff, a Dominican called Miguel Ángel Ramírez, proudly declared to the Cuban press that their mission was far from over.31 The Caribbean Legion had become a tool of considerable weight in the region. The AD, PLN and Auténtico parties enjoyed access to a network of experienced mercenaries, weapon smugglers and agents with a background in successfully organizing operations. As the case of Figueres had proven, any aspiring revolutionary in the Caribbean that managed to access the network’s pool of resources stood a good chance of achieving their goals. Ideologically akin projects that managed to secure the blessing of any of the core patrons of the network could count with a web of support and supplies that had been built throughout the years.

29 Angell,

‘Left in Latin America’, 179–180. Caribbean Legion, 95–109. 31 ‘La Legión del Caribe, Baluarte Democrático de América’, Bohemia, 14 August 1949. 30 Ameringer,

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Democracy Is Overthrown in Cuba In 1952, Cuba was preparing for presidential elections. The incumbent Auténtico party looked like it was going to be defeated by their rivals and off-shoot, the Ortodoxo party. Two terms of Auténtico government fraught with corruption scandals had shifted the advantage to the Ortodoxos, a political party that “did not differ ideologically from the Auténticos”, as Bonachea and Valdés remarked. Instead, the Ortodoxos claimed to be the true heirs of the revolutionary spirit that surged Cuba in the short interval between Machado’s dictatorship and Batista’s.32 The Ortodoxos blamed the Auténticos for enriching themselves and neglecting their responsibilities towards the revolutionary change that had been promised since the 1930s.33 Running far behind was a familiar character in Cuban politics: Batista. The former sergeant had led a coup in 1934 against the short-lived revolutionary government that rose after Machado’s downfall. During the 1930s, Batista had ruled behind puppet presidents and in 1940, he had agreed to create a constitution with the participation of all opposition parties, including the Communist Partido Socialista Popular (PSP). In 1940, he was democratically elected president in a 4-year term until his loss to the Auténticos in 1944. It seemed like Batista’s time in Cuban politics had faded as he retired to his estate in Florida. However he returned in 1948, elected to Congress and geared up in 1952 to compete for the presidential election. His chances were slim. Therefore, in early 1952, a group of disgruntled military officers plotted a coup with Batista, who knew he would not win the elections. Many of his supporters and cronies feared displacement “by the new parasitical social class spawned under Auténtico rule”.34 On 10 March, military officers headed by Batista declared total control of the army’s headquarters in Havana. Carlos Prío was caught off-guard and despite calls at Havana University to resist the coup, no weapons ever reached the students and soon, Prío was seeking asylum in 32 Rolando Bonachea and Nelson Valdés, Revolutionary Struggle: The Selected Works of Fidel Castro, Volume 1: 1947–1958 (London: MIT Press, 1972), 28–29. 33 Samuel Farber, Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 48–49. 34 Guerra, Heroes, Martyrs and Messiahs, 78; Bonachea and Valdés, Revolutionary Struggle, 33.

28  N. PRADOS ORTIZ DE SOLÓRZANO

the Mexican embassy. Batista placed himself at the head of the new government and delayed the elections until 1953.35 Prío and the politicians of the Auténtico party were no newcomers to the world of exile and conspiracy. After eight years in power with a proactive international policy cemented in the values of the Caribbean Legion, Auténtico politicians were well-connected in the region.36 They had an ally in Guatemalan president Árbenz and in Costa Rican presidential candidate, José Figueres. Prío had provided vital military support to the Guatemalan government in 1949 when it had to suppress a military revolt. Similarly, when Costa Rica was invaded by Nicaragua in late 1948, Prío ensured that several planes with military cargo were dispatched to help Figueres’ junta resist the assault.37 In the early weeks of Batista’s dictatorship, Guatemala and Costa Rica became the safe havens from which Auténtico exiles could plot. Additionally, these two governments were in need of some regional backing: Guatemala was facing increasing pressure from their own landed elite and their allies in the Dominican, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan dictatorships, as well as in some US companies. Costa Rica on the other hand, was on a hostile stand-off with its neighbour Nicaragua, where the Somoza dynasty fiercely disapproved of José Figueres coming to power. The Somoza’s were also backed by some elements of the Tico elite, and the Dominican and Venezuelan dictatorships. Removing Batista and reinstating their Auténtico allies would strengthen the Guatemalan and Costa Rican positions. The Árbenz government became a close supporter of the Cuban exiles. Weeks after the coup, Cuban agents from the Caribbean Legion were given asylum and work in Guatemala. Eufemio Fernández, Prío’s head of the secret police and a veteran leader of the Legion, was reported in Guatemala City, in charge of a “small intelligence unit reporting to Árbenz through his private secretary”. Fernández had been a military 35 Lars Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 49. See also Guerra, Heroes, Martyrs and Messiahs, 74–85, for perhaps the most in-depth account of how the 10 March coup unfolded. 36 Charles Ameringer, The Cuban Democratic Experience: The Auténtico Years, 1944–1952 (Miami, FL: University Press of Florida, 2000), 90–105. 37 Alberto Bayo, Tempestad en el Caribe (Mexico, 1950), 134–135; Salvador Pallarés to Luis Nicolau D’Olwer, 27 August 1949, FEU, CGRE, SE/1-10.

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leader in the Cayo Confites and Luperón expeditions, and was living with other Cuban exiles linked to the Legion.38 His role in Guatemala was to secure weapons and materiel to organize an invasion of Cuba. To that end, Fernández travelled frequently between Guatemala and Mexico, allegedly on a tab of half a million US dollars given to him by Prío for “revolutionary purposes”.39 Former education minister and Prío’s right-hand man, Aureliano Sánchez Arango, was also using his Guatemalan contacts to further the anti-Batista cause. Sánchez Arango had been involved in the Caribbean Legion and was now putting to use all his contacts in the region to oust the Cuban dictator.40 Over the years he had befriended his Guatemalan counterpart, Raúl Osegueda, who had been recently appointed foreign minister under Árbenz. Already in the summer of 1952, it was reported that “Sánchez Arango flies in his personal plane to Guatemala to consult with Osegueda and has been accompanied by president Prío”.41 Osegueda had pledged his support to the Cuban exiles to take down Batista’s illegitimate government, raising the suspicions of the US air attaché to Guatemala who reported “apparently increasing activity on the part of Cuban exiles in Guatemala and Mexico to bring about a planned revolt against Batista”.42 The Cuban exiles belonging to the Auténtico party had mobilized all the support they could muster against Batista. This support mainly came from Caribbean Legion veterans: exiles and freedom fighters roaming across the few democracies of the region, attracted to Prío’s fortune and promise of work.43 A plan was being devised for the summer 38 Rudolf Schoenfeld, ‘Cuban Ex-Police Chief Eufemio Fernández in Guatemala’, US Embassy in Havana, 14 May 1952, available at www.latinamericanstudies.org. 39 Carlos Cantillo to Ministro de Estado, 5 August 1957, available at www.latinamericanstudies.org; Schoenfeld, ‘Arrival in Guatemala of Eufemio Fernández’, 26 May 1953, available at www.latinamericanstudies.org. 40 CIA, ‘Cuban Counterrevolutionary Handbook’, 10 October 1962, available at https://cuban-exile.com/doc_376-400/doc0378.html. Accessed April 20, 2019. 41 FBI Director to Havana Legation, 17 July 1952, John F. Kennedy Assassination Records (hereafter JFKAR), ­124-10224-10230. 42 Earl T. Crain, ‘Alleged Plans for Revolt Activities Against Batista Regime’, US Havana Embassy, 13 February 1953, available at www.latinamericanstudies.org. 43 Unlike subsequent insurgent movements in the region, during the early 1950s, Communists of the region were pursuing non-revolutionary tactics and condemned all forms of “adventurism”.

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of 1953, just a year into Batista’s rule, to launch an expedition against Cuba reminiscent of the Legion’s operations back in the 1940s. For the preparations, Cuban exiles met and secured the alliance of other exiles. The patrons of the expedition would be Prío providing the funds, and the Árbenz government providing Guatemala as a springboard. Sánchez Arango travelled to Guatemala in the spring of 1953 accompanied by two Dominican leaders of the Legion, Enrique ‘Cotú’ Henríquez and Miguel Ángel Ramírez. Both were veterans of Cayo Confites and Luperón, and Ramírez had also fought in the Costa Rican Civil War. Through Osegueda, they lobbied to meet Árbenz personally.44 Some months earlier, Prío had also met with these two Dominican exiles in Mexico City, where he had pledged three million dollars for the rebellion.45 Thus, since the very beginning, the fight against Batista had a markedly international character. Almost immediately after the coup, a transnational network of anti-dictatorial solidarity was called in for support: the Cuban Revolution began to be shaped by a wider set of political decisions and calculations that transcended the immediate Cuban context. The Cubans were enlisting veteran Dominican freedom fighters to launch an attack with the assistance of the Guatemalan government. The first plan was a cross-party affair. A prestigious university professor close to the Ortodoxos was planning a coup in Havana’s military headquarters. Supporting his scheme, professor Rafael García Bárcena counted with around 3000 student volunteers. García Bárcena was invited to the meeting in Mexico City with the Dominican exiles, where Ramírez, chief of staff of the Legion, promised to provide weapons from the Legion’s arsenal if they were allowed to participate.46 The plan collapsed however when García Bárcena was arrested. Despite this setback, the Auténticos moved on to a second plan: a full-fledged invasion of Cuba designed by Caribbean Legion veterans, launched from Guatemala. As the summer approached, the Cuban press was filled with rumours of pending invasions. Newspapers repeatedly warned of “the complicity of Mexican, Guatemalan and Costa Rican authorities” in a possible triple-pronged attack of Cuba, and Visión

44 Crain, 45 Ibid., 46 Ibid.

‘Weeka 20’, US Embassy in Havana, 15 May 1953. ‘Alleged Plans’.

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31

magazine reported that Guatemala was going to be used as a base.47 With tensions running high, in July 1953, the plan devised by the Caribbean Legion was leaked to the press. Appearing under the headline “The Invasion of Country XXVI: Cuba”, the prestigious weekly magazine Bohemia revealed the contents of the scheme, presented by the Cuban Colonel that had intercepted them. In total, the file comprised around 160 pages, but Cuban intelligence only shared a handful with the press, detailing estimates of the amount of ships, warplanes or weapons needed to undertake the revolution.48 US intelligence was already aware of this plan through their air attaché in Guatemala, and corroborated that the plan was real. Throughout the report, the Caribbean Legion featured prominently as the military organizer.49 Revolutionary exiles and the transnational network that bound them together could be seen at the heart of the anti-Batista struggle. Tensions between the Cuban and Guatemalan governments were at an all-time high. During that summer, the Cuban air force strafed two cargo ships, thinking they were Guatemalan vessels headed for insurrection in Cuba. Three unlucky sailors were injured.50 To reduce tensions, a meeting was arranged between former Guatemalan president Arévalo and Batista. The Cuban ambassador to the United States disclosed to this country’s State Department some details of the meeting: “[The Cuban ambassador] said that Guatemala is the only country in Central America which permits activities to continue within its borders unfriendly to the Cuban government, and in this connection he spoke particularly of Prío and his followers and of the Caribbean Legion”. According to the ambassador, the meeting was a success, and as a result Eufemio Fernández had been discreetly fired from his job in the Guatemalan government and asked to leave the country.51 Luckily for 47 Schoenfeld, ‘Foreign Minister Denies Guatemalan Participation in Cuban Plots’, US Havana Embassy, 22 June 1953, available at www.latinamericanstudies.org. 48 ‘La Invasión del País XXVI: Cuba’, Bohemia, 5 July 1953. 49 Crain, ‘Bohemia Interview with Colonel Tabernilla on “The ‘Invasion of Country XXVI’: Cuba”’, US Havana Embassy, 7 July 1953, available at www.latinamericanstudies. org. 50 Ibid., ‘Weeka 31’, 31 July 1953. 51 Memorandum of conversation between Aurelio Concheso, Cuban ambassador and Charles Burrows, Office of Middle American Affairs, 22 July 1953, available at www.latinamericanstudies.org.

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the Cuban exiles, their Costa Rican ally José Figueres won his ­country’s presidential elections in July 1953 and welcomed Cuba’s political refugees.52

Cuba’s Political Landscape Batista’s coup had landed a severe blow to Cuba’s main parties, the Auténticos and the Ortodoxos, both already fraught with personalism and factionalism. The Auténticos splintered broadly into two factions as a result of the coup d’état. One faction led by Carlos Prío and his followers advocated revolution against the dictator’s regime. This faction moved into exile and recruited the help of the Caribbean Legion as described above. However, another faction refused to engage in insurrection. This faction, led by former president Ramón Grau San Martín (1944–1948), advocated participation in elections under Batista. Batista had announced an election for 1953 and some Auténtico politicians took him up on his word. Grau wanted to reclaim leadership of the Auténtico party and thought he would be able to achieve this by participating in the elections.53 Batista, however, delayed the election date to June 1954, feeding the suspicions of those who believed he would never allow a fair contest.54 Similarly, the Ortodoxo party became fractured by the challenge posed by Batista. Along the same lines, a faction was created advocating revolution while another favoured a negotiated solution and participation in the upcoming elections.55 Raúl Castro described the party at the time like “an army where their leaders had run away”.56 Within the Ortodoxo Youth, a group of students was becoming increasingly determined to overthrow Batista through violence rather than participate in

52 Havana Embassy to State Department 26 January 1954, available at www.latinamericanstudies.org; Carlos Hall, ‘Weeka 33’, Havana Embassy, 18 August 1954, available at www.latinamericanstudies.org. 53 Charles Ameringer, ‘The Auténtico Party and the Political Opposition in Cuba 1952– 1957’, The Hispanic American Historical Review, 65:2 (1985), 332. 54 Bonachea and Valdés, Revolutionary Struggle, 44–45. 55 Ibid., 34–35. 56 Carlos Franqui, Diario de la Revolución Cubana (Barcelona: Ediciones R. Torres, 1976), 66.

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the elections.57 One of these students was Fidel Castro, who had been in the Auténtico Youth until he joined the Ortodoxos at the moment of their foundation.58 The Ortodoxo Youth were breaking apart from their leadership, both with those willing to compromise with the dictatorship, and with those “playing revolutionary”.59 During 1952, an independent student movement began to coalesce around the figures of Fidel Castro and Abel Santamaría, with many of the members coming from the Ortodoxo ranks.60 These young revolutionaries, yet without a name for their organization, were offered to participate in García Bárcena’s coup, described earlier in this chapter. Participation was voted down by the group in a meeting, but nevertheless, García Bárcena commanded a great deal of respect among the students. After the discovery of the plot and his arrest, many of his followers joined Castro’s movement.61 If this group of students wanted to undertake a revolution, they needed weapons. For this, Castro ordered his followers to seek an alliance with Prío’s faction of revolutionary Auténticos.62 As the press covered the many invasion attempts from abroad, it was clear that the exiled Auténticos counted on an impressive arsenal and smuggling network. Castro’s fervent defence of revolutionary tactics only had a match in auténtico Aureliano Sánchez Arango, who was the loudest proponent of insurrection among his party; much more than Prío who seemed to harbour doubts on the best route back to the presidency.63 Regardless of the similarity of their end-goal, these contacts did not make much progress and after some fruitless months, in January 1953, Castro announced to his group that they should take matters into their own hands, independently from any other faction.64 The Castro-Auténtico collaboration would only come about some years later. 57 Guerra,

Heroes, Martyrs and Political Messiahs, 106–107. and Valdés, Revolutionary Struggle, 28. 59 Franqui, Diario, 68. 60 Guerra, Heroes, Martyrs and Political Messiahs, 123. 61 Franqui, Diario, 58–60. 62 Ibid., 67. 63 Bonachea and Valdés, Revolutionary Struggle, 45; A primary source also points to Prío’s indecisiveness and Arango’s fervour: FBI Director to Havana Legation, 17 July 1952, JFKAR, 124-10224-10230. 64 Franqui, Diario, 67. 58 Bonachea

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Castro and his group devised an attack against the Moncada barracks in the city of Santiago, and an outpost in Bayamo, on the eastern side of the island. The movement included over a hundred recruits and on 26 July 1953, struck the first blow to Batista’s regime. The attack was repelled by the army and many of the student combatants were apprehended, tortured and executed. A small band under Castro’s command tried to flee to the nearby mountains of Sierra Maestra, but eventually surrendered to authorities. As Cuban historian Antonio de la Cova wrote, Batista’s fierce repression after the Moncada attacks “allowed Castro to turn a military disaster into a political victory”.65 Castro and his group, now baptized the Movimiento 26 de Julio (M26/7), were propelled into national prominence. The survivors of the attack were imprisoned and sentenced to a fifteen-year term.66 The same day of the Moncada attack, Figueres was elected president of Costa Rica. As 1953 drew to a close, the outlook for 1954 was looking bleak for the Cuban revolutionaries. The failure at Moncada and the inability of the Auténticos to execute their plans meant that many politicians from the opposition were siding with those willing to participate in the 1954 elections. As Guerra noted, “at the dawn of 1954, Cubans perceived themselves on the cusp of a return to constitutional order”.67 Revolutionary activity went quiet as Castro and the survivors of his movement despaired in prison, and the Auténticos in exile were only welcome in Costa Rica. To make matters worse for the would-be revolutionaries, the Transnacional de la Mano Dura was working to bring about the removal of both Figueres and Árbenz, key supporters of the transnational revolutionary alliance. A blow against these friendly governments would have a severe impact on the revolutionaries linked by the Caribbean Legion network.

La Transnacional de La Mano Dura As Figueres took power in Costa Rica in 1953, neighbouring dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza, was already planning his removal. Somoza was allied with Trujillo to contain the democratic surges in the region, so

65 Cited

in Guerra, Heroes, Martyrs and Political Messiahs, 123. and Valdés, Revolutionary Struggle, 50–53, 62. 67 Guerra, Heroes, Martyrs and Political Messiahs, 140. 66 Bonachea

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they exchanged intelligence reports on the Caribbean Legion and kept a close eye on rebellious exiles threatening their regimes.68 This section will focus on the case study of a specific individual, a US mercenary called Edward Browder, to illustrate the composition and nature of the Transnacional. Browder, active in the Caribbean area between 1947 and the 1960s, managed to become involved in an exceptional number of plots directed by the Dominican, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan dictatorships against the democratic governments of the region. Through the story of Browder, we will obtain a clear view of how far these dictatorships collaborated and acted in coordination to sabotage, repress and depose enemy governments, thus reinforcing the notion of a regional “cold war”. Furthermore, if we are looking at a revolutionary movement, it is necessary that we examine its counter-revolutionary counterpart. As John M. Gates remarked, “the ­ study of revolution cannot be separated from the study of counterrevolution, recognizing that the forces opposed to a revolution represent an important aspect of the revolutionary dynamic and form a significant part of its history”.69 Edward Browder lived in Miami in 1945, after he had finished his service in World War II. Enjoying a reputation as a “shady ­promoter and a blowhard who was all conversation and no money”, he became involved in a plot with a group of Venezuelans, funded by the Dominican dictatorship in 1947.70 In 1945 the Venezuelan dictatorship was deposed and Rómulo Betancourt and his AD party rose to power. Former members of military government were banished and they received support from Trujillo, who paid Browder to obtain US weapons for an expedition against Venezuela. Like the Caribbean Legion, its counter-revolutionary opposite employed similarly transnational methods: the Dominican government was paying a US mercenary to support Venezuelan exiles in a proxy war against regional rivals. To cut costs, Browder stole US$20,000 worth of machine guns from an army base in Georgia. In August 1947, the ring was arrested and Browder was 68 Aaron Moulton, ‘Building Their Own Cold War in Their Own Backyard: The Transnational, International Conflicts in the Greater Caribbean Basin, 1944–1954’, Cold War History, 15:2 (2015), 145–147. 69 John M. Gates, ‘Towards a History of Revolution’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 28:3 (1986), 536. 70 Ibid.

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convicted for conspiring. This didn’t deter him. In January 1948, while out on bond, he became involved in another conspiracy.71 That month, Browder arranged the transport of two US planes to Nicaragua. The plan was to fly to Nicaragua, load the planes with shells, bomb Caracas and then return to the United States.72 Simultaneously, a group of around 50 Venezuelans were flown from the Dominican Republic to Nicaragua to form the expedition that was meant to invade after the bombing.73 However Betancourt denounced the plot internationally before it took place and Browder was arrested again and convicted to 3 years of imprisonment.74 These two episodes show the extent to which the Nicaraguan and Dominican dictatorships had established a network of support for exiles willing to depose their enemies. Just as the Caribbean Legion saw wealthy presidents backing rebellious exiles, the Transnacional followed a very similar approach. Trujillo and Somoza were coordinating their support for Venezuelan exiles to launch large-scale military operations. Both dictatorships funded, armed and organized those banished by enemy governments. As mentioned earlier, asylum was not given exclusively by democracies, but by dictatorships too. During the time Browder was imprisoned, the Transnacional scored some important victories. In November 1948, the AD government was overthrown by the military and the banished officers who had been supported by the Nicaraguan and Dominican dictatorships returned to positions of power. They would now repay the favours they had received.75 In 1952 the Cuban democratic government was overthrown by another military officer, Batista. Historian Acosta Matos hinted at collusion between the Cuban officers who staged the coup and Trujillo’s government, based on declarations made by Dominican officials some years 71 ‘Three Booked in Theft of US Machine Guns’, The New York Times, 24 April 1947; ‘2 Maryland Men Charged in Plot to Arm Venezuelans’, The Washington Post, 2 October 1947; ‘Navy Guns Purchased to Halt Dominican Revolt, Court Told’, ibid., 25 November 1947; ‘2 Convicted for Theft of Machineguns’, ibid., 3 December 1947; ‘FBI Accuses Six of Plotting to Bomb Venezuelan Capital’, ibid., 8 February 1948. 72 ‘FBI Accuses Six of Plotting to Bomb Venezuelan Capital’, The Washington Post, 8 February 1948. 73 Moulton, ‘Building Their Own Cold War’, 146. 74 ‘7 Sentenced in Venezuela Bombing Plot’, The Washington Post, 22 August 1948. 75 Moulton, ‘Building Their Own Cold War’, 148–149.

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later.76 Not surprisingly, Trujillo’s government was the first to recognize Batista’s regime and the Dominican dictator was ecstatic about forming a partnership with his Cuban neighbour.77 Relations between Batista and Trujillo however, became more complicated than initially expected, as we will learn in Chapter 2. In 1952, Browder was released and it wasn’t long before he was looking for work again. In that year, he was contacted by an agent of Prío to buy a cargo of weapons. Browder obtained the weapons from Italy but when he delivered them, he was paid half the amount in counterfeit US currency.78 Quite possibly because of this fiasco, in March 1953, Browder sent a letter to Batista offering him to disclose the location of a cache of weapons belonging to Prío in exchange for US$25,000.79 This seemed to be a habitual practice in Browder, to work for one side but try to profit simultaneously from the rival.80 During 1953, Browder became involved in a plot against Figueres, led by Nicaraguan exile and former ally of Figueres, Rosendo Argüello Jr. Argüello had helped Figueres during the Costa Rican Civil War of 1948 and upon success, he was granted command over the guerrillas destined to liberate Nicaragua. However, his mismanagement of the training camps was such that he earned the enmity of many influential Caribbean Legion commanders.81 In late 1948, Figueres asked the Legion to leave and Argüello’s mission was a failure criticized by most. Argüello denounced Figueres as a traitor.82 In 1953 he was planning Figueres’ downfall and for that, he hired Browder. In an example of transnational networking, in November 1953 Browder turned to other exiles from the Transnacional looking for help against Figueres. He found an ally in a group of Guatemalan military officers looking to depose Árbenz, headed by Colonel Castillo Armas. 76 Elíades Acosta Matos, La Telaraña Cubana de Trujillo: Tomo II (Santo Domingo: Archivo General de la Nación, 2012), 573, footnote 1. 77 Ibid., 521–522. 78 Rolf Larson to FBI Director, 25 June 1954, JFKAR, 124-10208-10425. 79 CIA Mexico City to Director, 28 May 1954, JFKAR, 104-10164-10077. 80 Larson to FBI Director, 25 June 1954, JFKAR, 124-10208-10425; FBI to Director, 30 June 1954, JFKAR, 124-10208-10427. 81 Ameringer, The Democratic Left, 82–83. 82 Argüello Jr. wrote a pamphlet titled Quiénes y Cómo Nos Traicionaron (Who Betrayed Us and How) in 1955 against Figueres.

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The Guatemalans had influential backers: the Dominican, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan dictatorships, plus the United States government.83 The deal between Browder and the officers was that the US mercenary would agree to provide eight planes, $850,000 worth of weaponry and participate in the uprising, in exchange for reciprocal help to depose Figueres and generous payment for his services. Additionally, Browder had to supervise the shipment of the weapons from Tangiers, Morocco, to a port in Honduras where the exile army was gathering.84 Preparations for the plot took Browder on trips to Guatemala and Nicaragua during the spring of 1954. His role in the coup was given to him personally by Anastasio Somoza’s son “Tachito”, revealing the deep complicity of actors from the Transnacional in the causes of their allies.85 However Browder suffered a setback just days before the attack on Guatemala was due to start: he was arrested by Mexican police. Browder was interrogated in his cell by Mexican and US officials on his activities but managed knock-out one of the guards and escaped. He immediately fled to Guatemala where he participated in the uprising as a pilot.86 Being involved in the fighting on the side of Castillo Armas didn’t stop Browder from trying to make a profit off the enemy. A truce was arranged in late June, when Árbenz agreed to leave the presidency and negotiations began for a settlement. During these hectic days, Browder wrote a letter to the Guatemalan ambassador in Mexico, loyal to Árbenz, offering his services as a provider of airplanes. As proof of his efficiency, he pointed out that he had been the person who had armed Castillo Armas! Ultimately, Árbenz’s government fell before any reply could reach Browder.87 After successfully deposing Árbenz, Browder and the Transnacional immediately turned, as promised, towards their next objective: Figueres 83 Moulton, ‘Building Their Own Cold War’, 149–151; On the involvement of the Transnacional in Árbenz’s downfall, see Moulton, ‘Counterrevolutionary Friends: Caribbean Basin Dictators and Guatemalan Exiles Against the Guatemalan Revolution, 1945–50’, The Americas, 76:1 (2019), 107–135. 84 CIA Mexico City to Director, 28 October 1954, JFKAR, 104-10164-10075. 85 ‘Tachito’ was the nickname of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Larson to FBI Director, 25 June 1954, JFKAR, 124-10208-10425. 86 Ibid.; US Mexico Legation to FBI Director, 26 November 1954, JFKAR, 124-10208-10434. 87 CIA Mexico City to Director, 28 October 1954, JFKAR, 104-10164-10075.

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in Costa Rica. Browder wrote letters to the dictators of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua requesting further aid for the movement against Figueres.88 The antagonism of the Transnacional towards Figueres had been further fuelled by a recent assassination attempt against Somoza, designed from Costa Rica. The action had been planned since late 1953 and was carried out on 3 April 1954. The plot featured help from all along the Caribbean Legion network: Prío provided funds through his agents Eufemio Fernández and Cotú Henríquez (a veteran of Cayo Confites and Luperón, as well as Prío’s brother-in-law); Figueres offered the staging ground for the smuggling of weapons and assassins into Nicaragua; and Legion veteran, Honduran Jorge Ribas Montes, was second-in-command of the operation. Juan Bosch and Rómulo Betancourt were also involved. The assassins however were surprised by the Nicaraguan National Guard and were either executed or imprisoned. Only one man survived the operation, a Nicaraguan former officer called Manuel Gómez Flores, a colonel in the Caribbean Legion during the Costa Rican Civil War and the Luperón expedition.89 By the fall of 1954, Browder was running short of money. He returned to Mexico to raise more funds and try to earn some for himself, offering Time-Life Magazine a report on the anti-Figueres’ expedition. Its editor, Henry Luce, personally sent a telegram to Browder to arrange sending a photographer to cover the future attack. Before anything could be agreed, Browder was arrested once more by Mexican immigration.90 Once more, this arrest stopped Browder from participating in the action: in January 1955, a column of Costa Rican exiles loyal to Rafael Calderón Guardia, the president Figueres had deposed in the Civil War, and armed by the Nicaraguan, Dominican and Venezuelan dictatorships, crossed into Costa Rica. This time however, the United States government did not side with the Transnacional. US disapproval of the Guatemalan government had intersected with the interests of the dictators, but the downfall of Figueres was not in the interest of the State Department. Therefore, the US government condemned the invasion

88 Ibid. 89 Ameringer, 90 Larson

Democratic Left, 206–208. to FBI Director, 19 January 1955, JFKAR, 124-10208-10438.

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and provided 5 fighter planes to the Costa Rican government for the symbolic price of $1 per plane. Within days, the invasion was repelled.91 Despite the Costa Rican fiasco, the success of the Transnacional in Guatemala delivered a devastating blow to the Caribbean Legion network, with many of its most reputed leaders facing arrest in the hands of the new military dictatorship. Furthermore, an important ally and patron had been lost. Árbenz and his government now joined the group of exiles wandering the streets of Mexico, Miami or San José. The failure to assassinate Somoza in April 1954 and the consequent decimation of the Nicaraguan underground added to the misery of the Legion. As 1954 came to a close, the democratic exiles were in desperate need of fresh ideas and new recruits. In Cuba, Batista’s promised elections arrived in November and he ran unopposed: it was the sham the radical sectors of both opposition parties had predicted. This gave common ground to the revolutionaries of Auténtico and Ortodoxo persuasion and thus, in December 1954, in Mexico City, Eufemio Fernández, Sánchez Arango and other revolutionaries linked to the Auténtico party began meeting with those few veterans of the Moncada attacks that had managed to escape the ordeal. The idea was to form an alliance between the Auténticos and the Moncadistas to fight Batista.92

Conclusion As we have seen in this chapter, Batista’s coup and the resistance that followed took place in an international context of unrest. As the history of the Caribbean Legion shows, the region was in considerable turmoil since the end of World War II, with democratic surges provoking streams of exiles from dictatorial countries. The region had descended into a “Cold War of [its] own”, with a 4-tiered interplay between exiles, their host countries and the expelling dictatorships, structured by a transnational network of support. Exiles represented those democratizing impulses in the Circum-Caribbean, frustrated by repression.

91 Moulton,

‘Building Their Own Cold War’, 151. Subversivas’, 23 December 1954, Archivo del Instituto de Historia de Cuba, Havana, Cuba (AHIC hereon), Colección Marina de Guerra (CMG from hereon), 28/1.3/1.3/1-48. 92 ‘Actividades

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41

In Cuba, Batista’s regime immediately drove any rebellious opposition into exile, reinforcing the transnational dynamic in place: as the Auténticos fled the island, the Caribbean Legion saw a sudden upsurge in vitality, with a new patron funding operations. The personal connections made through this network were immediately called into action, spurring influential members of the Guatemalan and Costa Rican governments to support subversive activities in Cuba. Opposition to Batista was taking place not just in the national domain, but also in the transnational, as exiles from several different nations joined the cause. This international dimension shows that the transnational network represented something more than the will of a handful of individuals: it was a region-wide wave of discontent against dictatorships everywhere, in Cuba and beyond. The anti-Batista revolutionary movement drew from the previously established insurgent network in the region: the Caribbean Legion. In reaction, the dictatorial governments of the Circum-Caribbean worked together to supress these rebellious activities. Cross-border cooperation between the different security agencies became common as plots were devised to assassinate exiles, thwart plans and even overthrow unfriendly governments. While the East–West Cold War flared in Europe and Asia, the Caribbean was living a divide of its own.

CHAPTER 3

The Internationalization of the Cuban Revolution, 1955–1956

Abstract  This chapter re-examines a crucial period of the Cuban Revolution: the year that Fidel Castro and the leadership of his movement spent in exile in Mexico. During this time, Prados shows how Castro, a newcomer to the world of revolution and guerrilla-fighting, tapped into the pre-existing Caribbean Legion network. With the aid from this experienced web of freedom fighters, smugglers, ­ politicians and exiles, Castro managed to successfully build up his organization from exile and invade Cuba. This chapter also draws attention to the ­ counter-revolutionary dynamics of the region, detailing how the relationship between Batista and Rafael Trujillo soured, leading to the ­unexpected support from the latter to Cuban rebels. Keywords  Fidel Castro · Exile · Caribbean Legion · Cuban Revolution · Revolutionary network · Rafael Trujillo In 1955, Mexico City was buzzing with exiles from all over Latin America. In cafés and cantinas, groups of Cubans discussed the politics of their country, while Venezuelans lamented the military ­ coup that had reinstated dictatorship in 1948, close to recently arrived Guatemalans loyal to Jacobo Árbenz’s government. This often contrasted with the more veteran Nicaraguan and Dominican exiles, whose countries had been under dictatorship for almost three decades, or © The Author(s) 2020 N. Prados Ortiz de Solórzano, Cuba in the Caribbean Cold War, St Antony’s Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46363-2_3

43

44  N. PRADOS ORTIZ DE SOLÓRZANO

the Spanish Republicans who had fled General Franco’s regime in the late 1930s.1 Additionally, in the opening years of the decade, two new groups of exiles arrived to Mexico from their Northern neighbour: US Communists and leftists (many of them Hollywood screenwriters, harassed by McCarthy’s witch-hunt) and Puerto Rican nationalists belonging to Pedro Albizu Campos’ Partido Nacionalista de Puerto Rico, facing prosecution after a failed uprising in 1950. Since the nineteenth century, Mexico had established an open policy towards exiles, consistently providing safe haven to political refugees.2 In 1955, Mexico City had thus become a breeding ground for a Caribbean revolution. In July of that year, Fidel Castro took a plane from Cuba to Mexico, joining his brother and a whole generation of exiles in the Mexican capital. Castro had been released from prison earlier in May, after the promulgation of a general amnesty. He had immediately returned to political agitation in Havana, accusing Batista’s regime of multiple abuses, until a prominent oppositionist loyal to the Auténticos, Felipe Agostini, was murdered in cold blood by police. The murder of Agostini, a veteran revolutionary that, like Castro, had participated in the Caribbean Legion operation of Cayo Confites, sent a clear message to all oppositionists on the island. Castro therefore decided that his revolution would be better prepared in exile. In the year and a half that ensued (from July 1955 to November 1956), the M26/7 emerged as a veritable force to challenge Batista. More importantly to this book, during this time the M26/7 became entangled in a larger revolutionary network, encompassing more than just opposition to Batista. In order to strengthen their organization, Castro and his inner group networked with other exiles, specially from Guatemala, Nicaragua and Puerto Rico. He also successfully lobbied the Costa Rican government for support and thus tapped into the Caribbean Legion network. The M26/7 managed to access the Legion thanks to the brokerage of revolutionary Auténtico politicians and became involved in something larger than Cuban politics: the internationalization of the Cuban Revolution had begun. 1 Mario Sznajder and Luis Roniger, The Politics of Exile in Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 156; Sznajder and Roniger, ‘Political Exile in Latin America’, in Exile & The Politics of Exclusion in the Americas, eds. Luis Roniger, James N. Green, and Pablo Yanklevich (Eastbourne: Sussex University Press, 2012), 13. 2 Ibid., 28.

3  THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE CUBAN … 

45

While Castro was in Mexico, on the other side of the Caribbean a twisted dynamic blurred the already intricate web of personal allegiances and strategic pacts criss-crossing the region. An international dispute over the US sugar quota between Cuba and the Dominican Republic pitted two dictators against each other: Rafael Trujillo and Fulgencio Batista. Trujillo devised a convoluted plan against Batista: he would provide training and weapons to Cuban exiles linked to the Auténticos with the hopes that in the ensuing chaos, Cuban generals friendly to the Dominican dictator would replace Batista. The exiles were to be used as a disposable pawn in Trujillo’s larger scheme and the Auténtico exiles wilfully accepted, thinking they could outsmart Trujillo and retain control over any regime change. The ensuing international “chess game” saw the birth of an unlikely alliance: Prío and many of his Auténtico lieutenants, many of them Caribbean Legion veterans, entered a partnership with their main nemesis, Trujillo. This collaboration turned into a triangle when Castro’s M26/7 in turn entered an uneasy alliance with the Auténticos, and thus became a beneficiary of Trujillo’s aid. The ­anti-Batista fight had become a truly transnational affair, where foreign involvement was not exclusively the domain of US agencies, but also from neighbouring governments such as the Dominican Republic or Costa Rica. In what follows, this chapter will first examine Fidel Castro’s exile in Mexico, while charting the networking and collaborations between the M26/7 and other exiled movements, under the auspice of the Auténtico party. One of the aims of this chapter is to add to recent ­ scholarly work, such as that by Sweig, which details ways in which “ ­ competing” revolutionary organizations collaborated and reached pragmatic ­ understandings to take advantage of their respective strengths.3 The ­ other aim is to show how the resulting alliance put the M26/7 in contact with a wider Latin American phenomenon, the Caribbean Legion’s anti-dictatorial struggle, and enmeshed the Cuban Revolution into a broader regional confrontation. Through the revolutionary network, the Cuban Revolution became interdependent and reliant on other revolutionary movements, such as the Nicaraguan, Dominican or Guatemalan. This will provide a new picture of Fidel Castro’s Mexican exile as a fundamental stage for the development of the M26/7. As we will see, networking with fellow exiles was vital for this movement. This reinforces 3 Julia Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 15–16, 18–20.

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one of the main arguments of this book: Cuban revolutionaries and the M26/7 in particular tapped into a pre-existing revolutionary network to wage war against Batista. The second part of this chapter will analyse the position of Batista within the Transnacional de la Mano Dura and his troubled relationship with Trujillo. Batista was torn between seeking the legitimacy of democracy through an electoral victory, while refusing to submit himself to the possibility of losing power. This drove him to reject and embrace Trujillo, depending on his own domestic problems. More importantly, the dispute over sugar quotas and cracks within the Cuban military establishment further aggravated relations between both tyrants. Trujillo was courting Cuban top generals who wanted Batista to drop the democratic pretence, and Batista increasingly faced the possibility of a coup from within the armed forces. Ultimately, the launch of a guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra by Castro’s rebels brought the Trujillo-Batista enmity to an end, as both dictators joined efforts to repress their rivals. The purpose of this apparent diversion from the Caribbean Legion is twofold. On the one hand, this explanation is needed to understand the paradoxical and counter-intuitive alliance between Auténtico exiles linked to the Caribbean Legion and Rafael Trujillo, as well as the equally complex participation of the M26/7 in this pact. On the other hand, this section will serve to expand on the idea of a Caribbean Cold War, showing the joint repression of exiles exercised by the security branches of the Cuban and Dominican dictatorships. As mentioned in Chapter 1, a thorough examination of a revolutionary movement cannot be detached from its counter-revolutionary opposite.

The M26/7 in Exile: Tapping into the Caribbean Legion Upon his arrival in Mexico City in July 1955, Fidel Castro sent a letter to a colleague from the M26/7 stating the priorities of the movement in exile: “we outlined a working plan which covers from getting Cuban news at a short notice, to the way of contacting influential personalities in this country whose friendship can be of use”.4 Networking was at the

4 Cited in Heberto Norman Acosta, La Palabra Empeñada (Havana: Oficina de Publicaciones del Consejo de Estado, 2005), vol. 1, 157.

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47

top of Castro’s priorities if he wanted to build a capable organization for waging war against Batista. After the failed Moncada attack, a stint in prison, and exile, Castro might have had “will and enthusiasm”, but his M26/7, according to US embassy analysts, lacked “the means for successful revolution”.5 By November 1956, however, the M26/7 had managed to purchase a yacht for an expedition, arm and equip a contingent of 82 recruits and provide training, shelter and food to over 100 movement members that had flocked to Mexico for instruction. Navigating the complex world of exiled politics in Mexico City was not easy for a newcomer. Shortly after arriving, Castro was furious when he learnt that one of the leaders of the Ortodoxo revolutionary faction in exile, his own party, had sold a shipment of weapons to followers of Árbenz, planning a revolution in Guatemala. The sale had been brokered by Auténtico revolutionary Eufemio Fernández.6 If Castro wanted to participate in this network of weapon-smuggling and logistical support, he needed an introduction from an insider. Luckily for him, the Auténtico party was going through a crisis. As explained in the previous chapter, the Auténticos were divided into two factions, one advocating revolution headed by Prío and his right-hand men, former education minister Aureliano Sánchez Arango and former head of secret police Eufemio Fernández; and the n ­ on-revolutionary faction willing to reach a political understanding with Batista, headed by former president Ramón Grau San Martín. In July 1955 it was being rumoured that Prío was willing to abandon his revolutionary stance and return to Cuba for peaceful negotiations with Batista. Members of the Auténtico revolutionary faction saw Prío’s move as treason. One former navy officer from this faction “violently expressed that if Prío was returning to Cuba to do politics of any kind, he would join the Ortodoxo revolutionary faction”.7 Castro was quick to pick up on this schism and, in line with his networking objective, decided to incorporate as many Auténticos as possible into his movement. The Auténtico revolutionary faction, best represented in the organization named Triple A headed by Sánchez Arango, held a valuable asset: a list of contacts that spanned almost all 5 Havana

Embassy, ‘Weeka 5’, 31 January 1956, available at latinamericanstudies.org. Cartaya, 29 July 1955, Archivo del Instituto de Historia de Cuba, Havana, Cuba (AHIC hereon), Colección Marina de Guerra (CMG from hereon), 28/1.31.5/1-186. 7 Ibid. This officer ended up joining Castro’s expedition. 6 Nicolás

48  N. PRADOS ORTIZ DE SOLÓRZANO

revolutionaries in the Caribbean basin. Men like Sánchez Arango or Eufemio Fernández were key figures in the Caribbean Legion network and thus enjoyed a prominent position within what Tad Szulc called “the Latin American revolutionary grapevine”.8 An alliance between the M26/7 and the Triple A would give Castro’s group access to a pool of resources beyond their means. The Triple A’s smuggling network involved a web of personal allegiances and friendships that spanned several nationalities and countries. Batista’s spies in Mexico managed to unearth one particular smuggling route that painted a picture of deep transnational cooperation: weapons were purchased in Mexico City through a company owned by two prominent Mexican generals from the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). The weapons were then taken by train to Campeche in the Yucatán peninsula, where a local smuggler transported them to the hacienda of a Mexican businessman friends with Prío. In turn, this hacendado moved the cargo to the port of Chetumal, where the network counted on three small airplanes and two schooners: one with a Costa Rican licence and the other with a Haitian one. Both schooners were owned by two Nicaraguan brothers, and the planes were piloted by a Nicaraguan and a Mexican. Aiding in the operation was a Guatemalan woman nicknamed “La Tigresa” (the tigress) married to a former Arbenzista mayor, and operated from an Indian village in the south of Belize. Working with her from Livingstone, Guatemala, was a former military officer.9 Instead of heading straight to Cuba and thus alerting the suspicions of both Mexican and Cuban authorities, the smugglers took a diversion to Belize and Guatemala before heading north to the island of Hispaniola and then finally, into Cuba. As illustrated by this account, such route to Cuba involved agents of five different nationalities, working across four countries. Similarly, arrests along other smuggling routes shed light on the international revolution being carried out. On one occasion, a seizure prompted by a denunciation from the Cuban secret service to Mexican authorities resulted in the arrest of 12 Cubans, 4 Venezuelans and a Nicaraguan citizen carrying weapons aboard a ship.10

8 Tad

Szulc, Fidel: A Critical Portrait (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 326. Estevez Maymir, 21 September 1956, AHIC, colección Ejército (CE from hereon), 24/3.80/1.1/1-228. 10 Ibid., 7 December 1956, 24/3.20/1.1/1-223. 9 Juan

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49

The young M26/7 in exile could only dream of building a network as intricate as the one the Triple A enjoyed. Castro immediately got to work to lure these disaffected revolutionary Auténticos onto his side. In a letter to a fellow movement leader, Castro instructed him “to work with the utmost skill” now that the “sincerely revolutionary Auténtico group will no doubt rebel against” Prío’s decision to return to Cuba.11 In August 1955, Prío returned to Cuba and publicly renounced revolution as a means of securing power. “The moment is ours!” Castro responded as he wrote to the M26/7 national directorate: “You will have to be skilful and intelligent in recruiting without exceptions any unhappy elements with weapons”.12 Through the course of 1955, he met with leaders from the Triple A. In August, he visited Horacio Ornes (a Dominican leader of the Caribbean Legion who had participated in Cayo Confites, Costa Rica and Luperón), and asked him for an introduction to Eufemio Fernández, with whom he wanted to reach an understanding.13 In September, Paco Cairol and Cándido de la Torre, agents of Sánchez Arango travelled to Mexico to meet Castro.14 A few weeks later, Justo Carrillo, another prominent member of the Triple A, met with Castro in the scenic ruins of Chichen Itzá.15 An agreement was reached between both groups: the M26/7 had just gained access to the Caribbean Legion network.16 Through this cooperation with the revolutionary Auténticos, Fidel Castro met Salvador Cancio Peña, a Cuban cartoonist and satirist that had been living in exile since Batista’s coup. Cancio Peña had produced several anti-Batista pamphlets from exile and was being funded by both Prío and Ortodoxo revolutionaries. He worked from Miami until he was discovered stashing 15 rifles in his home and fled to Mexico in 1955.17 There, he befriended Castro and introduced him to a friend who could be useful to Castro’s cause: retired general and prominent Caribbean 11 Acosta,

La Palabra Empeñada, vol. 1, 166. 199. 13 Horacio Ornes to Eufemio Fernández, 29 August 1955, digital scan sent to me by Dr. Aaron Moulton. 14 Acosta, La Palabra Empeñada, vol. 1, 241; vol. 2, 46. 15 Ibid., vol. 1, 233, 275. 16 CIA, ‘Cuban Counterrevolutionary Handbook’, 10 October 1962. 17 ‘Antecedentes Extractados de Salvador Cancio Peña’, 21 January 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/8.1/1-134. 12 Ibid.,

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Legionnaire Alberto Bayo.18 Bayo was a Spanish career officer, having fought in Morocco during the 1920s, and later in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Republican forces. In 1939 he fled Spain and arrived in the Caribbean as an exile, where by 1948 he was entangled with the Caribbean Legion as an instructor for anti-Somoza guerrillas in Costa Rica. He additionally participated in the 1949 Luperón affair and had since worked multiple jobs, barely making a living while keeping contact with several exiles from different nationalities in the hopes of finding a new revolutionary project.19 After a conversation with Castro, Bayo was recruited as the military instructor of the group. In exile, the M26/7 leadership actively networked with exiles from multiple nationalities to further their cause. Melba Hernández, a leader of the M26/7, described in a letter to her mother how they had been recently meeting and mixing with other exiles, such as the Venezuelan former president Rómulo Gallegos.20 In Mexico City’s Ateneo Español (an organization of the Spanish Republican exiles) Castro gave speeches to gatherings of exiles from all over the Spanish-speaking world. Reminiscing on the event, Puerto Rican politician Juan Juarbe Juarbe recalled that the audience was composed of Guatemalan, Salvadorian, Peruvian, Venezuelan, Puerto Rican and Dominican exiles. “They all see the 26th of July as their date too”, Castro summed in a letter.21 In the Autumn of 1955, Castro embarked on a fundraising tour of the United States. This tour catered particularly to the Cuban émigrés, but also counted on the help of other exiles: the Tampa, Florida, branch of the M26/7, “second in stature in the United States” according to the FBI, was organized thanks to Bayo’s recommendation letter sent to prominent Spanish Republican exiles living in Florida. According to an FBI informant, the Tampa branch had become so successful due to “the large Cuban and inter-related Spanish–Latin colony” and to the pressure exerted upon ­ it “by the powerful Spanish Commies of Tampa—the old timers of the Spanish Civil War”: Alberto Bayo’s comrades in arms.22 Similarly, Castro’s 18 Alberto Bayo, Mi Aporte a la Revolución Cubana (Havana: Imprenta Ejército Rebelde, 1960), 20. 19 See Bayo, Tempestad en el Caribe (Mexico, 1950). 20 Acosta, La Palabra Empeñada, vol. 1, 300. 21 Ibid., 182. 22 ‘July 26 Movement, Tampa, Florida’, 5 December 1960, FBI online-archive, available at https://vault.fbi.gov/fidel-castro/fidel-castro-Part-05-of-05/view. Accessed April 20, 2019.

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first speech in New York was organized and hosted by the Dominican exile community, who ceded the Casa Dominicana in Broadway for the event.23 Besides touring the United States, during 1955 and 1956, Castro established partnerships between the M26/7 and three key groups entwined by the Caribbean Legion network: the Guatemalan exiles loyal to Árbenz, Nicaraguan anti-Somoza exiles and the Costa Rican government under Caribbean Legion patron José Figueres. Other key figures soon joined this network. In the final months of 1953, Ernesto Guevara was travelling across the Americas after finishing his studies in his native Argentina. By December, Guevara was in San José, Costa Rica, where Figueres had attained power a few months earlier.24 Here Guevara met for the first time members of the Caribbean Legion: he dined several times with Juan Bosch and Rómulo Betancourt whom he knew through a friendship with Bosch’s son. Years later, Bosch wrote on the impact that this young Argentinian doctor had had on him, and the multiple meetings they had while Guevara passed through the country.25 By January 1954, Guevara arrived to Guatemala and he was impressed by the efforts of Árbenz and Arévalo’s governments to reform the country while confronting US business interests and their own military and terrateniente establishments. Living in Guatemala City, Guevara met his future wife Hilda Gadea, a Peruvian exiled activist from Haya de la Torre’s APRA party. Through Gadea, he became embedded in the exile community of Guatemala, befriending Ñico López, a Cuban veteran of the Moncada attack; Elena Leiva de Holst, a Honduran exile who headed the Alianza de Mujeres organization and had visited the Soviet Union; and Edelberto Torres, a prestigious Nicaraguan writer teaching at a local university as well as his son Edelberto Torres Jr.26 The senior Edelberto had played an active role

23 Acosta,

La Palabra Empeñada, vol. 1, 303. Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove Press, 2010), 318–321. 25 ‘Mis Recuerdos de Che Guevara por Juan Bosch’, El Día, 9 October 2017, available at https://eldia.com.do/mis-recuerdos-de-che-guevara-articulo-escrito-por-juan-bosch/. Accessed April 20, 2019. 26 Charles Ameringer, The Democratic Left in Exile: The Antidictatorial Struggle in the Caribbean, 1945–1959 (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1974), 163; Acosta, Palabra Empeñada, vol. 1, 14. 24 Jon

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in the Caribbean Legion in the past years: he had introduced Figueres to Juan José Arévalo back in 1948 and had actively conspired against Somoza from Costa Rica. The junior Edelberto was roughly Ernesto Guevara’s age and was already an established leader of Guatemalan Communist Youth.27 The uprising against Árbenz in June 1954 left Guevara “understandably bitter”, and it wasn’t until September that he was able to leave the country and move to Mexico.28 Guevara met Castro in Mexico over the summer of 1955 and quickly joined the movement, strengthening the ties of the M26/7 to the Guatemalan exile community in Mexico City. Many of Árbenz’s followers had been granted asylum in the capital and were planning on retaking control of their homeland. Both the Cubans and Guatemalans joined forces several times: as mentioned above, the Guatemalan exiles bought a cargo of weapons from Ortodoxo revolutionaries through Eufemio Fernández, who had worked closely for the Árbenz government. This partnership between the Guatemalans and the different Cuban factions aroused suspicions among the members of the Transnacional de la Mano Dura. In July 1955 deposed Costa Rican president and Somozaally, Rafael Calderón Guardia, was warning Cuban intelligence that Guatemalan exiles where gathering in the Yucatán peninsula, looking to jointly launch an expedition against Cuba.29 Indeed, former Árbenz officials were very close to the Cuban exiles. In a report from Batista’s intelligence service, the military attaché in Mexico City reported that the former Guatemalan ambassador to Cuba, Colonel García Montenegro was in close contact with Castro and his group: “he meets with these elements on account of his own conspiracy against Guatemala”.30 Additionally, García Montenegro served as a courier for important transactions along the Caribbean Legion: in November 1956 the colonel travelled to Cuba to pick up money coming from Puerto Rico. The sender of this money was former Venezuelan president Betancourt, and the funds were to be distributed among the Cuban revolutionary exiles in Mexico.31

27 Ameringer,

Democratic Left, 201. Che, 393, 411–412. 29 Estevez to Ayudante General, 30 July 1955, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/1.1/1-222. 30 Ibid., 6 September 1956. 31 Ibid., 12 November 1956. 28 Anderson,

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The full extent of the Cuban–Guatemalan alliance was revealed when a safe house pertaining to the M26/7 in Mexico City was raided and a large cache of weapons seized. When interrogated, the owner of the house confessed that these weapons belonged to Fidel Castro, Eufemio Fernández and Jorge Torriello, a Guatemalan politician who had been part of Guatemala’s first democratic junta with Árbenz in 1944.32 Torriello and the M26/7 worked in close partnership, and when Castro finally boarded his group on an overcrowded yacht to Cuba, he handed the Guatemalan exiles all the weapons he could not carry with him.33 The other group that worked in partnership with the M26/7 were the Nicaraguan anti-Somoza exiles. Living in Mexico at the time were several key figures of the anti-Somoza movement such as Juan José Meza and colonel Manuel Gómez Flores.34 Alberto Bayo was acquainted with them: the former had hired him back in 1948 to train the Nicaraguan rebels in Costa Rica, and the latter had been a fellow instructor at the Costa Rican training camps and a participant of the Luperón invasion of 1949.35 Additionally, Gómez Flores had been the sole survivor of the foiled assassination attempt against Somoza in 1954 with help from the Caribbean Legion network, as explained in the previous chapter. In June 1956, Fidel Castro’s group in Mexico City was briefly arrested by Mexican police. In the raid, Mexican authorities confiscated documentation which revealed that the M26/7 had “links with exiled politicians of different nationalities living in Mexico, mainly with the Nicaraguans headed by Manuel Gómez Flores”. Additionally, the police report highlighted the “great friendship” between members of the M26/7, Gómez Flores and Salvador Cancio Peña.36 Events in Nicaragua were unfolding fast: in September 1956 Anastasio Somoza had been assassinated, and the ensuing turmoil prompted revolutionary preparations against the regime. Batista’s spies in Mexico became anxious, reporting on Nicaraguan security as if it was their own: “my constant worry has augmented due to the recent events in Nicaragua”, wrote the Cuban military attaché to Mexico a few days 32 Ibid.,

17 November 1956. 7 December 1956. 34 ‘Nicaraguan Sees Exiles Uniting’, The New York Times, 28 September 1956. 35 Bayo, Tempestad, 191. 36 Leandro Castillo Venegas, 26 June 1956, Archivo del Ministerio de Exteriores, Havana, Cuba (MINREX hereon), no file number. 33 Ibid.,

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after the assassination.37 “We must not ignore what happened to general Somoza” he warned again some weeks later.38 He had reasons to be concerned, as he recently witnessed the collaboration between Cuban and Nicaraguan exiles. The latter were in communication with Castro and the attaché feared such partnership: “they’re preparing to strike against Cuba and Nicaragua; possibly Nicaragua will go first as they think it’s weaker”.39 To make matters worse, a few weeks after Somoza’s murder, Castro and Cancio Peña travelled to Costa Rica to meet Gómez Flores, where he was training a Nicaraguan guerrilla.40 In the end, the Cuban–Nicaraguan invasion against Somoza did not materialize in 1956: it had to wait until June 1959 when an outfit of Nicaraguan exiles was trained and equipped by Castro’s revolutionary government to attack the Somozas. The third main supporter of the M26/7 in exile was Caribbean Legion patron José Figueres, elected president of Costa Rica in 1953. Bayo was a fervent admirer of Figueres, whom he considered a champion of the oppressed and exiled from any part of the Hispanic world. “I am bound to José Figueres by ties of admiration and personal gratitude”, he wrote in 1950, “regardless of political differences”, as Figueres was more conservative than many in the Legion network.41 As soon as he won the election, Figueres granted asylum to many Cubans fleeing Batista’s persecution. In Mexico City, Castro became acquainted with Luis Alberto Monge, a Costa Rican and head of the Inter-American Regional Labour Organization (ORIT), a continental organization considered to be “one of the pillars of the Democratic Left”.42 Monge’s friendship was valuable, given that he was a well-connected Tico and his brother was the Costa Rican consul to Mexico. Using ORIT money, Monge paid for the printing of Cancio Peña’s anti-Batista leaflets in Mexico.43 In June 1956 Castro travelled to Costa Rica to meet with government officials, receptive to his plans and, after four days of meetings and 37 Estevez, 38 Ibid.,

23 September 1956, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/1.1/1-222. 22 October 1956.

39 Ibid. 40 Esteban M. Beruvides, Cuba: Archivos Confidenciales, vol. 3 (Miami, FL: Colonial Press International, 2001), 15. 41 Bayo, Tempestad, 88. 42 Szulc, Fidel, 355. 43 Estevez, 4 December 1956, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/1.1/1-222.

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55

negotiations, he secured the support of the government.44 Later that summer Castro showed his passport to an American journalist and the writer noted that it showed “several trips between Mexico and Costa Rica, and [Castro] indicated that he planned to go [again] to Costa Rica shortly”.45 Indeed something was afoot in the Cuban-Tico connection, as Batista’s spies indicated that Figueres had joined the conspiracy and was “amassing semi-heavy weapons” in the Caribbean port of Limón to ship to Cuba.46 Additionally, Figueres visited Mexico in September 1956 and the Cuban military attaché to Mexico feared that he was in town to meet with Castro, Sánchez Arango and Eufemio Fernández.47 Facing these reports, Batista decided to dispatch an additional military attaché to Central America, based in Costa Rica. This new position would be responsible for reporting on activities in Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Panama, alleviating the workload of the attaché to Mexico who was previously expected to cover the whole isthmus. Describing the move in a dispatch to the Department of State, the US embassy in Havana highlighted the main reason behind it: “it has been reported several times that Figueres, Prío and Fidel Castro are working closely together against Batista. The location of a loyal colonel in Costa Rica will provide more first-hand information of anti-Batista activities”.48 The alliance with Figueres’ government bore fruit. In October 1956, Batista’s spies reported that “approximately 400 Cubans” were receiving training in Figueres’ personal finca.49 The figure was as exaggeration but the report had some truth to it: a handful of M26/7 members exiled in San José were receiving training by members of the Costa Rican National Guard in haciendas outside the capital. Every week, the Cuban exiles travelled to a different estate where instructors taught them how to use weapons and grenades. Additionally, they received tactical classes on how to assault an enemy position.50 Eventually this small group linked up 44 Acosta,

Palabra Empeñada, vol. 2, 54. Embassy to State Department, ‘Weeka 32’, 8 August 1956, available at latinamericanstudies.org. 46 Estevez, 19 September 1956, AHIC, CE, ­24/3.20/1.1/1-222. 47 Ibid., 8 September 1956, 9 September 1956. 48 Havana Embassy to State Department, ‘Weeka 39’, 26 September 1956, available at latinamericanstudies.org. 49 Estevez, 22 October 1956, AHIC colección Ejército, 24/3.20/1.1/1-222. 50 Acosta, Palabra Empeñada, vol. 2, 243. 45 Havana

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with the rest of the movement in Mexico and sailed on the expedition to Cuba in November 1956. In sum, during their time in Mexico City, members of the M26/7 became fully embedded in the Caribbean Legion network of transnational revolutionary activity. Through their tactical alliance with disaffected Auténticos, Castro’s group managed to tap into a pool of resources previously unavailable to them. It was a move not too dissimilar from the way Figueres became involved in the Legion back in 1948: accessing the network through the introduction of a senior figure. This period in exile internationalized the Cuban revolutionary movement, turning the struggle from a national affair to a truly Caribbean revolution with far-reaching consequences. As we have seen, networking with fellow exiles was key for the development of the M26/7. The Cubans were able to build on a foundation already provided by the Caribbean Legion network, which in turn shaped the anti-Batista struggle and its participants: the incipient Cuban Revolution adopted the pro-democratic and anti-dictatorial character of the Legion.

The Complicated Batista–Trujillo Relationship In 1956, Spanish exile Jesús de Galíndez described the Caribbean as a place where “a crisscross of interests and forces” had been created, one “in which exiles seek to attack the dictatorships of their respective countries, and often dictators and democracies help each against the other. The Dominican Republic is in the centre of that volcano”.51 In order to understand this complicated “crisscross of interests and forces”, we must turn to the Caribbean Legion’s counterpart. By understanding the dynamics involving the Transnacional de la Mano Dura, we will be able to comprehend the apparently contradictory pact between Caribbean Legion-linked Auténtico exiles and members of the M26/7 with the regime of Rafael Trujillo. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Trujillo and his government in the Dominican Republic led the Transnacional de la Mano Dura, the alliance between Trujillo, the Somoza dynasty of Nicaragua and the ­counter-revolutionary exiles of the region. By the time of Batista’s coup in 1952, the group had added the Venezuelan dictatorship of Pérez

51 Jesús

de Galíndez, La Era de Trujillo (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Marimar, 1962), 317.

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Jiménez to their ranks and Trujillo was ecstatic to hear about Batista’s ousting of his enemies, the Cuban Auténtico party. Immediately after Batista’s coup, Trujillo threw the full weight of his regime behind Batista’s new government, and sought to ally with Cuba’s new strongman.52 The two regimes worked very close on security matters: both Trujillo and Batista feared their opposition in exile and were happy to help each other with their respective enemies. For example, in the ensuing raids after the Moncada attacks, Dominican exile Juan Bosch was arrested after his name was suggested by a Dominican official to Cuban intelligence.53 In a meeting between the Cuban defence minister and the Dominican ambassador, the Cuban defence minister stated this clearly by saying that “Batista’s enemies have allied with the enemies of the Dominican government” and thus they wanted to establish a “mutual defence plan against our common enemies”.54 As of 1953, both governments began their defensive alliance. Such cooperation was further secured by Trujillo’s strategy of courting prominent Cuban generals, gathering support of the top brass through all types of courtesies and gifts. So much so that the Dominican naval attaché to Cuba counted on a special budget for “atenciones varias”, meant to be used in dinners and receptions with the Cuban military establishment.55 As a result of this charm offensive, it was reported that the Dominican government had managed to secure a “beach-head” within the Cuban military.56 Batista’s relations with Trujillo, however, were not free of problems. Many Cuban officials seemed to show more loyalty to the Dominican Generalissimo than to Batista. This was due to a perceived weakness of Batista within the Cuban military, where he faced significant hostility from a sector of the army nicknamed the “tanquistas”. Despite having seized power through an illegal coup, Batista dreamt of popular legitimacy, and this often drove him to making some paradoxical apertures of his regime, such as announcing elections only to sabotage them later, or

52 Eliades Acosta Matos, La Telaraña Cubana de Trujillo (Santo Domingo: Archivo General de la Nación, 2012), vol. 2, 521–522. 53 Ibid., 526. 54 Ibid., 534–535. 55 Ibid., 533. 56 Wm. Affeld, Jr to State Department, ‘Dominican-Cuban Relations’, 14 February 1956, available at latinamericanstudies.org.

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lift and impose censorship irregularly.57 Batista’s government was divided between the civilians, seeking to liberalize the regime to some degree, and the tanquistas, admirers of Trujillo’s 25-year unbreakable rule of the Dominican Republic, pushing to end the democratic charade and step up repression. Batista sought to play each faction against the other in an uneasy balance.58 Despite the friendly start, by 1955 relations between both rulers began to deteriorate. Several factors pitted Trujillo against his supposed Cuban ally. Firstly, the Cuban press launched an attack against Trujillo’s regime when the latter was about to celebrate the anniversary of his rule. The influential weekly Bohemia led the offensive against the Dominican dictator and Trujillo was outraged at Batista’s permissiveness. Additionally, rumours and reports of revolutionary activity in the Caribbean alarmed Trujillo, who feared a repetition of the Cayo Confites or Luperón invasions. But perhaps more importantly, Trujillo profoundly resented Cuba’s preferential position in the United States’ sugar market. 1955 was marked in the Dominican calendar as the 25th anniversary of Trujillo’s ascendancy to power, making him the longest-ruling strong man of the region. However the celebratory ceremonies were tarnished by an international press campaign against his rule. Cuban weekly Bohemia enjoyed continent-wide circulation and had an ample readership in Latin America, making it a very influential opinion-maker. In the anniversary of trujillismo, this leading editorial voice directed its criticism towards the Dominican dictator. Reporting on the special fair set to commemorate the date, Bohemia headlined “The FAIR of TERROR and DEATH”.59 These attacks over such a special year angered Trujillo, who demanded Batista to put an end to the magazine’s circulation, like Pérez Jiménez had done in Venezuela. Batista’s inability or unwillingness to confront Bohemia encouraged several other newspapers to join the anti-Trujillista chorus. The Dominican dictator was losing patience with his Caribbean neighbour.60 Constant reports of possible revolutionary activity had Trujillo in a permanent state of unease. Particularly worrying were news of his old

57 Rolando E. Bonachea and Nelson P. Valdés, Revolutionary Struggle: The Selected Works of Fidel Castro, volume 1: 1947–1958 (London: The MIT Press, 1972), 61. 58 Ibid., 62. 59 ‘La Feria del Terror y de la Muerte’, Bohemia, 1 January 1956. 60 Acosta Matos, Telaraña Cubana, vol. 2, 562.

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foes Carlos Prío, Jacobo Árbenz, Rómulo Betancourt and Eufemio Fernández meeting in Mexico City during the spring of 1955.61 To make matters worse, it was reported that Betancourt had created an exile junta, tasked with bringing down the dictatorships of the Caribbean. This junta was allegedly composed by the foremost ­anti-Trujillistas of the region, the aforementioned Prío, Árbenz, Betancourt, plus Costa Rican Figueres acting as chief of the junta, and Lázaro Cárdenas and Vicente Lombardo Toledano as the Mexican allies of the group.62 The possibility of a new expedition against Santo Domingo became increasingly likely in the mind of Trujillo, sending him into a panic where his distrust towards allies like Batista became exacerbated.63 An equally important factor in the deterioration of relations was sugar. In the late 1940s, Trujillo had decided to expand his personal fortune into the sugar business. He began to purchase and construct sugar mills in the country to the point that, by the mid 1950s, he was the largest producer in the Dominican Republic.64 The most profitable destination for this commodity was the United States but unfortunately for the dictator, the United States bought most of their sugar from Cuba, giving the Dominican Republic a meagre share of their quota. Thus by 1954, Trujillo embarked on a mission to reduce Cuba’s quota to his advantage.65 As the United States debated drawing up a new quota agreement with their suppliers in spring 1955, the Dominican government stepped up its effort to undermine Cuba’s position.66 As a show of force, Trujillo ordered the assassination of a Dominican exile called Pipí Hérnandez in Havana, who was stabbed to death in a well-off neighbourhood in August 1955. This murder prompted the outrage of the Cuban society, launching a full-blown anti-Trujillo campaign by more dailies than just Bohemia magazine.67 Batista’s government, desperate to 61 Cartaya,

30 April 1955, AHIC, CMG, 28/1.3/1.4/1-57. Junta Revolucionaria de Exilados Políticos’, Diario de la Marina, 10

62 ‘Constituyen

June 1955. 63 Acosta Matos, Telaraña Cubana, vol. 2, 557. 64 Frank Moya Pons, ‘The Dominican Republic Since 1930’, in Cambridge History of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell, vol. 7, 515. 65 Galíndez, Era de Trujillo, 292. 66 Alan Dye and Richard Sicotte, ‘The US Sugar Program and the Cuban Revolution’, The Journal of Economic History, 64:3 (2004), 694. 67 Acosta Matos, Telaraña Cubana, vol. 2, 566.

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cash-in some sympathy from the Cuban population, jumped behind the propaganda war against Trujillo. Trujillo’s objective in this confrontation with Batista was clear: to undermine Cuba’s sugar industry and to intimidate Batista into submission. If this could not be achieved, then Batista would have to be replaced by a Tanquista general friendlier to the Dominican generalísimo. Trujillo decided to reach out to an unlikely ally: his old nemesis Carlos Prío. One of Trujillo’s secret agents was a Cuban gangster with a ­nefarious reputation called Policarpo Soler. In early 1956, Prío abandoned the peaceful stance he had adopted the previous summer, returned to his exile in Miami and reverted to revolutionary scheming through his own Organización Auténtica (OA). Eufemio Fernández, as one of the lieutenants of the OA, met with Soler, who informed him of Trujillo’s wishes to ally with Prío. Eventually Fernández met Trujillo personally and an alliance was struck between both parties.68 The Cuban military was alarmed, and informed the US military attaché of the weapons Trujillo was supplying the OA: “1000 double-action American rifles given by the US government to the Dominican Republic, 600 M-1 rifles, 3000 pounds of dynamite”; the list continued to include 26 jeeps and 4 trucks.69 Further confirmation of this alliance was received in the spring of 1956, when the new Dominican ambassador made a tremendous blunder: The Cuban senate had undertaken an investigation of Dominican meddling in Cuban affairs, focused on its infiltration of the Cuban military and its execution of exiles on the island. The leader of this commission was Rolando Masferrer, a publicity hound who had switched sides from a paramilitary action group to Batista’s employ. Masferrer was a veteran of Cayo Confites and wanted to leverage his anti-Trujillismo at this heated time to increase his popularity. The Dominican ambassador, Joaquín Llaverías, tried to bribe Masferrer in a private meeting, without knowing that the latter was secretly recording the conversation. In the course of the meeting, the Dominican ambassador confirmed that Eufemio Fernández and the OA were allied with Trujillo, but the Dominican dictator did not trust them and thought 68 Havana Embassy to State Department, ‘Weeka 33’, 8 August 1956, available at latinamericanstudies.org; Vinton Chapin, ‘Cuban-Dominican relations’, 28 August 1956, available at latinamericanstudies.org. 69 Cantillo to Joseph Treadway, 21 March 1956, AHIC, CE, 24/2.1/13.9/1-149.

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Masferrer would be a better agent: Llaverías pointed out “the ­advantage that you have always appeared as an enemy of his”.70 As a result of this alliance, scores of OA members flew to the Dominican Republic to receive military training by the Dominican military, a Spanish Francoist mercenary and a US soldier of fortune.71 There was a surprising third party to the Trujillo–Prío alliance: Fidel Castro’s M26/7. As described during the previous section, from his exile in Mexico, Castro closed ties with the Auténtico-aligned Triple A organization. By the time Prío returned to exile in May 1956, he additionally joined the alliance with the M26/7. It is well-known in the literature of the Cuban Revolution that Prío paid for the purchase of the expedition’s yacht and provided funds to Castro’s group.72 However the implication of the M26/7 in the Prío–Trujillo triangle is less developed.73 On 21 June 1956, the leadership of the M26/7 in Mexico City was arrested, including the Castro brothers and Guevara. In the subsequent raids of their safe houses, Mexican police managed to seize some weapons and around 50 kilograms of dynamite.74 On 5 July, Cuban intelligence reported on some suspicious activity in the Dominican Republic: “these past few days [the Dominican weapons factories] are working on full capacity to fulfil a $3 million armament contract paid jointly by Carlos Prío and Rafael Trujillo”. This “urgency” was due to the fact that “many arms have been seized and several leaders of the movement have been arrested”.75 As implied by this report, these weapons were being sent to the M26/7 in Cuba. In the Oriente province, M26/7 leader Frank País was accepting all the weapons he was being offered by Dominican agents. The exchanges involved a considerable degree of collaboration: on one occasion, a Dominican ship with a cargo of weapons arrived to a secluded spot of the Oriente coastline. A local Triple A 70 Chapin, ‘Cuban-Dominican Relations: Alleged Transcript of Conversation Between Dominican Ambassador and Cuban Senator’, 25 May 1956, available at latinamericanstudies.org. 71 Pedro Valdivia, 19 November 1956, AHIC, CE, 24/3.80/7.1/1-175; Estevez, 7 December 1956, 24/3.20/1.1/1-222. 72 Szulc, Fidel, 366–367. 73 According to Hugh Thomas, the M26/7 received some weapons from Trujillo “by mistake”. Hugh Thomas, Cuba: A History (London: Penguin Books, 2010), 587. 74 Castillo, 26 June 1956, MINREX. 75 Valdivia, 5 July 1956, AHIC, CE, 24/3.80/7.1/1-175.

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leader in communication with Policarpo Soler arranged the encounter, and invited local M26/7 leader and Moncada veteran, Léster Rodríguez, to help him move the weapons in exchange for half of the cargo. Members of the M26/7 moved the weapons to Santiago de Cuba and divided the lot between the different Triple A and M26/7 safe houses.76 The FBI received information that confirmed this alliance: two secret informants “both of whom have furnished reliable information in the past” disclosed that “Trujillo has been supplying money to Fidel Castro Ruz (…) which is aimed against Batista”. Additionally, “Trujillo had supplied [censored] and their confederates, with approximately twenty tons of arms and ammunitions” during the first half of 1956, and more crucially, that Pedro Miret and Ñico López, both Moncada veterans and influential members of the M26/7, had travelled to the Dominican Republic in August 1956 to carry “important papers from Trujillo to Fidel Castro”.77 These convoluted alliances stood purely on pragmatic grounds. All parties thought they could take advantage of each other for their own benefit and could temporarily make use of any help that would come their way. Batista’s government kept making denunciations of this triple alliance but received little credence from the US government mainly for two reasons. Firstly, Batista refused to share any evidence of the Castro–Prío– Trujillo collusion despite having some significant leads.78 This was due to the fact that Batista did not actually want a serious confrontation with Trujillo: the feud was sustained by Batista in order to unite an increasingly disloyal army (which had threatened twice to overthrow him in 1956)79 against an external enemy, and to try to gain some s­ympathy from the population. Therefore, the feud was always kept below a boiling point that would entail violent confrontation. Hence, the US 76 Acosta,

Palabra Empeñada, vol. 2, 57. ‘Alleged Revolutionary Activities: Cuba-Dominican Republic’, 30 August 1956, available online at https://archive.org/details/Anti-CastroAndCuba109-12-210/page/ n2. Accessed April 20, 2019. 78 Chapin, ‘Cuban-Dominican Relations’, 28 August 1956, available at latinamericanstudies.org. 79 The US military attaché was secretly informed by a Cuban officer that a military coup against Batista was being planned for that year. Havana Embassy to State Department, ‘Weeka 39’, 26 September 1956, available at latinamericanstudies.org. 77 FBI,

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government officials could not support Batista in his denunciation ­without any evidence. The second reason, and perhaps the most revealing, was the state of the greater Cold War at the end of 1956: in the aftermath of the Hungarian Uprising and the Suez Crisis of October, the State Department stressed to the Cuban government that “the critical world situation demands utmost efforts on part all American states retain their normal solidarity. [The] Free World by remaining strong and united can take good advantage of present crumblings within communist world”.80 Therefore, the United States strongly encouraged Trujillo and Batista to make peace. By late 1956, the Dominican government began to reduce their subversive campaign. Reports from a Dominican spy within the M26/7 leadership revealed that Trujillo’s schemes could be costly in the future: “If the M26/7 is successful, they will help the Caribbean Legion against our government in reciprocity” for the help the Legion network had given the M26/7.81 Additionally, the sugar situation was improving for Trujillo, so his anti-Cuban campaign could begin to relax. A new quota was approved in the United States which granted the Dominican Republic a larger share of the market, in detriment of the Cubans, and the disruption caused by the Suez Crisis meant that the international sugar market was “unusually strong”, allowing Trujillo to reap its benefits.82 With these elements into account, and Fidel Castro’s apparently failed landing in the Oriente coast on 2 December 1956, Trujillo and Batista struck peace in the New Year of 1957.

Conclusion On the night of 24 November 1956, after more than a year in exile, Castro’s group was ready to invade Cuba. A yacht named Granma was bought with money donated by Prío, and boarded by a selection of recruits: the objective was to land in the eastern point of the island, coinciding with an uprising in Santiago, and quickly move to the nearby

80 Hoover

to Havana Embassy, 11 December 1956, available at latinamericanstudies.org. Matos, Telaraña Cubana, vol. 2, 609. 82 Dye and Sicotte, ‘US Sugar Program’, 677. 81 Acosta

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Sierra Maestra. From there, they would launch a guerrilla campaign against Batista’s army. 82 men landed in the Oriente province after an arduous journey in an old, badly maintained, overcrowded boat. The landing was a disaster: the ship ran aground in some shallows, the expeditionaries lost part of their materiel and some days after disembarking, they were ambushed by the army, killing and capturing most of the group. However, the leadership of the M26/7 survived and moved to the Sierra Maestra mountains, where the guerrilla war began. This expedition was made possible thanks to the help provided by fellow exiles to the M26/7 during their stay in Mexico, the United States and Costa Rica. As this chapter has shown, between 1955 and 1956, the Cuban Revolution became a truly Circum-Caribbean phenomenon, enlisting the support and participation of men and women from all over the Basin. Castro’s uncompromising revolutionary attitude gained him the favour of many fellow revolutionary exiles from other countries and more importantly, from those who were part of the Caribbean Legion network. This experienced network of support, to which the M26/7 was introduced thanks to their Auténtico allies, became the crucial supporter of Castro’s guerrilla. Launching the war against Batista was possible in great part thanks to Castro’s ability to mobilize and appropriate the pre-existing revolutionary network in the region, the Caribbean Legion. This in turn shaped the early Cuban revolutionary movement, which adopted the democratic and anti-dictatorial emphasis of the Legion. The opposition to Batista was divided but yet it managed to reach some common ground, as this chapter has shown. The M26/7 and the Auténticos were capable of reaching an understanding to further their aims. Despite much rhetoric, both organizations formed a pragmatic alliance during these years of struggle, and the pragmatism of both groups stretched to the point of including the nefarious Rafael Trujillo. This adds nuance to common understandings of the Cuban Revolution, emphasizing the overlap between different revolutionary factions. Furthermore, this chapter has shown how the Caribbean was submerged in an international divide of its own, not exactly aligned to US–Soviet lines. As the global Cold War heated up in flashpoints like Hungary and Suez, the governments of Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Venezuela were embroiled in a regional power struggle of their own. Just as the exiles organized and coordinated across borders, so did the dictatorships, with the repression of Cuban, Dominican and Nicaraguan exiles spilling beyond their

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borders. Despite their tumultuous relationship, Trujillo and Batista were joined in the end by their common security concern: the threat posed to their regimes by exiles. The divide breaching the Caribbean was not on the question of Communism, like the larger Cold War, but on democracy. Political refugees were at the centre of Batista–Trujillo relations: on the one hand, the alliances between Cuban and Dominican exiles made the two dictators agree to a security coalition and narrow the ties between both countries’ militaries; on the other hand, exiles were the main beneficiaries of the Trujillo–Batista dispute: both the Auténticos and the M26/7 received much-needed weapons and funds from the Dominican dictator to support their efforts against Batista. These events shed light on how internationalized the fight against Batista was, and how it was interconnected to neighbouring countries in a truly transnational phenomenon centred around exile. Despite being expelled from their homelands, the men and women described in this chapter managed to play an influential role in their countries and in the wider region, shaping the sensibilities of a generation towards a shared, transnational awareness. As 1957 began, the M26/7 initiated a guerrilla campaign in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra. Their army however was small, decimated by the Cuban army’s ambush, and found themselves starving and in dire need of supplies. With Batista making every effort to isolate the guerrilleros in the mountains, the M26/7 had to look abroad to find the much needed weaponry and supplies to defeat the Cuban army. Fortunately for them, they could count on the Caribbean Legion network as an ally.

CHAPTER 4

The Caribbean Legion Supplying the Sierra Maestra, 1957–1958

Abstract  In this chapter, Prados highlights the crucial aid that Fidel Castro and his guerrillas received from the democratic governments of the Circum-Caribbean, namely from Costa Rican president José Figueres and Venezuelan politician Rómulo Betancourt. Focusing on the transnational networks that supplied the Cuban guerrillas, this chapter provides a new perspective of the Cuban Revolution as a flashpoint in a Caribbean Cold War. It shows how the guerrillas enjoyed the international backing of those in the region pushing for increased democratization and against dictatorship. Keywords  Cuban Revolution · Romulo Betancourt Fidel Castro · Caribbean Legion

· Jose Figueres ·

In December 1956, Fidel Castro and his group of 82 guerrilleros landed on the coast of Cuba’s Oriente province. Shortly after their arrival, the expeditionaries were ambushed and decimated by an army patrol. A handful of survivors scattered and quickly made their way to the mountains of the Sierra Maestra. The guerrilla phase of the Cuban Revolution was underway. This chapter will examine how the Cuban guerrillas were supplied from abroad, mainly from Costa Rica and Venezuela. Its aim is © The Author(s) 2020 N. Prados Ortiz de Solórzano, Cuba in the Caribbean Cold War, St Antony’s Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46363-2_4

67

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to show how military supplies to Castro’s guerrilla were channeled through the Caribbean Legion network. It will also examine how prominent leaders of the Legion attained positions of power in several Caribbean governments during 1957–1958 and how this propelled the cause of the Cuban rebels, providing it with some international legitimacy. The general purpose of this chapter is to show how Castro’s M26/7 guerrilla counted with significant and decisive support from abroad, structured through the channels, agents and leaders that conformed the Caribbean Legion. It will be divided in two sections: the first will offer an account of the involvement of the Costa Rican government in supplying the Sierra Maestra with materiel, and will explain how, after Figueres handed over power, many Cuban exiles relocated to Honduras. I will briefly outline the role of the new Honduran government in the Caribbean Legion network before moving on to the second section, Venezuela. This part will examine the extent to which the new Venezuelan government became involved in the fight against Batista, providing insight into how the Caribbean Legion links forged during the 1940s came into play during the Cuban Revolution and greatly benefitted Castro’s guerrilla. Events at the national level such as a regime fall in Venezuela, or democratization in Honduras, will look very differently when seen through a transnational lens that connects it with larger processes. Combined, we will be able to locate the Cuban Revolution in a new regional context of discontent and resistance against authoritarianism. Support from the Caribbean Legion network embedded the Cuban fighting into a larger frame of regional anti-­dictatorial struggle. During most part of 1957, Castro’s priority was to rebuild the rebel army and consolidate their position in the mountains, as well as their own position vis-à-vis the urban division of the M26/7, and the other revolutionary organizations. The M26/7 had split between the leadership in the Sierra, headed by Fidel, and the urban cadres organizing resistance in the main cities, the Llano. Desperate for supplies, Castro exhorted the urban section to devote their energies to furnishing the guerrillas. The Llano was reluctant to hand over full authority to Castro and wanted to prioritize the urban struggle. Meanwhile, other revolutionary groups such as Prío’s OA or the university students’ Directorio Revolucionario (DR) were trying to establish guerrillas of their own, to stake out their claim to revolutionary supremacy.

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For the OA’s attempt, Prío had hired Alberto Bayo, after his success with Castro’s group, to train another expedition in Miami.1 The group of OA volunteers that had been trained in the Dominican Republic (as seen in Chapter 2), were expelled from the country as part of the Trujillo–Batista understanding of January 1957. These exiles received further training in Miami and were sent on an expedition mirroring the Granma: aboard a yacht, the Corynthia, 27 recruits sailed to the Oriente province. Their plan was to establish a second guerrilla front in the Sierra Cristal, east of the Sierra Maestra, in coordination with Castro’s group. Unfortunately for the expeditionaries, Cuban intelligence services were aware of the plan and days after landing, the aspiring guerrilla was ambushed and annihilated.2 The few survivors were aided by the M26/7.3 The DR tried a different approach: they believed that if Batista was assassinated, the regime would collapse. In March 1957, commando groups of the DR with the collaboration of members of the OA planned an attack on Havana’s presidential palace. The aim was to blitz through the building to Batista’s office, execute him and call for a provisional government. Many of the participants of this plan were Caribbean Legion veterans, “beginning with the action at Cayo Confites, up to the one at Luperón, and now in the fight against Batista”.4 The assailants however failed to locate Batista once inside the palace and were eventually gunned down by police. The plan had failed and much of the DR were either killed or arrested, but it showed how Caribbean Legion veterans were deeply embedded in the Cuban revolutionary movement, in more than one organization. After these two failed attempts, the M26/7 saw their position strengthened. Castro’s organization was now the main threat to Batista’s rule. Accordingly, the other groups reluctantly agreed to supply the Sierra Maestra guerrilla with much needed weapons and materiel. In the Circum-Caribbean, events were unfolding that would significantly impact the Cuban Revolution. During 1957 and 1958, members 1 Julia Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 19. 2 Report to CMGE, 21 April 1957, Archivo del Instituto de Historia de Cuba, Havana, Cuba (AHIC hereon), Colección Ejército (CE hereon), 24/2.1/13.9/1-149. 3 Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution, 20. 4 Carlos Franqui, Diary of the Cuban Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1980), 158.

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of the Caribbean Legion attained positions of power in several governments of the region: In Costa Rica, José Figueres entered the last year of his presidency, significantly stepping up his efforts to support Cuban revolutionaries. In Honduras, a new democratic president, Ramón Villeda Morales, was sworn-in in late 1957 and appointed two Caribbean Legion commanders to cabinet positions in his government. This saw a shift in the wider alliances of the Caribbean Cold War: Honduras moved from a partner of the Transnacional de la Mano Dura under Tiburcio Carías, to a participant in the wider Caribbean Legion network with Villeda Morales. And finally and perhaps more crucially, in January 1958, dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez fled Venezuela and left for the Dominican Republic. Former Caribbean Legion patron and Acción Democrática leader, Rómulo Betancourt, was elected president of Venezuela some months after. During 1958, Venezuela became a “Mecca” for Cuban exiles, harbouring the headquarters of the main revolutionary organizations. With the deep pockets of an oil-rich country, Venezuela supplied Castro’s guerrilla with tonnes of weaponry and ammunition. Meanwhile, since late 1957, the relationship between Batista and the United States’ government had been souring. After Batista’s government infringed the terms of their military agreement, the United States became reluctant to continue providing the Cuban army with weapons and eventually enforced an arms embargo in March 1958. The Cuban government would now have to pay for weapons for the first time, and to negotiate costly deals with the United Kingdom and the Dominican Republic.

Costa Rican Support for the Guerrilla In 1957, Figueres was reaching the end of his term as president of Costa Rica. Elections were due in early 1958 and Figueres was not running for re-election. After successfully repelling the invasion attempt from Nicaragua in 1955, the Costa Rican president remained as committed as ever to the fight against the Transnacional de la Mano Dura. As seen in the previous chapter, Figueres had agreed to lend official support to the Cuban exiles, providing military instruction to several volunteers. Once guerrilla warfare commenced in Cuba, Costa Rica became one of the central suppliers of weaponry and materiel to the rebels in the Sierra Maestra. Through 1957 and 1958, tonnes of military equipment were sent to the Caribbean island, both by sea and air.

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Figueres had become one of the main patrons of the Caribbean Legion network and put to use the relationships he had forged during the 1940s to support the M26/7. Veterans of the 1948 Costa Rican Civil War and leading members of the Legion were employed as smugglers and military instructors to support the fighting in Cuba. But Cuba was not the only front that the Caribbean Legion network was fighting on: Nicaraguan exiles led by Manuel Gómez Flores (Legion veteran and Castro ally) were hoping to strike at the Somoza dynasty as it transitioned from Anastasio Somoza (assassinated in 1956) to his son Luis. The Cuban revolutionary movement became further entangled with the anti-Somoza resistance: Cuban exiles in Costa Rica and Honduras agreed to support the Nicaraguans in exchange for reciprocal aid in case of success. If the Nicaraguans failed, all efforts would turn towards Cuba; Somoza’s removal would have to follow Batista’s. The projected Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions were interdependent movements. Batista’s intelligence service reported constantly and with alarm on the activities taking place in Costa Rica. The Figueres government’s support for the Cubans was so blatant that the Costa Rican guardia civil was providing the exiles with Italian machine guns in public.5 Costa Rica was acting as a safe haven where exiles from all over the Caribbean could send the weapons they purchased or received, and then ship them to Cuba from a safe port. Limón became the main port for weapons destined to Cuba. The collusion of Costa Rican authorities was evident: on one occasion, a schooner arrived in Limón from Mexico carrying 500 hand grenades, 80 sub-machine guns, 20,000 rounds and 300 rifles. The cargo was handed over to the head of the Limón military outpost, who in turn made arrangements to ship the cargo to Cuba on boats carrying timber.6 Limón had become “the only place in this country where weapons can leave without being inspected”.7 The Cuban military attaché centred his efforts on this port, trying to bribe the people in charge and succeeding to some extent in forcing the occasional cooperation of the authorities.8 The attaché denounced a cargo of weapons which included a couple of Argentinian mortars and resulted in the arrest of three men: 5 Manuel Larrubia to Ayudante General, 26 January 1957, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/5.1/ 1-148. 6 Ibid., ‘Informe sobre actividades subversivas en el extranjero’, 21 May 1957. 7 Ibid., to Tabernilla, 13 November 1957. 8 Ibid.

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two Cubans and a Venezuelan.9 However, their interdiction efforts were mostly fruitless. Despite counting on significant amounts of information on a particular boat named “Blue Ship”, they were unable to stop this vessel crewed by Cuban exiles from making frequent trips ferrying weapons from Miami to Cuba via Mexico and Costa Rica.10 Similarly, another boat doing the route Limón–Puerto Rico (where the governor, Luis Muñoz Marín was a personal friend of Figueres and suspected by Cuban authorities of helping the rebels) was flagged as suspicious, thought to be carrying weapons for the Cuban rebels.11 The military attaché was powerless to stop it.12 As 1958 began and Figueres reached the final days in government, he stepped up the efforts to rid himself of all the weapons he personally owned. According to intelligence, Figueres and a handful of personal allies controlled the arsenals of the reserve army, a group of around 5000 volunteers tasked with helping in the defence of the republic and loyal to Figueres.13 Figueres wanted to hand over these weapons as quickly as possible, as once the new government was in place in May, arsenals would be audited, weapons would be counted, tagged and it would be impossible to move them.14 Dominican intelligence officers were sharing information with their Cuban colleagues, warning them that there were plans to move all of the Costa Rican arsenal to Cuba by the end of March.15 Indeed, a large haul of weapons to the Sierra Maestra was being prepared. Huber Matos was a Cuban schoolteacher affiliated to the M26/7. Wanting to join the rebels in the Sierra, he received word from Castro saying that they had plenty of volunteers: what they were desperately short of were weapons and ammunition. Matos thus left Cuba

9 Ibid.,

to Ayudante General, 10 February 1957. to Tabernilla, 23 December 1957, 24/3.80/1.2/1-332. 11 Alberto García Navarro to Gonzalo Güell, 16 December 1958, Archivo del Ministerio de Exteriores, Havana, Cuba (MINREX hereon), no file number. 12 Larrubia to Tabernilla, 13 November 1957, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/5.1/1-148. 13 ‘Conclusiones a las que he llegado de los informes que se me han suministrado y de mi observación personal’, 26 April 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/5.1/1-148. 14 Larrubia, ‘Informe sobre actividades subversivas’, 13 February 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/5.1/1-148. 15 Estevez to G-3-EME, 4 March 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/8.1/1-130. 10 Ibid.,

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and moved to Costa Rica, hoping to enlist the support of Figueres.16 During his time in exile, Matos met the fellow Caribbean exiles residing in San José; his hostel was one of the headquarters of the Venezuelan resistance. He also became acquainted with Dominican exiles, as well as Cubans such as Caribbean Legion veteran Eufemio Fernández, “an intelligent and brave man who enjoys wide respect”. Reflecting on the shared experience of the Caribbean exiles, Matos wrote in his memoirs: “We all speak an almost identical political language. Tyrannies have much in common. The suffering of the oppressed varies in intensity and details, but it’s the same drama”.17 After almost a year in Costa Rica organizing the local branch of the M26/7 and securing the support of Figueres and top figures of his government, in early 1958, Matos and his colleagues from the M26/7 obtained weapons from veterans of the Caribbean Legion such as Frank Marshall (a decisive figure in the Costa Rican Civil War) and from Figueres himself, who donated the arsenal located in the presidential palace.18 Figueres stressed that any weapons had to go to Castro himself and to no other group, and insisted on the limited time frame: he told Matos the weapons had to leave before the end of March, just as Dominican intelligence had predicted.19 On 30 March 1958, a plane belonging to a Costa Rican general was loaded with five tonnes of military equipment.20 The plane landed successfully and provided the guerrilla with crucial supplies. According to British intelligence, it was suspected that as many as three similar flights had taken off from Costa Rica to Cuba during the early months of 1958.21 This stream of supplies towards the Sierra Maestra was occurring parallel to similarly ambitious schemes. As mentioned in the previous chapter, just as Castro was preparing an invasion of his homeland from 16 Huber Matos, Cómo Llegó La Noche (Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 2002, digital edition), 54. 17 Ibid., 57–58. 18 On Marshall’s role in the Costa Rican Civil War, see Guillermo Villegas Hoffmeister, Frank Marshall: El Último Soldado, available at https://elespiritudel48.org/frank-marshall-el-ultimo-soldado/. Accessed April 20, 2019. 19 Matos, Cómo Llegó la Noche, 63–65. 20 Ibid., 69. 21 ‘Supply of Arms to Cuban Rebels’, 15 May 1958, National Archives, London (NA hereon), FO371/139661.

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exile, Nicaraguan colonel Manuel Gómez Flores was planning a similar attempt. He was a participant in the same network as Castro, and thus enjoyed the backing of the Caribbean Legion’s patrons: namely Prío and Figueres. Gómez Flores was based in Costa Rica, where he was training a guerrilla army of fellow Nicaraguan exiles. To this end, he received financial support from Prío and the collaboration of Cuban exiles in Costa Rica, headed by Eufemio Fernández.22 Like in the many pacts made along the Caribbean Legion network, aid from one group of exiles to another was reciprocal: after the attack on Nicaragua, the Nicaraguans had to help the Cubans. The Cuban military attaché in Costa Rica managed to tap into phone conversations held by Cuban exiles and their Nicaraguan counterparts and discovered a smuggling ring of weapons and propaganda to be shipped from Costa Rica to Havana.23 In return, Cuban exiles in Costa Rica volunteered to participate in Gómez Flores’ attack against the Somozas. Additionally, Alberto Bayo, who was in Mexico training Cuban expeditionaries loyal to Prío, quickly received an invitation to “join [Gómez Flores] in Central America in order to assist him with training troops for a projected military action against the current Nicaraguan government”.24 In preparation for this expected attack, the Nicaraguan government had been secretly reinforced by a shipment of weapons from the Dominican Republic, courtesy of Trujillo, and the Colombian and Venezuelan navies were patrolling the Nicaraguan Pacific coast.25 Just as the Caribbean Legion was teaming up against the Somozas, the Transnacional could count on the help of the area’s dictators, Trujillo, Pérez Jiménez and the Colombian Rojas Pinilla.26 However, trouble was mounting on the Nicaraguan regime, north of their border. In Honduras, a new president had been democratically elected in late 1957, 22 Financial support is mentioned in L. Pérez Coujil, ‘Actividades Insurecionales’, 6 September 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.14/111.5/1-151. The participation of Cuban exiles is mentioned in Larrubia to Ayudante General, 26 January 1957, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/5.1/1-148. 23 Ibid., 10 February 1957. 24 Legat Mexico to FBI Director, 29 November 1957, John F. Kennedy Assassination Records (hereafter JFKAR) 124-10290-10196. 25 Larrubia, ‘Informe sobre la toma de posesión del Honorable Señor Presidente de la República de Nicaragua, y los acontecimientos posteriores’, 8 May 1957, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/5.1/1-148. 26 Gustavo Rojas Pinilla was dictator of Colombia from 1953 until May 1957.

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Ramón Villeda Morales, and appointed two veterans of the Caribbean Legion to his cabinet, Francisco “El Indio” Sánchez and Miguel Francisco Morazán.27 Both were veterans of the Costa Rican Civil War and Sánchez had been living in exile in San José. Cuban intelligence reports began to note how, as Figueres’ term was coming to an end and Villeda Morales started his in Honduras, Cuban exiles had begun flocking towards the latter country.28 According to Dominican intelligence shared with the Cuban government, El Indio Sánchez was acting as the link between the Cuban exiles and the Honduran government.29 With this official help, a Cuban exile living in Honduras by the name of Silvio Peña was reported smuggling weapons from Costa Rica to Honduras, to be used by the Nicaraguan exiles in their attempt. Peña was seen using a car with a government licence plate to drive weapons into Honduras from El Salvador.30 This scheme culminated in April 1958, when the Honduran government arrested a group of Nicaraguan exiles in an airfield near the border with Nicaragua. The Nicaraguan exiles had stolen a plane belonging to the Somoza government in Miami and flown it to Honduras to load up the accumulated weapons and use it in their expedition.31 Perhaps pressured by the international scandal, the Honduran government was forced to step in and dissolve the plot, as the OAS clearly condemned any kind of interference in other countries. In the resulting raid, the Honduran army seized “enough rifles and ammunition to arm 600 men” and arrested Gómez Flores, caught red-handed.32 Revealingly, Silvio Peña’s car was found parked in the airfield.33 As this attack had failed, it was time for the Nicaraguans to put their efforts to use in the Cuban cause. Since early 1958, another force had been gathering south of the Nicaraguan border, in Costa Rica.

27 Charles Ameringer, The Democratic Left in Exile: The Antidictatorial Struggle in the Caribbean, 1945–1959 (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1974), 219. 28 Guerra, ‘Informar sobre el trasiego de cubanos asilados en Costa Rica hacia otros países centroamericanos’, 9 May 1958, AHIC, CE, ­24/3.20/9.1/1-39. 29 Estevez to G-3-EME, 16 April 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/8.1/1-134. 30 Guerra to G-3-EME, ‘Actividades de los Cubanos asilados en Honduras’, 1 May 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/9.1/1-39. 31 Ibid., ‘Informe sobre tráfico de armas’, 5 May 1958. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., ‘Cubanos asilados en Honduras’.

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In January 1958, chief of staff of the Caribbean Legion, the Dominican general Miguel Ángel Ramírez, arrived in San José as a petition from Figueres. Ramírez was put in charge of what the exiles started calling “la Gran Conspiración del Caribe”, and contacting the Nicaraguan, Dominican and Cuban exiles living in Costa Rica. In these contacts he met frequently with a Cuban exile called Feliciano Maderne. Maderne and Ramírez already knew each other since the days of Cayo Confites, where Maderne had been the head of one of the companies: Fidel Castro served under him during those weeks at the cay.34 Maderne at the time was living in Honduras and shuttling back and forth between Honduras and Costa Rica, trying to shift the focus of the Legion’s network to the Cubans’ advantage.35 This diplomatic labour bore its fruit, since Ramírez was put at the head of an aerial invasion of Cuba. Ramírez’s aide secretly confessed to the Cuban military attaché that Ramírez’s mission was to attack Cuba and not Nicaragua. This information was corroborated by a second source in Costa Rica, an informant reporting on the activities of two Legion veterans, a Cuban and a Nicaraguan, who had been storing arms in a finca near the Caribbean coast. This informant reported that the main target had become Cuba and in exchange, as usual, “Fidel […] would help them against Nicaragua and finally Trujillo”.36 The expedition against Cuba headed by Ramírez was finally ready to take off from Limón on 10 May 1958, just two weeks after the press announced Gómez Flores’ failure and arrest in Honduras. However, it seems that the pilots got cold feet and decided to change the course mid-flight and landed in a Costa Rican airfield near Nicaragua. The men were arrested, including Ramírez, and testified that they were going to Cuba “to fight with Fidel Castro”. It is unclear why the pilots decided unilaterally to change the plans at the last minute.37 As shown, the Cuban Revolution was not being fought in isolation. By joining the Caribbean Legion network, the M26/7 had become enmeshed in a wider web of revolutionary schemes, smuggling and plotting; it had been subsumed into the larger Caribbean anti-dictatorial crusade. Support to the Sierra Maestra guerrilla was now interdependent on 34 ‘Fidel y la expedición de Cayo Confites’, Bohemia, January 2019, available at http:// bohemia.cu/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/pag-36-37.pdf. Accessed April 20, 2019. 35 Guerra to G-3-EME, ‘Actividades de los Cubanos asilados en Honduras’. 36 Larrubia, ‘Informe sobre actividades subversivas’. 37 Garcia to Güell, 12 May 1958, MINREX.

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the fortunes of other ventures along the network, such as the Nicaraguan attempted guerrilla. The survival of the anti-Batista resistance was not just the preoccupation of Cuban exiles, but it had become the focus of a wider movement that spanned different nationalities and countries. A veritable transnational web of exiles and patrons was at work in the Caribbean, trying to oust the region’s dictatorships. The examples of Costa Rica and Honduras described in this section illustrate how it was a time for revolution in the Caribbean, and all it took to set the region aflame would be for one of the guerrillas to succeed. As pressure slowly increased on the region’s dictatorships, one event would kick-start the downfall of Batista: on 23 January 1958, a group of disgruntled military officers and members of Rómulo Betancourt’s AD party, staged a coup against dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela. Thus, with Caribbean Legion veteran Betancourt back in his native Venezuela, one of the largest economies of the region had just shifted its weight from the Transnacional de la Mano Dura to the Caribbean Legion.

Venezuela Joins the Rebels By 1958 Venezuela had been under a military dictatorship for a decade. In 1948, a group of officers staged a coup against the government of Rómulo Gallegos, from the Acción Democrática party. Gallegos, along with fellow party leader Rómulo Betancourt (together they were known as “Los Rómulos”), had ruled Venezuela for three years, since 1945. During this period, known as the trienio Adeco, Venezuela made some strides to pass wide reforms and internationally aligned itself with the Caribbean Legion against the region’s dictators.38 The country was sympathetic to exiles and numerous Spanish immigrants arrived after 1945, many of them receiving valid papers from the Spanish Republican consulate in exile. All this however changed after the 1948 coup. The new dictatorial government aligned Venezuela with the Transnacional and Franco’s regime in Spain. Undocumented Spanish immigrants or those with papers provided by the Republican government in exile were sent to Guasina, a concentration camp in the swamps of the Orinoco delta. Conditions at the camp were appalling. Diseases were rife, with outbreaks of malaria, dysentery, tuberculosis and 38 Harry Kantor, ‘The Development of Acción Democrática de Venezuela’, Journal of ­Inter-American Studies, 1:2 (1959), 237–255.

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typhus, worsened by a regime of forced labour. A group of exiles arrived in Venezuela after traversing the Atlantic on a schooner, “in worse conditions than Columbus”, from the Canary Islands. Upon arriving they were informed that they would be interned in the deadly Guasina camp and one of the refugees slit his own throat rather than face the horrors of the jungle camp. Guasina would continue working as a concentration camp for political prisoners, mainly AD party members, until 1952.39 By 1957, dictator Pérez Jiménez was slowly losing the support of the Venezuelan elite, the Church and eventually even the army. On 23 January 1958, a joint military-civilian uprising ousted the dictator. Admiral Wolfgang Larrazábal took over, called for elections for the end of the year and began a purge of Perezjimenistas from the army and business sectors.40 Cuban exiles were ecstatic with this turn of events. Batista’s spies had reported that the fall of Pérez Jiménez would be disastrous, as the opposition were “open partisans of Carlos Prío and Fidel Castro”.41 Indeed, the Cuban revolutionaries found helpful allies in both Larrazábal and Betancourt. Exiles began flocking to Caracas as early as February, when the M26/7 inaugurated its Venezuelan branch, and soon every revolutionary organization set up their headquarters in Caracas.42 Venezuela had become the new port of call of exiles in the fight against Batista. Cuban rebels received significant military aid from Venezuela. Larrazábal sympathized with the M26/7 and was willing to lend a hand in the struggle against Batista.43 Manuel Urrutia, the M26/7’s presidential candidate for a post-Batista election, arrived in Caracas to secure arms and ammunitions for Castro.44 The Cuban military attaché was reporting increased contacts between the Venezuelan government and the local branch of the M26/7, fearing a “joint attack” by exiles coming 39 Untitled and undated report, FUE, CGRE, MEX 85-3; Ameringer, Democratic Left, 139. 40 Judith Ewell, ‘Venezuela Since 1930’, in Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 8, ed. Leslie Bethell, 752–753. 41 Pedro Barrera to Díaz-Tamayo, 16 January 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/2.1/1-78. 42 Ibid., 12 February 1958; Pedro Rodríguez Ávila to Tabernilla, 29 April 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/1.2/1-332; Barrera to Tabernilla, 21 July 1958, AHIC, 24/3.20/2.1/1-78. 43 Jonathan Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 225. 44 CIA, ‘Cuban Political Situation’, 12 March 1958, JFKAR, 104-10177-10068.

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from Honduras, Costa Rica, Colombia and Venezuela.45 Indeed, the Venezuelan government was hosting several groups of Cuban exiles preparing expeditions against Cuba: some aiming to attack the westernmost province of Pinar del Río and others to reinforce Castro in the Sierra.46 Larrazábal allowed Cuban exiles to fly from Venezuela loaded with weapons and money over to Castro.47 Additionally, Larrazábal’s government cooperated with Betancourt, now back in Venezuela after a decade in exile, to help the Cubans. In one operation, the Venezuelan junta bought a cargo of weapons from Figueres through the mediation of Betancourt and Gallegos.48 Betancourt was very active in supporting the Cuban rebels. He commissioned his friend Juan Juarbe, a Puerto Rican exile who had befriended Castro in Mexico, to ship weapons Betancourt had bought in Mexico to Cuba. These weapons were destined to support Castro’s “total war” campaign that had started in spring 1958.49 Betancourt also became the channel through which Figueres, no longer in power since May 1958, could ship his arsenals to Venezuela, en route to Cuba.50 Just like in the late 1940s, the Caribbean Legion network was active and working closely to depose a dictator. Betancourt purchased and handed two planes to Legion veteran Eufemio Fernández, and jointly with Prío bought 10 tonnes of weapons, which were stored in Caracas for use in Cuba.51 As the Cuban ambassador in Costa Rica observed with alarm, M26/7 rebels were receiving supplies “at a LARGE-SCALE and in regular periods”. The ambassador noted in capital letters that “the large-scale aid being provided by Venezuela to the Cuban revolutionaries” was 45 Estevez

to G-3-EME, 12 April 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/8.1/1-104. Aguiar to G-3-EME, ‘Actividades subversivas en el extranjero’, 20 June 1958, AHIC, CE, 2 ­ 4/12/1.17/1-63; Pérez-Coujil to JEMC, ‘Actividades insurreccionales’, 22 August 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.14/1:1.5/1-151. 47 Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World, 226. 48 A.P. Chaumont to Tabernilla, 28 May 1958, AHIC, CE, 2 ­ 4/3.20/1.2/1-332. 49 Chaumont to Tabernilla, 22 April 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/1.2/1-332. On the friendship between Castro and Juarbe see Heberto Norman Acosta, La Palabra Empeñada, vol. 1 (Havana: Oficina de Publicaciones del Consejo de Estado, 2005). 50 Pérez-Coujil to JEMC, 5 June 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.14/1:1.5/1-151. 51 Barrera to Tabernilla, ‘Informando sobre actividades subversivas contra el gobierno de Cuba’, 21 July 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/2.1/1-78; Estévez, to G-3-EME, 24 September 1958, AHIC, 24/3.20/8.1/1-134. 46 José

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intensifying.52 These supplies were being delivered by plane and boat, but also, allegedly, by submarine. In reports from December 1958, the diplomat stressed repeatedly that in the last days of Pérez Jiménez’s dictatorship, the tyrant had acquired two submarines which arrived in Venezuela after his ousting. Allegedly, one of these submarines was being used to supply Castro with weapons, and this information had been corroborated by the allied Dominican government.53 It is unclear if indeed a submarine was being used, but it is worth noting that the previous year, British intelligence had reported several submarine sightings in the coast of Costa Rica. These sightings had been produced in 1957 however, before the delivery of the submarines in 1958.54 A new route being exploited by the exiles at this time was Haiti. Despite François Duvalier’s sympathy towards Batista, Cuban rebels kept trying to use Haiti as a base.55 Enjoying a close proximity with Cuba’s eastern coast, Haiti was in a prime position to smuggle weapons to the Sierra Maestra. Numerous exiles arrived in Haiti with cargos of military equipment, trying to smuggle them into Cuba. However, the Haitian government moved to stop this, resulting in the arrest of several Cubans.56 The rebels did however find a friendly face in the Haitian military attaché in Caracas. He sympathized with the Cuban rebels and arranged the sale of military aircraft to the Venezuelan junta, to be used by the Cubans.57 In addition to military supplies, oil-rich Venezuela was providing the Cuban rebels with significant donations. The Venezuelan government gave money to the M26/7 in exile, as well as US$10,000 to Castro’s sister.58 When the plane that had taken Huber Matos from Costa Rica to Cuba was rendered useless upon landing, the Venezuelan government reimbursed the Costa Rican owner for his loss.59 At a smaller scale, the 52 García

to Güell, 3 December 1958, MINREX; Ibid., 16 December 1958.

53 Ibid. 54 ‘Copies of the File Following the Sightings of Russian? Submarines in Costa Rican Waters’, 2 September 1957, NA, FO371/126609. 55 I. Leonard to G-3-EME, 2 May 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/7.1/1-175. 56 Valdivia to G-3-EME, 29 November 1958, ibid. 57 Leonard to G-3-EME, 2 May 1958, ibid. 58 Chaumont to Tabernilla, 19 April 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/1.2/1-332; García to Güell, 12 May 1958, MINREX. 59 Ibid.

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Venezuelan junta was running with the transport costs of Cuban exiles, paying the passage of several exiles to Venezuela—not just Cubans, but also Dominicans and Nicaraguans.60 The government was also providing passports and papers to lists of M26/7 members in exile.61 But perhaps more ambitiously, Rómulo Betancourt was sparing no expense to reinforce the Caribbean Legion. According to several sources, Betancourt made available US$700,000 to “reorganize the Caribbean Legion and help the revolutions in Cuba, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic”.62 Reports from Honduras, where Legion veterans served in the government, echoed this information. “The Legion has been reorganized and readied to act” warned the report, which stated that, according to a “trusted source”, it was being led by Betancourt.63 The Cuban ambassador in Costa Rica also warned that Betancourt, after winning the Venezuelan elections of December 1958, would increase the financial and materiel support to the rebels: “people linked to the Caribbean Legion have reported that deposing Batista has become an obsession for them, especially for Figueres and Betancourt”.64 Indeed, in the fall of 1958, the nephew of Miguel Ángel Ramírez sent a letter to his uncle from Caracas, informing him that a group of M26/7 members would arrive shortly in Costa Rica to speak with Ramírez. “They want to speak to you personally on behalf of their cause, which I believe is also ours”, stressed the nephew, adding: “this could be of great benefit for the common cause of both our peoples”.65 Ramírez was working from Costa Rica for the cause of the Cuban rebels. In November, Feliciano Maderne (mentioned earlier in this chapter) arrived in Costa Rica “with a great deal of money”. Maderne was working as an aide for Ramírez and both of them sat with Frank Marshall, a Legion veteran from the Costa Rican Civil War, to purchase weapons for the

60 Pérez-Coujil

to JEMC, 5 June 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.14/1:1.5/1-151. 22 August 1958. 62 García to Güell, 12 May 1958, MINREX. The same quantity is mentioned again in Chaumont to Tabernilla, 22 April 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/1.2/1-332. 63 Guerra to G-3-EME, ‘Actividades de los cubanos asilados en este país’, 1 October 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/9.1/1-39. 64 García to Güell, 16 December 1958, MINREX. 65 Guillermo Yriarte to Miguel Ángel Ramírez, 14 October 1958, scanned PDF sent to me by Dr. Aaron Moulton. 61 Ibid.,

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Cubans.66 Contrary to most of the secondary literature, in 1958 the Caribbean Legion could not be more alive and kicking.67 Support to the Cuban rebels from Venezuela also came in the form of propaganda and international legitimacy. With the opening of an M26/7 branch in Caracas, Castro’s group had the opportunity to expand their publicity. By April 1958, a radio station was operating from Venezuela manned by Cuban exiles.68 An informant arriving in Cuba from Venezuela reported to the chagrin of Batista’s secret services that cars were driving around Caracas adorned with M26/7 insignia, the movement had opened several public relations offices, and cinemas were projecting newsreels praising Castro’s fight in the Sierra Maestra.69 Venezuela had become a thorn on Batista’s side, and a powerful ally to the Cuban revolutionaries. The Venezuelan press joined the anti-Batista crusade and the wider cause of the Caribbean Legion. The Cuban military attaché in Caracas reported that the Venezuelan press had begun an “intense campaign” against the dictatorial governments of Spain, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic “and even against the United States”. He reported that the Cuban exiles were taking advantage of this campaign by funding rhetorical attacks against the Cuban regime and using every means to further anti-Batista propaganda. These media campaigns had clearly succeeded in earning the sympathy of the Venezuelan population for the rebels. As the attaché finished his report, he remarked: “It’s the eve of the 26th of July, so you can imagine my situation in a completely hostile environment and surrounded by enemies everywhere”.70 There were signs that hemispheric opinion was slowly but surely turning against the dictatorial regimes of autocrats like Batista, Trujillo or the 66 García

to Güell, 30 November 1958, MINREX. The Caribbean Legion: Patriots, Politicians and Soldiers of Fortune, 1946– 1950 (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1995) and The Democratic Left state that the Legion ceased to exist in 1950, as does Piero Gleijeses in his article ‘Juan José Arévalo and the Caribbean Legion’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 21:1 (1989), 135–145. 68 ‘Arms Carried to Cuban Rebels from Costa Rica’, 24 April 1958, NA, FO371/139661. 69 Aguiar, ‘Actividades subversivas en el extranjero’, 29 June 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/12/ 1.17/1-63. 70 Barrera to Tabernilla, ‘Informando sobre actividades subversivas contra el gobierno de Cuba’, 21 July 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/2.1/1-78. 67 Ameringer’s,

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Somozas. The rhetorical and ideological battle against these dictatorships was also being waged in influential magazines by some of the brightest Latin American thinkers of the time. Support from the region’s intellectuals was providing the Cuban rebels with a powerful legitimizing boost in the eyes of international opinion and the United States in particular. From Mexico City, Cuban exile and future foreign relations minister under Castro, Raúl Roa, was directing a magazine called Humanismo.71 This publication had become a platform for the ideological current that sustained the Caribbean Legion, featuring articles and essays by prestigious intellectuals, writers and politicians like Juan Bosch, Betancourt, Gallegos, Haya de la Torre, Laura de Albizu Campos,72 Raúl Osegueda,73 Juan José Arévalo, Edelberto Torres,74 Felipe Pazos,75 Luis I. Rodríguez76 or figures of worldwide renown like Octavio Paz, Lázaro Cárdenas, Raúl Prebisch and Rafael Alberti.77 In February 1958, the magazine was distributed in Venezuela for the first time after a 5-year ban by the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship. To mark the occasion, Humanismo devoted their issue to the Cuban Revolution under the headline “Homenaje al Pueblo de Cuba”. This number contained texts by authors such as Fidel Castro, José Martí, the former Colombian liberal president Eduardo Santos, Teresa Casuso78 and the Nicaraguan revolutionary Juan José Meza. It also featured a treatise on Cuba’s economic development authored by the M26/7.79 The support for the Cuban guerrillas was grounded in this intellectual current, which for the 71 During their time in Mexico, Guevara and Castro would frequent the house of Lucila Velásquez, writer in Humanismo, and flatmate of Hilda Gadea. Acosta, La Palabra Empeñada, vol. 1, 67 and 171. 72 Wife of Puerto Rican nationalist leader Pedro Albizu-Campos, and a close ally of Castro in Mexico. 73 Mentioned in Chapter 1, Guatemalan foreign minister under Árbenz and Caribbean Legion collaborator. 74 Nicaraguan exile, writer and revolutionary; mentioned in Chapter 2. 75 Prestigious Cuban economist and member of the M26/7. 76 In Chapter 2, one of the Mexican PRI politicians that shipped weapons to Cuba. 77 Some numbers of Humanismo are available online http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/ portales/revistas_de_migraciones_y_exilios/partes/684930/humanism. Accessed April 20, 2019. 78 Friend of Castro and Prío, who stashed weapons in her Mexico City house for the M26/7, OA and Guatemalan rebels. Mentioned in Chapter 2. 79 Humanismo, 47, 1958.

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time being were passionate backers of Fidel Castro and his group. In an open letter in September 1957, exiled Adeco, Ildegar Pérez-Segnini, compared Castro to Sandino and Martí, linked the liberation of Cuba to that of Venezuela and thus, emphasized the hemispherical nature of his struggle.80 It was for all to see that the sympathies of some of Latin America’s most respected writers lied firmly with the Cuban and CircumCaribbean anti-dictatorial revolutionaries. In Costa Rica, another magazine was founded in 1958, fuelling the momentum of the anti-dictatorial struggle in the wake of Venezuela’s democratic transition. After leaving power, Figueres established the International Institute of Political and Social Sciences to further the democratic, anti-dictatorial agenda. The institute published a political journal called Combate with a board of editors which reflected the intellectual make-up of the Caribbean Legion, and showed the affinity of this journal with Humanismo. The board was composed by Figueres, Betancourt, Haya de la Torre and the Colombian Eduardo Santos, who, according to British intelligence, had been one of the key financial and diplomatic supporters of the Caribbean Legion in its origins back in the late 1940s.81 Combate was managed by Luis Alberto Monge, the Costa Rican head of ORIT who had collaborated with the M26/7 in Mexico, as mentioned in the previous chapter. He came up with the name as a reference to the magazine Albert Camus had published during his time in the French Resistance against the Nazis, and saw it as the “mouthpiece (…) of the fighters for democracy”.82 In such capacity, Combate featured an article by Triple A leader Aureliano Sánchez Arango.83 As 1958 went on, Fulgencio Batista’s grip over Cuba slowly eroded. During this year, it seemed as if the time for dictatorships in Latin America was coming to an end. In 1954, Brazilian autocrat Getúlio

80 Ibid., 45, 1957, available at http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/portales/revistas_de_ migraciones_y_exilios/obra/num-45-septiembre-octubre-1957/. Accessed April 20, 2019. 81 Leslie Boas, ‘The Caribbean Legion’, 2 March 1957, NA, FO371/119802. 82 ‘Entevista: Luis Alberto Monge de nuevo en Combate (Parte I)’, Cambio Político, 20 December 2011, available at https://cambiopolitico.com/entrevista-luis-alberto-monge-de-nuevo-en-combate-parte-i/2884/. Accessed April 20, 2019. 83 ­‘Izquierda-Centro-Derecha’, Combate, nº2, May–June 1957. Mentioned in CEPAL’s bibliography of Latin America’s historical evolution: https://repositorio.cepal.org/bitstream/handle/11362/3416/S6900468_es.pdf. Accessed April 20, 2019. Unfortunately, copies of the magazine are hard to come-by nowadays.

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Vargas had committed suicide; in 1955, Argentinian leader Juan Domingo Perón had been ousted; in 1956, Peruvian despot Manuel Odría lost power and, in 1958, Pérez Jiménez had been expelled from Venezuela. New York Times journalist Tad Szulc published a book on the fall of these five dictators, titling the historical moment (and the book) as the “Twilight of the Tyrants”.84 Batista’s outlook was not bright, as indeed sympathy from his northern neighbour was beginning to switch towards those democrats in the region like Betancourt and Figueres, and slowly pulling away from the autocrats like Trujillo and himself. In March, the United States decided against giving any more weapons to his regime after Batista had used US military aid to supress an uprising the previous year. This breached the terms of hemispheric aid and thus, shipments of weapons were interrupted. Up until then, Cuba had received weaponry from the United States virtually for free, as part of the hemispheric aid agreement.85 The move signalled an important shift in US foreign policy and tolerance towards dictatorial regimes, and in more practical terms, it placed a large financial strain on the Batista regime. In 1958, for the first time, the Cuban government saw itself forced to buy significant amounts of military materiel to confront the Sierra Maestra rebels. As the rebels were receiving financial backing from Venezuela, Batista was forced to purchase weapons in the world market. The war was now being waged in the economic arena too. Batista first turned to the United Kingdom, asking for an extensive list of arms and ammunition, as well as vehicles and airplanes. The British, tempted by the “excellent commercial possibilities” of the deal, agreed to a contract with the Cuban government for an estimated US$4 million worth of weapons; “an important export order”.86 Additionally, Batista turned towards Trujillo, on whom he had become increasingly reliant for security matters after their “peace” in 1957. Towards the end of the summer of 1958, as Batista’s offensive against the Sierra Maestra rebels lost momentum, the Cuban regime approached the Dominicans for an urgent order of ammunition: more than one million rounds, delivered as

84 Tad

Szulc, Twilight of the Tyrants (New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1959). E. Bonachea and Nelson P. Valdés, Revolutionary Struggle: The Selected Works of Fidel Castro, volume 1: 1947–1958 (London: The MIT Press, 1972), 106. 86 ‘Export of Arms’, 11 October 1957, NA, AK1192/1; ‘Arms for Cuba’, 29 November 1957, ibid. 85 Rolando

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quickly as possible. The Cuban military attaché recommended periodical purchases of ammunition to avoid shortages in the fight against Castro.87 Batista saw himself in an arms race against the economic might of ­oil-rich Venezuela, no rival for the island’s sugar economy. According to British intelligence, “the tremendous flow of arms and financial support sent from Venezuela to the Castro movement, particularly towards the end, was a prime factor in the final outcome: not because by the end Castro’s side already possessed overwhelming strength but because it was felt on Batista’s side that with such aid from Venezuela (and the US) it very soon would”.88 It is telling that Foreign Office officials included the United States as a supporter of Castro against Batista. In the early hours of 1 January 1959, as the demoralized Cuban army lost ground to the guerrillas, Fulgencio Batista and his closest allies boarded a plane towards the Dominican Republic. After almost seven years in power, Batista’s dictatorship had been finally defeated.

Conclusion This chapter has looked at how the anti-Batista guerrilla war became internationalized through the work of the Caribbean Legion network, chiefly exiles. Democratic governments with presence of Legionnaires in their make-up provided significant backing to anti-dictatorial revolutionaries in the region during these years: mainly Cubans and Nicaraguans, whose struggles as we have seen were not parallel but rather interconnected. It has shown how the Cuban rebellion was being waged in a profoundly transnational environment, with supplies and equipment flowing from multiple countries, through agents of several nationalities. Additionally, the rhetoric and intellectual work undertaken by leading writers ideologically linked to the Caribbean Legion provided an invaluable legitimating boost to the Cuban revolutionaries. The fight in Cuba was not occurring in a vacuum, nor it was a purely Cuban affair, concerning only those affected by the dictatorship. For a decade, the Caribbean Legion had set up a transnational revolutionary network available to any credible anti-dictatorial fighters willing to enlist their help. This network was remarkably and crucially active during the

87 Estevez 88 ‘Cuban

to G-3-EME, 5 August 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/8.1/1-134. Venezuelan Relations’, 27 January 1959, NA, FO371/90774.

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late 1950s. As we saw in this chapter, the Costa Rican government provided substantial material backing to the M26/7. It did so through the network of exiles at their disposal; a web of personal relationships woven throughout many years on the premise of a shared ideological mission: the ousting of every dictator in the Caribbean. Participation in this web interconnected the M26/7 and the Cuban Revolution with the fortunes of fellow exiled freedom fighters, such as the Nicaraguans under Colonel Gómez Flores, the Hondurans under “El Indio” Sánchez, or the Dominicans under Miguel Ángel Ramírez. A victory in Venezuela or an electoral success in Honduras or Costa Rica gave the Cuban rebels a vital lifeline. In this regard, the provisional junta of Wolfgang Larrazábal and the work of Rómulo Betancourt from Venezuela provided invaluable and, perhaps determining help to the Sierra Maestra rebels. Tonnes of military equipment were made available to the guerrilleros precisely at the time when the war was entering its toughest stages. Increasingly large donations were sustaining the rebel war effort, allegedly allowing Castro to pay as much as one dollar per bullet in his counteroffensive against the government.89 To borrow from historian Barry Carr, “developments that have been examined as discrete events look very different when examined as parts of a larger transnational process”.90 But furthermore, it seemed as if finally the Caribbean Legion was reaching regional dominance after a long decade of defeats and exile. All the responsible parties in supporting Castro’s guerrilla, starting by Castro himself, had been participants in this Legion. Either as patrons footing the bill, such as Prío, Figueres or Betancourt; as military instructors such as Alberto Bayo or Miguel Ángel Ramírez; as agents and middlemen such as El Indio Sánchez, Feliciano Maderne or Eufemio Fernández, Caribbean Legionnaires were at the heart of the fight against Batista. As this chapter has shown, exiles were once more extremely active in their support of the Cuban fighting. Not just Cuban exiles, but their Nicaraguan, Dominican, Guatemalan, Honduran and Venezuelan counterparts played a role too. After all, as Betancourt, who had endured 89 Bonachea

and Valdés, Revolutionary Struggle, 111. Carr, ‘Across Seas and Borders: Charting the Webs of Radical Internationalism in the Circum-Caribbean’, in Exile & the Politics of Exclusion in the Americas, eds. Luis Roniger, James N. Green, and Pablo Yankelevich (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2012), 235. 90 Barry

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a lifetime of intermittent exile remarked in 1958, there was a “deep American conscience ready to manifest itself in active cooperation against dictators and in favour of democratic causes”.91 The common practice of the region’s dictators to send their opponents into exile backfired in creating a revolutionary community joined by links of solidarity and common support. Due to their influential role during the anti-Batista struggle, it comes as no surprise that Havana became in 1959 the new port of call for the political exiles of the Hispanic world. Remarkably, not only Caribbean exiles relocated to the island, but even Portuguese and Spanish exiles flocked to Cuba. In the years that succeeded, Cuba’s revolutionary commitment to the support of exiles and internationalism was not grounded on just Marxist–Leninist dogmas, but on an important debt of gratitude acquired during 1952 to 1958.

91 Ameringer,

Democratic Left, 263.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion: The Demise of the Caribbean Legion, 1959–1961

Abstract  This chapter ties together the main findings of the book, while also analysing how and why the Caribbean Legion disbanded. Prados explains how the invasions launched from Cuba in the summer of 1959 were the last efforts coordinated through the Caribbean Legion, and how diverging ideological positions drove a wedge between Fidel Castro’s regime and their partners in the revolutionary network, Rómulo Betancourt and José Figueres. This split signalled the demise of the Caribbean Legion, as international revolutionary activism quickly took a new shape under the direction of Cuba’s new “Liberation Department”. However this chapter shows how the Legion network provided the foundation for revolutionary attempts beyond the region, examining the case of Portuguese exiles attempting to start a guerrilla in Angola with ­support from Legion veterans. Keywords  Cuban revolution · Internationalism Angola · Dominican Republic

· Nicaragua ·

In February 1959, as the new Cuban revolutionary government took its first steps, a US official in Havana noticed some familiar faces in the stream of newcomers arriving to the island:

© The Author(s) 2020 N. Prados Ortiz de Solórzano, Cuba in the Caribbean Cold War, St Antony’s Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46363-2_5

89

90  N. PRADOS ORTIZ DE SOLÓRZANO A number of Dominican exiles are in Cuba, including ‘General’ Miguel Ángel RAMÍREZ. The revolutionary leaders, as distinct from the officers of the provisional Government, seem to feel that they have a piece of unfinished business to take care of in connection with the Dominican Republic, in the form of the abortive Cayo Confites expedition of 1947, in which a number of the revolutionary leaders, including Fidel Castro, were involved. (…) A number of Nicaraguan exiles are in town, including Manuel GÓMEZ Flores. The Embassy has today received a report from a fairly reliable source that the Nicaraguan group feels that they will be the first to attack. … This report mentions Guevara specifically as actively participating in the plotting, and as training some of the participants. It was indicated that they hoped to be able to launch an invasion within two months.1

US intelligence was correct: mere weeks after arriving to power, leaders of the M26/7 such as Raúl Castro, Ernesto Guevara or Fidel Castro himself, were already plotting the downfall of neighbouring dictatorships. Influential members of the Caribbean Legion such as the aforementioned Ramírez or Gómez Flores moved to Cuba, hoping to organize a new invasion against their homelands. The summer of 1959 would witness the last operation of the Caribbean Legion, its third and final attack on Rafael Trujillo. In Chapter 1 of this book we identified the structure, political context and purpose of the Caribbean Legion. We saw how the Auténtico party in Cuba called in the support of the Legion to fight against Batista’s dictatorship, and outlined Cuba’s political landscape during the early 1950s to establish the relationship between the Auténtico and Ortodoxo parties towards revolutionary struggle. The chapter concluded with an examination into the Transnacional de la Mano Dura, the counter-revolutionary network established by Caribbean dictators to supress democratic exiles. In doing so we identified the Caribbean Cold War unfolding during the period. In Chapter 2 we turned towards Fidel Castro’s movement, the M26/7 and their experience in exile. During this time, the M26/7 established alliances with fellow exiled groups from multiple countries. By doing this, the Cuban Revolution became enmeshed in a 1 Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove Press, 2010), 987–988.

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wider revolutionary network, involving not just Cuban politics, but a ­region-wide anti-dictatorial phenomenon. The second part of this chapter was devoted to understanding the intricate relationship between Batista and Trujillo, and how it affected both the Legion and the Transnacional in unexpected ways. Chapter 3 analysed the support given to the Cuban guerrillas by Legion patron and Costa Rican president, José Figueres. This was followed by a similar look on Venezuela, and how after a democratic coup of 1958, this country’s junta became a staunch supporter of Castro’s war effort. This was coupled with the relentless activity of Legion leader Rómulo Betancourt in supplying the Cubans with materiel. Through the connections forged in the Caribbean Legion, the M26/7 received military, financial and diplomatic backing from Venezuela. In what follows, the conclusion will highlight the main findings of this book and provide an epilogue to the Legion’s activity and its eventual demise. The Caribbean Legion and the network of exiles that composed it played a crucial role in the rise to power of Castro’s guerrillas. The Cuban Revolution was a profoundly international fight since its beginning; the latest flashpoint in an undeclared Cold War between the democratic governments of the Caribbean and the autocratic regimes. As we have seen in the course of this book, Batista’s coup d’état and the subsequent resistance to his regime was not taking place in a vacuum. The Caribbean was in a state of turmoil, witnessing a surge of democratic demands in a context of authoritarianism and Cold War anti-Communist paranoia. These demands for freedom could not be absorbed by the ruling generals of Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela or the Dominican Republic and thus, military insurrection was embraced by the increasingly large number of exiles. The physical proximity between the different countries and the technological advances in communications and travel improved the possibilities of transnational alliances and the Caribbean Legion was precisely this: a transnational network designed to coordinate revolutionary activity. The fight against Batista’s dictatorship was taking place in this context, and as we have seen, the international dimension had a major influence not only in the Revolution itself, but also in its aftermath and the Castro regime. Histories of the Cuban Revolution cannot limit their international outlook to the United States. The involvement of neighbouring countries had an undeniable and defining impact on both Batista and his rivals. We would have had a very different history if

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Batista could not have counted on his allies from the Transnacional de la Mano Dura, or if the M26/7 had not had allies in foreign countries and fellow exiles. These events in turn shed light on the Cold War itself. The conflict was not just a totemic East versus West undeclared war, in which the two superpowers moved their pawns in the world’s chessboard. Instead what we have seen is that a different, smaller cold war was taking place under the umbrella of Soviet–US struggles. In this Caribbean Cold War, different actors invoked the menace of Communism to discredit their enemies and attempt to reverse the power play: to provoke the United States to do one’s bidding; to fuel fears of a Communist Guatemala to defeat a regional enemy, for example. The events of the Caribbean during the 1940s and 1950s add nuance to Cold War historiography, detailing how beneath an overarching global conflict, we can find regional power struggles along different lines. This Caribbean Cold War would eventually be subsumed into the wider Global Cold War during the 1960s, with the United States’ failed attempt to oust the Castro regime in 1961 and the subsequent adherence of the Cuban government to Marxism–Leninism. Throughout this Caribbean Cold War, exiles played a crucial role. Post-World War II advances in communication, international forums and organizations, and the increased importance of human rights saw the rise of transnational networking that changed exile in Latin America. The rise of this “four-tiered exile”, as described by Sznajder and Roniger, defined the events of the Caribbean region during the late 1940s and 1950s.2 In contrast to previous experiences of exile in decades or centuries prior, this period of the Caribbean Cold War saw frenetic exchange, contact and collaboration between exiles on both sides of the ideological divide. The creation of the Caribbean Legion as a transnational network for revolution shaped the conflicts of its time. It imbued its participants with a strong commitment to internationalism that would eventually become one of the cornerstones of Cuba’s revolutionary government, and it provoked an alliance between the opposing dictatorships that would foreshadow the Operación Condor of the 1970s, when the dictatorships of Argentina, Brazil and Chile coordinated closely against their opponents.3

2 Mario Sznajder and Luis Roniger, The Politics of Exile in Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 153–154. 3 Ibid.

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Just three weeks after reaching power, Castro flew to Caracas on his first official trip, an unsurprising visit considering the support he had received from the Venezuelan government. Castro and Betancourt met for over three hours to discuss the future of their governments. During that conversation, Castro asked Betancourt for a loan of US$300 million to avoid having to rely on the United States. Betancourt refused, and according to historian Jonathan Brown, “his negative response to Castro foreclosed future collaboration between them”.4 Betancourt and Castro had fundamentally opposite views on a topic as salient as the United States and the role it should be allowed to play in Latin American affairs. Besides ideological differences (Betancourt had moved away from the Marxist philosophy that influenced his youth, while Castro seemed to be entering his flirtation with Communism), a generational gap separated both leaders and the political movements they represented. The Cuban revolutionaries were significantly younger than Betancourt and his cohort, and had been deeply scarred by the US intervention in Guatemala, as well as by their frequent support to dictators like Trujillo or the Somozas while disregarding democratic exiles. This fuelled a strong scepticism and dislike of the United States. Betancourt and many of the veterans of the AD party on the other hand had been contemporaries of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s shift towards the Good Neighbour policy, the social-democratic reforms of the New Deal and the passionate defence of democracy during the Second World War. Those conflicting and opposite images of the region’s hegemon created a schism between the Cuban revolutionaries and their Venezuelan allies. However, not all “future collaboration” had been foreclosed. There was still something on which both the Venezuelan government and the barbudos could agree. In that same meeting, Betancourt had an offer to make to Castro: an invasion of the Dominican Republic by Caribbean Legion veterans, Dominican exiles and Cuban and Venezuelan volunteers. Castro mentioned the high expenses of such an enterprise but Betancourt offered up to half a million US dollars for the operation. Castro agreed and the Caribbean Legion’s last plan was put in motion.5

4 Jonathan Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 226–227. 5 Delio Gómez Ochoa, Constanza, Maimón y Estero Hondo: La Victoria de los Caídos (Santo Domingo: Comisión Permanente de Efemérides Patrias, 2007), 28.

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By June 1959, an expeditionary force was ready to depart Cuba. The army was composed of mainly Dominican exiles, including several prominent Caribbean Legion veterans occupying key positions. For example, José Horacio Rodríguez, a veteran of Cayo Confites and Luperón was named Chief of Staff.6 Rodríguez was the son of Juan Rodríguez, head financier of the Caribbean Legion during its early years. Betancourt provided US$150,000 for the expedition (substantially less than promised) and military equipment such as rations or boots that had been given to his government by the United States.7 The expedition bore the hallmarks of Caribbean Legion operations: a multinational army composed of Dominican, Cuban, Venezuelan, Puerto Rican and Spanish volunteers, divided into a two-pronged invasion, by air and sea, financially backed by Betancourt and Castro, the Legion’s new patron.8 On 14 June 1959, the final Caribbean Legion adventure departed Cuba and attacked the Dominican Republic. Over the course of the oncoming weeks, the invasion force was repelled and decimated. Trujillo relied heavily on his contacts along the Transnacional de la Mano Dura to defend his country: the airborne invasion was repelled by Spanish Legionnaires sent by dictator Francisco Franco, and the seaborne attack was strafed from fighter jets piloted by Cuban exiles loyal to Batista.9 However, the attack succeeded in the long term. The expedition inspired the sympathy of the Dominican population. Fearful, Trujillo devoted increasing amounts of money to matters of defence, spending around 60% of the Dominican budget in a time of decreasing export prices.10 This led to economic trouble and eventually Trujillo lost support of Dominican elites, his traditional backers.11 On 30 May 1961, Trujillo was assassinated, putting an end to his more than 30 years of rule. In the country’s first free elections in December 1962, exile leader and Caribbean Legion member Juan Bosch was elected president. Another invasion was being plotted in the opening months of 1959 from Cuba. Nicaraguan exiles had travelled to the island-nation 6 Ibid.,

36–37. 43, 57. 8 Ibid., 69; Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World, 67. 9 Alfredo Sánchez-Bella to Fernando Castiella, 27 June 1959, Archivo de la Fundación Nacional Francisco Franco (hereafter AFNFF), Madrid, Spain, 13233. 10 Ibid., 2 November 1959, 17400. 11 Ibid., 29 June 1959, 13233. 7 Ibid.,

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hoping to secure the revolutionary government’s backing to depose the Somozas. This operation would signal the split and eventual dissolution of the Caribbean Legion. Unlike the Dominican invasion, the Nicaraguan exiles did not come together under a single junta, but remained divided among factions. Figueres hoped to integrate Castro and his government to an ­ anti-dictatorial axis headed by himself and Rómulo Betancourt. However, both parties disagreed as they held essentially different conceptions of the Caribbean Legion: Figueres and Betancourt wanted the Legion to be firmly anti-Communist and deny their participation, while the Cubans, headed by Ernesto Guevara’s “Liberation Department”, sympathized with pro-Communist exiles.12 This division became apparent in the anti-Somoza struggle. Conservative Nicaraguan exiles, mainly Legion veterans, moved to Costa Rica, supported by Figueres and Betancourt while the Communist exiles had their headquarters in Havana.13 This resulted in two different invasions: one that departed from Costa Rica in late May 1959 and another from Cuba in late June. Both attacks were unsuccessful. The Cuban and Costa Rican governments would not collaborate again until 1978, when Castro and then Costa Rican president Rodrigo Carazo collaborated to support the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional in their fight against the Somozas.14 The Sandinistas would eventually oust the Somoza dynasty in 1979, after over 40 years in power. The experience of the Caribbean Legion set the stage for something larger, once the M26/7 reached power. On the one hand, the transnational experience of allying with a regional network of exiles and revolutionaries reinforced the internationalist outlook of the new Cuban government. Drawing from the Caribbean Legion network to fight Batista had shaped the Cuban revolutionaries into a particularly 12 Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS), 1958–1960, Volume VI, Cuba, ed. John P. Glennon (Washington, 1991), Document 267; FRUS, 1958–1960, Volume V (Washington, 1991), Document 90; Anderson, Che, 990. 13 Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World, 71. 14 ‘Los pactos y las rupturas de Fidel Castro con los gobiernos de Costa Rica’, La Nación, 26 November 2016, available at https://www.nacion.com/el-mundo/conflictos/lospactos-y-las-rupturas-de-fidel-castro-con-los-gobiernos-de-costa-rica/FMXW6MZV35D 6VJLO3U3JTZPZDM/story/. Accessed April 20, 2019.

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internationally minded insurgency, and that carried on into the revolutionary government. However, the Caribbean Legion network also came with a specific ideological inclination, which although diffuse it was clearly non-Communist and hopeful of earning the favour of the United States administration. In my view, this set an ideological constraint on the new Cuban regime that many in the M26/7 were unwilling to abide by. In March 1959, merely three months into the new Cuban regime, José Figueres was encouraged by a US State Department official to travel to Cuba and persuade Fidel Castro to steer the revolutionary government towards a more prudent direction.15 US officials were wary of Castro’s unpredictability and wanted Figueres and Betancourt to exercise a moderating influence. In a private meeting in January, the US ambassador to Costa Rica had told Figueres: “it seems to me that those of you such as Muñoz Marín, Romulo Betancourt, yourself and others who have been supporting and sponsoring the Fidel Castro movement, have a tremendous moral responsibility to see that things come out right in Cuba”, to which Figueres replied: “I agree with you, and I think we are going to be able to do something”.16 Figueres visited Cuba some weeks later but he was unable to persuade Castro. The trip was a fiasco, resulting in a bitter public disagreement between him and Castro during a rally when Figueres encouraged the Cubans to embrace US influence while Castro and one of the labour leaders present retorted that Cuba was a sovereign nation and it didn’t have to support the United States.17 Over the course of 1959, the Cuban regime broke with its Caribbean Legion allies. For the new Cuban government, the scope of operations looked beyond Latin America and for the first time, strict ideological discipline was enforced: since early 1959, the new Cuban patron would only support pro-Communist groups, with the exception of the Dominican expedition. This alienated the other backers of the Legion and broke down the fundamental objective of the alliance: to fight dictatorships. A British diplomat noted that “the crusading triumvirate” between Castro, Figueres and Betancourt “was stillborn”.18 The 15 D. J. Mill Irwing, ‘Visit of Ex-President Figueres to Cuba’, 25 March 1959, National Archives, London, UK (NA hereon), FO 371/139661. 16 FRUS, 1958–1960, Volume VI, Cuba, ed. John P. Glennon, Document 242. 17 Ibid., Document 266. 18 British Havana Embassy to American Department, 8 April 1959, NA, FO371/139661.

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new objective of Cuba’s internationalism was to support and spread Marxism–Leninism across the world. Ernesto Guevara had created the Liberation Department within Cuba’s defence ministry to promote revolution abroad, effectively signalling the end of the Caribbean Legion as it had been known. The loosely defined, flexible network of personal contacts with no specific ideology beyond a commitment to democracy and against dictatorships was replaced by an organized department within a politicized government institution. Ideological discipline was enforced and guided, and this new department was not a network of individuals, but a well-structured instrument of Cuba’s revolutionary government. Future operations from the Liberation Department would be more professional affairs, in contrast with the more “artisanal” expeditions of 1959, which like Caribbean Legion plots, “relied on personal relationships”.19 Therefore, by creating a home for the more leftist or Marxist exiles, the Liberation Department undermined the broad church appeal of the Legion. However, there is an interesting plot that serves as a bridge between both types of internationalism, and shows how the experience of the Caribbean Legion and its members was the seed for future Cuban interventions. Some of the most famous internationalist interventions of the Cuban Communist government in the world, namely those in Angola and Nicaragua, have roots in the Caribbean Legion. The experience of exile and revolution during the late 1940s and 1950s had far-reaching consequences for the Cold War, which went beyond the immediate Latin American context as these forays into Angola or the Iberian Peninsula will show. In 1959, Spanish exile Alberto Bayo moved to Cuba to re-join his pupils. In Havana, Bayo was put in charge of a guerrilla school tasked with organizing a rebel force in Spain. Bayo, a Caribbean Legion veteran, was now training his last expeditionary force. For this plan, he counted with around 100 Spanish volunteers and the support of Cuba’s revolutionary high command.20 In early 1959, Bayo received the visit of Fernando Queiroga, a Portuguese Communist exile and an agent of Humberto Delgado, a Portuguese politician exiled in Brazil. Queiroga was sent to Havana to secure the support from the revolutionary

19 Anderson, 20 Lojendio

Che, 990. to Minister of Foreign Affairs, 17 April 1959, AFNFF, 21770.

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government for an attack against the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar.21 Out of this collaboration came an ambitious plan: Iberian exiles were trained in Cuba for guerrilla warfare in the Portuguese colony of Angola. The plan was to drag the Salazar regime into a protracted colonial war that would eventually drain its resources and collapse the dictatorship.22 Unfortunately for the revolutionaries, the transatlantic ship they kidnapped to travel from the Caribbean to Africa was forced to dock in Brazil, where the would-be guerrilleros claimed asylum.23 Alberto Bayo would die in Havana in 1967 of old age, without being able to fulfil his dream of an anti-Francoist guerrilla that would return Spain to democracy. The world of exile changed after 1959. If the divide during the 1940s and 1950s was on the issue of authoritarianism versus democracy, by the 1960s the cleavage was on the question of Communism: ­pro-Communist exiles would find refuge in Cuba while non-Communist exiles would look towards Europe, the United States, Venezuela or Costa Rica. This shift re-aligned the alliances forged during the 1950s, as for example Prío, in exile from Miami, allied himself with the Somozas, his old nemeses, against Castro’s regime.24 Betancourt also turned on Cuba, agreeing to support US efforts against Castro on the condition that Trujillo was ousted first. Speaking to US diplomats in 1959, Betancourt ridiculed former Guatemalan president (and an old ally of his) Juan José Arévalo, adding that he supported the US intervention in Guatemala in 1954. As historian Stephen G. Rabe wrote, “ten years of exile had been a harsh and bitter experience for the Venezuelan leader”.25 Indeed, exile took a toll on many of the participants of the Caribbean Legion. Juan Rodríguez, the Dominican financier of the Legion

21 Untitled

report, 30 April 1959, AFNFF, 21766. to Minister of Foreign Affairs, 25 January 1959, AFNFF, 6159; Manuel Rojas to Ernesto Guevara, 1960, AFNFF, 5164; ‘Santa Maria Case Linked to a Cuban’, New York Times, 11 February 1961. 23 Ibid. 24 CIA, ‘Support of Luis Somoza for Military Plan of Carlos Prio Socarras to Liberate Cuba’, 31 October 1963, JFKAR, 104-10220-10104, available at https://documents. theblackvault.com/documents/jfk/NARA-July2017/JFK-July_2017_Release-Formerly_ released_in_part/104-10220-10104.pdf. Accessed April 20, 2019. 25 Stephen G. Rabe, ‘The Caribbean Triangle: Betancourt, Castro, and Trujillo and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1958–1963’, Diplomatic History, 20:1 (1996), 63–64. 22 Morales

5  CONCLUSION: THE DEMISE OF THE CARIBBEAN LEGION, 1959–1961 

99

committed suicide in 1960, a year after his son had died in the 1959 expedition. Árbenz briefly sought solace from his exile in Havana, at the invitation of the revolutionary government. However, the new regime used him as a public example for failure, stressing the mistakes his government had committed and how the new Cuban regime was avoiding them. Humiliated, he eventually moved to Mexico City, where he died one night of 1971, tormented and in complete solitude.26 Carlos Prío, returned to Cuba in 1959 and defended the new revolutionary government for over a year, before defecting to Miami. From there he made some attempts to return to power through military action, but he no longer had the influence in the new exile generation that he had enjoyed in the past. One morning of 1977, a financially troubled Prío shot himself in his Florida home.27 Much of the historiography highlights the many defeats of the Caribbean Legion, its inability to fulfil the grand schemes it plotted. The majority of their military actions were unsuccessful, however despite this they managed to turn the tide of the region from dictatorial darkness to a hopeful opening of democracy during the late 1950s. Perhaps its true success did not lie in its invasions and revolutions, but in the fact that despite the defeats they kept going; representing those in the region and the Hispanic world in general that refused to submit to dictatorship. The triumph of the Legion was its unwavering commitment to the ideal of democracy in the face of overwhelming odds: the victory of the Legion lied in that it never accepted defeat. Writing from Adeco-ruled Caracas in early 1948, Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier finished his novel El Reino de Este Mundo with a paragraph that perfectly summed the sentiment underpinning the Caribbean Legion: (…) la grandeza del hombre está precisamente en querer mejorar lo que es. En imponerse Tareas. En el Reino de los Cielos no hay grandeza que conquistar, puesto que allá todo es jerarquía establecida, incógnita

26 Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 391. 27 ‘Prio Socarras, Cuban Ex-Leader, Dies of Gunshot Wound in Florida’, New York Times, 6 April 1977.

100  N. PRADOS ORTIZ DE SOLÓRZANO despejada, existir sin término, imposibilidad de sacrificio, reposo y deleite. Por ello, agobiado de penas y de Tareas, hermoso dentro de su miseria, capaz de amar en medio de las plagas, el hombre sólo puede hallar su grandeza, su máxima medida en el Reino de este Mundo.28

28 Alejo

Carpentier, El Reino de Este Mundo (Barcelona: Austral, 2015).

Bibliography

Archives Abbreviations in parenthesis indicate the way in which files are referred to in footnotes. In Havana, Cuba: Archivo del Instituto de Historia (AHIC): The Cuban Communist Party’s archives, where records belonging to the Cuban army are kept. It stores multiple records belonging to the Cuban army from the 1930s to the 1950s, as well as documents from the Movimiento 26 de Julio. • Colección Marina de Guerra (CMG) – Fondo Jefe del Departamento de Dirección • Colección Ejército 1952–1958 (CE) – Fondo Agregados Militares. Archivo del Ministerio de Exteriores (MINREX): The archive of the Cuban foreign affairs ministry. It stores diplomatic correspondence during Batista’s rule, although access is limited. To access the records I had to inform the archivists of my topic, what embassies I was interested in, and they would present to me papers that could be of interest.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 N. Prados Ortiz de Solórzano, Cuba in the Caribbean Cold War, St Antony’s Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46363-2

101

102  Bibliography

• Embajada de Cuba en México • Embajada de Cuba en Costa Rica. In Madrid, Spain: Archivo de la Fundación Universitaria Española (FUE): This archive contains all records from the different Spanish exiled governments loyal to the Republic from 1939 to 1975. It ranges from diplomatic reports to personal letters from various government figures. • Colección Gobierno de la II República en el Exilio (CGRE) – Sección de Fondo París – Sección de Fondo México. Archivo de la Fundación Nacional Francisco Franco (AFNFF): The AFNFF contains various records from the Francisco Franco dictatorship, including multiple diplomatic reports from Latin America. It is not divided in sections, it just makes available a long index for the researcher to look through. In London, United Kingdom: National Archives (NA): The UK government’s official archive, spanning over 1000 years of historical documents. • Foreign Office: Political Departments: General Correspondence from 1906–1966 – American Department. US Archives (Available Online): John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection (JFKAR): Records related to the investigation of President John Kennedy’s assassination. It includes files by both the FBI and the CIA, many pertaining to revolutionary activities in the Caribbean during the 1950s. These files were made public in 2017, and I accessed them through the website iConectXera (https://xeracloud.iconect.com/). • Agency: FBI • Agency: CIA. Dispatches from the US Embassy in Havana, 1952–1958: Scanned copies of multiple files from the American Embassy in Havana are available

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  103

online in the website latinamericanstudies.org, an invaluable resource for researchers ran by Cuban historian Antonio de la Cova. The files can be found through this link: http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/ embassy/. Accessed April 20, 2019. Official Documents Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1958–1960, Volume V, American Republics (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1991). Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1958–1960, Volume VI, Cuba, ed. John P. Glennon (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1991). Warren Commission Report, Volume XXVI: CE3063, 1 December 1963, available at https://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh26/pdf/WH26_CE_ 3063.pdf.

Newspapers and Magazines Bohemia (Havana, Cuba). 1949–2019. Diario de la Marina (Havana, Cuba). 1955. Humanismo (Mexico City, Mexico). 1957–1958. New York Times (New York, NY). 1947–1977. Washington Post (Washington, DC). 1947–1948.

Memoirs Batista, Fulgencio. Cuba Betrayed (NY: Vantage Press, 1962). Bayo, Alberto. Mi Aporte a la Revolución Cubana (Havana: Imprenta Ejército Rebelde, 1960). ———. Tempestad en el Caribe (Mexico, 1950). Diederich, Bernard. 1959: The Year That Inflamed the Caribbean (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2009). Franqui, Carlos. Diario de la Revolución Cubana (Barcelona: Ediciones R. Torres, 1976). ———. Diary of the Cuban Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1980). Gómez Ochoa, Delio. Constanza, Maimón y Estero Hondo: La Victoria de los Caídos (Santo Domingo: Comisión Permanente de Efemérides Patrias, 2007). Llerena, Mario. The Unsuspected Revolution: The Birth and Rise of Castroism (London: Cornell University Press, 1978). Matos, Huber. Cómo Llegó La Noche (Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 2002, digital edition). Rojo del Río, Manuel. La Historia Cambió en la Sierra (San José, Costa Rica: 1970).

104  Bibliography

Secondary Literature Books Acosta, Heberto Norman. La Palabra Empeñada (Havana: Oficina de Publicaciones del Consejo de Estado, 2005). Acosta Matos, Eliades. La Telaraña Cubana de Trujillo: Tomo II (Santo Domingo: Archivo General de la Nación, 2012). Ameringer, Charles. The Caribbean Legion: Patriots, Politicians and Soldiers of Fortune, 1946–1950 (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1995). ———. The Cuban Democratic Experience: The Auténtico Years, 1944–1952 (Miami, FL: University of Florida Press, 2000). ———. The Democratic Left in Exile: The Antidictatorial Struggle in the Caribbean, 1945–1959 (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1974). Anderson, Jon Lee. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove Press, 2010). Beruvides, Esteban M. Cuba: Archivos Confidenciales, volume 3 (Miami, FL: Colonial Press International, 2001). Bonachea, Rolando E., and Valdés, Nelson P. Revolutionary Struggle: The Selected Works of Fidel Castro, volume 1: 1947–1958 (London: The MIT Press, 1972). Brown, Jonathan C. Cuba’s Revolutionary World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). Carpentier, Alejo. El Reino de Este Mundo (Barcelona: Austral, 2015). Carr, E. H. What Is History? (London: Penguin Classic, 2018, first published 1961). Cushion, Steve. A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped the Guerrillas’ Victory (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016). Farber, Samuel. Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Galíndez, Jesús de. La Era de Trujillo (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Marimar, 1962). García-Bryce, Íñigo. Haya de la Torre and the Pursuit of Power in ­Twentieth-Century Peru and Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Gleijeses, Piero. Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Guerra, Lillian. Heroes, Martyrs & Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946–1958 (London: Yale University Press, 2018). Harmer, Tanya. Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Huntington, Samuel P. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993). Isabella, Maurizio. Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Émigrés and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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Kapcia, Antoni. Leadership in the Cuban Revolution: The Unseen Story (London: Zed Books, 2014). Keller, Renata. Mexico’s Cold War: Cuba, The United States and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Martínez-Fernández, Luis. Revolutionary Cuba: A History (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2014). Paterson, Thomas G. Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Sáenz Rovner, Eduardo. The Cuban Connection: Drug Trafficking, Smuggling and Gambling in Cuba from the 1920s to the Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Schoultz, Lars. That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Staniland, Paul. Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). Suchlicki, Jaime. University Students and Revolution in Cuba (Miami, FL: University of Miami Press, 1969). Sweig, Julia. Inside The Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Sznajder, Mario, and Roniger, Luis. The Politics of Exile in Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Szulc, Tad. Fidel: A Critical Portrait (New York: William Morrow, 1986). ———. Twilight of the Tyrants (New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1959). Thomas, Hugh. Cuba: A History (London: Penguin Books, 2010). Wright, Thomas C. Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution, Revised Edition (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2001).

Chapters in Books Angell, Alan. ‘The Left in Latin America Since c. 1920’, in Leslie Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 6: 1930 to the Present, Part 2: Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Bustamante, Michael J., and Lambe, Jennifer L. ‘Cuba’s Revolution from Within: The Politics of Historical Paradigms’, in Michael J. Bustamante and Jennifer L. Lambe (eds.), The Revolution from Within: Cuba, 1959–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). Carr, Barry. ‘Across Seas and Borders: Charting the Webs of Radical Internationalism in the Circum-Caribbean’, in Luis Roniger, James N. Green, and Pablo Yankelevich (eds.), Exile & the Politics of Exclusion in the Americas (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2012).

106  Bibliography Curthoys, Ann, and Lake, Marylin. ‘Introduction’, in Curthoys and Lake (eds.), Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2005). Ewell, Judith. ‘Venezuela Since 1930’, in Leslie Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America: Volume 8: Latin America Since 1930: Spanish South America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Friedman, Max Paul, and Kenney, Padraic. ‘History in Politics’, in Friedman and Kenney (eds.), Partisan Histories: The Past in Contemporary Global Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Moya Pons, Frank. ‘The Dominican Republic Since 1930’, in Leslie Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Roniger, Luis. ‘Political Exile and Democracy’, in Luis Roniger, James N. Green, and Pablo Yankelevich (eds.), Exile & the Politics of Exclusion in the Americas (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2012). Sznajder, Mario, and Roniger, Luis. ‘Political Exile in Latin America’, in Luis Roniger, James N. Green, and Pablo Yanklevich (eds.), Exile & The Politics of Exclusion in the Americas (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2012).

Articles Ameringer, Charles. ‘The Auténtico Party and the Political Opposition in Cuba 1952–1957’, The Hispanic American Historical Review, 65:2 (1985), 327–351. Börzel, Tanja A. ‘Organizing Babylon—On the Different Conceptions of Policy Networks’, Public Administration, 76:2 (1998), 253–273. Carr, Barry. ‘Pioneering Transnational Solidarity in the Americas: The Movement in Support of Augusto C. Sandino, 1927–1934’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, 20:2 (2014), 141–152. Dye, Alan, and Sicotte, Richard. ‘The US Sugar Program and the Cuban Revolution’, The Journal of Economic History, 64:3 (2004), 673–704. Friedman, Max Paul. ‘Retiring the Puppets, Bringing Latin America Back In: Recent Scholarship on United States-Latin American Relations’, Diplomatic History, 27:5 (2003), 621–636. Gates, John M. ‘Towards a History of Revolution’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 28:3 (1986), 535–544. Gleijeses, Piero. ‘Juan José Arévalo and the Caribbean Legion’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 21:1 (1989), 135–145. Harmer, Tanya, and Martín Álvarez, Alberto. ‘Introduction: Writing the History of Revolutionary Transnationalism and Militant Networks in the Americas’, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, 28:2 (2017), 1–13.

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Joseph, Gilbert M. ‘Border Crossings and the Remaking of Latin American Cold War Studies’, Cold War History, 19:1 (2019), 1–30. Kantor, Harry. ‘The Development of Acción Democrática de Venezuela’, Journal of Inter-American Studies, 1:2 (1959), 237–255. Karl, Robert A. ‘Reading the Cuban Revolution from Bogotá, 1957–1962’, Cold War History, 16:4 (2016), 337–358. Martínez Heredia, Fernando. ‘¿Cómo Investigar la Revolución Cubana? Cinco problemas para la investigación (I)’, La Tizza, 27 March 2018. Available at https://medium.com/la-tiza/c%C3%B3mo-investigar-la-revoluci%C3%B3ncubana-i-2d5a9c18ce7a. Moulton, Aaron. ‘Building Their Own Cold War in Their Own Backyard: The Transnational, International Conflicts in the Greater Caribbean Basin, 1944– 1954’, Cold War History, 15:2 (2015), 135–154. ———. ‘Counterrevolutionary Friends: Caribbean Basin Dictators and Guatemalan Exiles Against the Guatemalan Revolution, 1945–50’, The Americas, 76:1 (2019), 107–135. ———. ‘Militant Roots: The Anti-Fascist Left in the Caribbean Basin, 1945– 1954’, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, 28:2 (2017), 14–29. Rabe, Stephen G. ‘The Caribbean Triangle: Betancourt, Castro, and Trujillo and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1958–1963’, Diplomatic History, 20:1 (1996), 55–78. Reed, Brian. ‘A Social Network Approach to Understanding an Insurgency’, Parameters, 37:2 (2007), 19–30. Roniger, Luis, and Yankelevich, Pablo. ‘Exilio y política en América Latina: nuevos estudios y avances teóricos’, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, 20:1 (2009), 7–17. Sanz, Ileana. ‘Early Groundings for a Circum-Caribbean Integrationist Thought’, Caribbean Quarterly, 55:1 (2017), 1–14. Weld, Kirsten. ‘The Spanish Civil War and the Construction of a Reactionary Historical Consciousness in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 98:1 (2018), 77–115. Westad, Odd Arne. ‘Rethinking Revolutions: The Cold War in the Third World’, Journal of Peace Research, 49:4 (1992), 455–464.

Index

A Acción Democrática party (AD), 20, 26, 35, 36, 70, 77, 78, 93 Agostini, Felipe, 44 Alberti, Rafael, 83 Albizu Campos, Laura de, 83 Albizu Campos, Pedro, 44 Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana party (APRA), 8, 9, 20, 51 Angola, 97, 98 Árbenz, Jacobo, 3, 6, 18, 23, 28–30, 34, 37, 38, 40, 43, 47, 51–53, 59, 99 Arévalo, Juan José, 10, 21, 23, 31, 51, 52, 83, 98 Argüello Jr, Rosendo, 37 Auténtico party, 9, 15, 17, 20, 26–30, 32–34, 40, 41, 44–47, 49, 56, 57, 61, 64, 65, 90

B Batista, Fulgencio, 1, 5, 7, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17–20, 25, 27–32, 34, 36, 37, 40, 41, 44–49, 52–60, 62–65, 68–71, 77, 78, 80–82, 84–87, 90, 91, 94, 95 anti-movement, 11, 15, 29, 31, 41, 45, 49, 54–56, 77, 82, 86, 88 Bayo, Alberto, 24, 50, 53, 54, 69, 74, 87, 97, 98 Betancourt, Rómulo, 3, 6, 16, 21, 23, 35, 36, 39, 51, 52, 59, 70, 77–79, 81, 83–85, 87, 91, 93–96, 98 Bohemia magazine, 31, 58, 59 Bosch, Juan, 3, 6, 22, 39, 51, 57, 83, 94 Browder, Edward, 35–39

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 N. Prados Ortiz de Solórzano, Cuba in the Caribbean Cold War, St Antony’s Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46363-2

109

110  Index C Cairol, Francisco, 49 Calderón Guardia, Rafael, 39, 52 Camus, Albert, 84 Cancio Peña, Salvador ‘Saviur’, 49, 53, 54 Carazo, Rodrigo, 95 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 59, 83 Carías, Tiburcio, 70 Caribbean Legion, 2, 15–19, 26, 28–32, 34–37, 39–41, 44–46, 48–54, 56, 63–65, 68–71, 73, 74, 76, 77, 79, 81–84, 86, 87, 90–92, 95, 97, 99 Cayo Confites expedition, 2, 24, 25, 29, 30, 39, 44, 49, 58, 60, 69, 76, 90, 94 Constanza, Maimón and Estero Hondo expeditions, 93, 94 disbandment, 89, 95, 96, 98 historiography, 3, 9, 14 ideology, 7–9 Luperón expedition, 26, 29, 30, 39, 49, 50, 53, 58, 69, 94 origins, 9, 22 participation in the Costa Rican Civil War, 26 structure, 22, 24 Carpentier, Alejo, 99 Carrillo, Justo, 49 Castillo Armas, Carlos, 37, 38 Castro, Fidel, 1, 2, 5, 6, 11, 13, 15, 16, 19, 25, 33, 34, 44–56, 61–64, 67–74, 76, 78–80, 82–84, 86, 87, 90–96, 98 Castro, Raúl, 32, 90 Casuso, Teresa, 83 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 15 Colombia, 19, 22, 79 Communism, 20, 27, 44, 52, 65, 92, 93, 95–98 Corynthia expedition, 69

Costa Rica, 6, 15, 18, 19, 25, 28, 34, 39, 40, 44, 45, 49–54, 64, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73–77, 79–81, 84, 87, 95, 96, 98 Costa Rican Civil War, 25, 26, 30, 37, 39, 71, 73, 75, 81 D Darío, Rubén, 7 Delgado, Humberto, 97 Directorio Revolucionario (DR), 68, 69 Dominican Republic, 2, 6, 9, 15, 18, 19, 21, 23, 25, 26, 36, 45, 56, 58–61, 63, 64, 69, 70, 74, 81, 82, 86, 90, 91, 93, 94 Duvalier, François, 2, 80 E El Salvador, 75 F Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 15, 50, 62 Fernández, Eufemio, 28, 29, 31, 39, 40, 47–49, 52, 53, 55, 59, 60, 73, 74, 79, 87 Figueres, José, 3, 15, 19, 25, 26, 28, 32, 34, 37–39, 51, 52, 54–56, 59, 68, 70–76, 79, 81, 84, 85, 87, 91, 95, 96 Franco, Francisco, 14, 15, 44, 77, 94 Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN), 95 G Gadea, Hilda, 51 Galíndez, Jesús de, 56

Index

Gallegos, Rómulo, 50, 77, 79, 83 García Bárcena, Rafael, 30, 33 García Montenegro, Adolfo, 52 Gómez, Juan Vicente, 20 Gómez Flores, Manuel, 39, 53, 54, 71, 74–76, 87, 90 Grau San Martín, Ramón, 32, 47 Great Depression, 19 Guasina, 77 Guatemala, 6, 9, 17–19, 21, 23, 26, 28–31, 38–40, 44, 47, 48, 51–53, 64, 92, 93, 98 Guevara, Ernesto ‘Che’, 51, 52, 61, 90, 95, 97 H Haiti, 2, 18, 80 Hart Phillips, Ruby, 1, 2 Haya de la Torre, Víctor Raúl, 8, 20, 21, 51, 83, 84 Henríquez, Enrique ‘Cotú’, 30, 39 Hérnandez, José ‘Pipí’, 59 Hernández, Melba, 50 Honduras, 6, 18, 19, 21, 38, 68, 70, 71, 74–77, 79, 81, 87

  111

Marshall, Frank, 73, 81 Martí, José, 83, 84 Marxism, 8, 13, 20, 88, 92, 93, 97 Masferrer, Rolando, 60 Matos, Huber, 36, 72, 73, 80 Matthews, Herbert, 2 Mexican Revolution, 8 Mexico, 8, 29, 30, 38–40, 43–50, 52–56, 59, 61, 64, 71, 74, 79, 83, 84, 99 Meza, Juan José, 53, 83 Miret, Pedro, 62 Moncada barracks, 19, 34, 40, 47, 51, 57, 62 Monge, Luis Alberto, 54, 84 Morazán, Miguel Francisco, 75 Movimiento 26 de Julio, 2, 15, 34, 44–56, 61–65, 68, 69, 71–73, 76, 78–84, 87, 90–92, 95, 96 Muñoz Marín, Luis, 9, 72, 96 N Nicaragua, 2, 6, 8, 16, 18, 19, 21, 28, 34, 36–39, 44, 53, 55, 56, 64, 70, 74–76, 81, 82, 91, 97

L Larrazábal, Wolfgang, 78, 79, 87 Leiva de Holst, Elena, 51 Llaverías, Joaquín, 60, 61 Lombardo Toledano, Vicente, 59 López, Antonio ‘Ñico’, 51, 62

O Odría, Manuel, 85 Organización Auténtica (OA), 60, 61, 68, 69 Organization of American States (OAS), 75 Ornes, Horacio, 49 Ortodoxo party (PPC), 27, 30, 32, 33, 40, 47, 49, 52, 90 Osegueda, Raúl, 29, 30, 83

M Machado, Gerardo, 20, 27 Maderne, Feliciano, 76, 81, 87

P Partido de Liberación Nacional (PLN), 26

J Juarbe, Juan, 50, 79

112  Index Partido Socialista Popular (PSP), 27 Paz, Octavio, 83 Pazos, Felipe, 83 Peña, Silvio, 75 Pérez Jiménez, Marcos, 16, 18, 56, 58, 70, 74, 77, 78, 80, 83, 85 Pérez-Segnini, Ildegar, 84 Perón, Juan Domingo, 85 Prebisch, Raúl, 83 Prío, Carlos, 3, 6, 17, 18, 23, 27–33, 37, 39, 45, 47–49, 55, 59–63, 68, 69, 74, 78, 79, 87, 98, 99 Puerto Rico, 44, 52, 72 Q Queiroga, Fernando, 97 R Ramírez, Miguel Ángel, 26, 30, 76, 81, 87, 90 Ribas Montes, Jorge, 39 Roa, Raúl, 83 Rodó, José Enrique, 7 Rodríguez, José Horacio, 94 Rodríguez, Juan, 23, 25, 94, 98 Rodríguez, Léster, 62 Rodríguez, Luis Ignacio, 83 Rojas Pinilla, Gustavo, 74 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 93 S Salazar, António de Oliveira, 98 Sánchez Arango, Aureliano, 29, 30, 33, 40, 47–49, 55, 84 Sánchez, Francisco ‘El Indio’, 75, 87 Sandinistas. See Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional Sandino, Augusto César, 8, 84 Santamaría, Abel, 33

Santos, Eduardo, 22, 83, 84 Second World War, 9, 10, 13, 14, 19, 21, 35, 40, 92, 93 Servicio de Inteligencia Militar (SIM), 14 Sierra Maestra, 34, 46, 64, 65, 67–70, 72, 73, 76, 80, 82, 85, 87 Soler, Policarpo, 60, 62 Somoza dynasty, 2, 28, 52, 54, 56, 71, 74, 75, 82, 93, 95, 98 Anastasio, 18, 22, 34, 36, 39, 40, 53, 54, 71 Anastasio “Tachito” (son), 38 anti-movement, 50, 51, 53, 71, 95 Luis, 71 Soviet Union, 3, 12, 13, 51, 64, 92 Spain, 14, 18, 50, 77, 82, 97, 98 Spanish Civil War, 6, 7, 24, 50 Spanish Republicans, 15, 24, 26, 44, 50, 77 Suez Crisis, 63 T Torre, Cándido de la, 49 Torres Espinosa, Edelberto, 51, 83 Torres Rivas, Edelberto, 51, 52 Torriello, Jorge, 53 Transnacional de la Mano Dura, 15, 18, 34–40, 46, 52, 56, 70, 74, 77, 90–92, 94 Triple A, 47–49, 61, 84 Trujillo, Rafael, 2, 15, 18, 21, 22, 34–37, 45, 46, 56–65, 69, 74, 76, 82, 85, 90, 91, 93, 94, 98 U United Kingdom, 70, 85 British intelligence, 22, 73, 80, 84, 86

Index

United States, 3, 7, 8, 10–13, 15, 19, 28, 29, 31, 35–39, 44, 45, 47, 50, 51, 55, 58–64, 70, 82, 83, 85, 86, 89–94, 96, 98, 102 Urrutia, Manuel, 78 V Vargas, Getúlio, 84

  113

Venezuela, 6, 16, 18, 19, 21, 26, 35, 39, 58, 64, 67, 70, 77–80, 82–87, 91, 98 Villeda Morales, Ramón, 70, 75