Ignacio Ramonet: Both the landing at Playa Girón and the dirty war were authorized by President John Kennedy, who would later be a central figure, with you and Khrushchev, in the grave crisis that occurred in October 1962, which you've just mentioned. Yet when you talk about Kennedy, it doesn't sound as though you bear any animosity towards him, and even that you almost liked him, How do you explain that?
Fidel Castro: Well, with respect to Playa Girón, which was in April 1961, Kennedy really inherited the plan from Eisenhower and his vice president Richard Nixon. The invasion was a fait accompli; plans existed for destroying the Revolution, despite the fact that at that point the Revolution wasn't even officially Socialist.
The most important steps we had taken so far were the agrarian reform and the nationalization of large industrial and commercial corporations and banks, along with certain other measures of great social impact, such as the literacy campaign, the reduction in rates for electricity and telephones, the urban reform, the rent-control act, the confiscation of property of those who had stolen from the government and the people. We'd done some very important things, but we hadn't proclaimed ourselves as being Socialists, or openly proclaimed Marxist-Leninist doctrines. Girón accelerated the revolutionary process.
I should even say that our agrarian reform was, at the time, less radical than the reform General MacArthur had instituted in Japan. Because when the United States occupied Japan in 1945, MacArthur did away with large land holdings and parceled out the land and distributed it among the peasantry and the poor. But in Japan the large tracts of land hadn't belonged to big Americans corporations, while in Cuba they had. So that's why we weren't allowed to have an agrarian reform, just as it wasn't allowed in Guatemala when Arbenz tried to implement one in 1954.
So then, Kennedy, with reservations, scruples and some hesitation, put the Eisenhower and Nixon's plan into effect -- he believed that the plan developed by the CIA and the Pentagon would have the support of the [Cuban] people, that the people would rush into the streets to welcome the invaders and that the militias wouldn't fight, that they'd rise against the country's government. They may have believed their own lies and propaganda, and they most certainly underestimated the the Cuban people and our Cuban revolutionaries.
Kennedy wavered, but in the end, given the difficulties that the Playa Girón invasion was facing, he decided to give air support, but by the time they were ready to do that, there were no mercenaries to support. In less than seventy-two hours the overwhelming counter-attack by the Rebel Army and the Revolutionary Militias had totally wiped out that expedition. A hard defeat for the empire. And a great humiliation.
Ignacio Ramonet: How did Kennedy react to that humiliation?
Fidel Castro: Well, on the one hand he imposed an economic blockade and backed pirate attacks and the dirty war. But he also reacted more intelligently, by developing a political programme aimed at social reform and economic aid for Latin America.
Kennedy proposed, after the defeat at Girón an 'Alliance for Progress', plus the Peace Crorps, a very astute strategy for putting the brakes on revolution. He proposed a plan to inject $20 billion into the region over a period of ten years, and this money was to go towards a programme of agrarian reform -- agrarian reform! The administration that had never wanted to hear the phrase 'agrarian reform', that considered it a 'Communist' idea, was now suggesting that there was a need for agrarian reform in Latin America. And they also proposed many other initiatives: housing construction, fiscal reforms, educational programmes, health programmes -- almost exactly the same things we were doing.
In face of the Cuban Revolution, Kennedy was forced to launch initiatives of that kind. He realized that social reforms and economic factors in the region could well lead to a radical revolution across the continent. There could be a second Cuban Revolution, but on a continent-wide scale, and perhaps even more radical.
In the end, many Latin American rulers stole all the money they could and the Alliance for Progress didn't solve a thing. Still, it was an intelligent reaction on Kennedy's part -- he was a man of unquestionable intelligence.
From:
Fidel Castro, My Life, A Spoken Biography.
By Fidel Castro and Ignacio Ramonet
Scribner, New York, 2006
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