Vadney, T.E.
The World Since 1945.
Penkin Group Books.
USA, 1987.

A Neo-Colonial World: Latin America

Political independence combined with continuing economic dependence were the hallmarks of Latin American history well before the post-1945 rush to decolonization. Although conquered by Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth century, most of the region had succeeded in establishing its legal autonomy by the 1820s. Yet the legacy of the colonial past was not easily exorcised. The conquest of the Indian empires of Latin America, particularly the Aztecs and Incas, had reduced them to Third World status. Their entire social order was integrated into a trans-Atlantic market and restructured to serve the needs of outsider. Vast territories were organized as viceroyalties (or colonial kingdoms) subject to Madrid and Lisbon. Further, the coming of the conquistadores resulted in a demographic disaster, mainly as the result of the introduction of European diseases and of efforts to enslave the native population. In Mexico, for example, the number of Indians declined from perhaps as many as 25 million in 1519 to somewhat over one million in 1605; in Peru it fell from a likely peak of seven million to just under two million by 1580. Black slaves from Africa helped make up the loss, and in due course Spanish law recognized certain communally owned Indian lands as inalienable. But the decimation of the Indian population was bleak testimony to the impact of Europe. Of course, so was the trade in African slaves.

Latin America's Third World status was also linked to the situation of Spain and Portugal as dependencies (and thus underdeveloped areas) of Western Europe. The voyages of discovery and the appropriation of the wealth of the New World meant that both powers could prosper without developing, i.e. without building the kind of diversified and eventually industrialized society of which England was the model. Instead, Spain and Portugal simply looted the Americas, thus setting the latter on a course of export-oriented growth rather than diversified development.

For the Spanish the central plateau of Mexico and the mountainous empire of the Incas offered a rich storehouse of precious metals, chiefly silver, which could be taken home and spent on imports from other parts of Europe. Mining therefore became the leading economic sector in the Spanish empire, with haciendas established mainly to supply food for port towns and mining operations and not for a global market. The hacienda also represented a form of status for the non-industrial elite of the New World, as it was modelled on the virtually self-sufficient landed estate of feudal times. But this also reflected the pre-industrial orientation of the conquerers, and limited the possibility of development in the New World. It stood in marked contrast to the Thirteen Colonies of Britain in North America, where complex, diversified economies evolved. These carried on a lively export trade with the mother country, and Britain certainly intended that they remain subordinate to its interests. But the British colonies engaged in intercolonial trade as well, and by 1776 had established a complex commercial network, run by colonials and reaching even into the Caribbean. Diversification also meant that they were firmly on the road to eventual industrialization.

The Neo-Colonial Era

Independence did come to Latin America, though events in Europe more than in the Americas provided the immediate occasion for the break. The Napoleonic wars overwhelmed Spain and Portugal, and eroded their authority in the New World. Yet the establishment of autonomous states in the early nineteenth century proved to be more of a political than a social revolution. The Latin American wars of independence were mainly a series of intramural disputes between competing elites in the New and Old Worlds, each of which wanted to control the region on its own terms. Although at various points in the independence struggle popular discontent manifested itself and new leaders came forward (particularly from among the military), the poverty of the masses remained essentially unchanged. Moreover, independence did nothing to alter the unequal economic relations between Europe and Latin America which were at the root of the area's impoverishment in the first place. Britain quickly displaced Spain as Latin America's most important trading partner, but in most other respects the latter's role in the global market underwent little change. Thus diversified development (as distinct from mere quantitative growth) remained retarded, and as a consequence many of the social problems inherited from the colonial past persisted. These were to have a significant impact on the course of Latin American politics in the future. As elsewhere, economic underdevelopment would affect the potential for social revolution.

Yet the precise nature of Latin America's dependency varied over time region entered upon a period of rapid economic growth, fuelled mainly by the industrial revolution in Europe and North America. The result was the evolution of a much larger export-import sector than in the past, with Latin America serving as a source of raw materials and as a market for the manufactures of the industrialized world. The growing urban populations of the developed world also created a demand for imported foodstuffs from the region. The effect was a dramatic increase in Latin America's shipments of primary commodities such as copper, zinc, tin, guano and nitrate fertilizers, wool, rubber, tobacco, coffee, sugar, beef, hides, bananas and grain. At the same time governments began to develop the infrastructures needed to sustain an export economy: ports, canals and railways. The problem was the that foreigners provided most of the money for these facilities, so that the region was soon deeply in debt. Outsiders were also the source of investment capital for the expansion of agriculture and establishment of mining enterprises and small industries, and though in many countries the indigenous elite played a large role, a high percentage of foreign ownership typified the commercial and industrial sectors. Industrialization, however, was on a very modest scale, and did not alter the region's dependency on the export of primary commodities. By 1929 the most industrially developed country was Argentina, where industry accounted for 23 per cent of total national production. Then came Mexico at just over 14 per cent, followed by Brazil at about 12 per cent, Chile at 8 per cent, and Colombia at 6 per cent. Accordingly most manufactures still had to be imported.

There were other problems. In countries with a significant indigenous population governments opened up Indian lands to exploitation by entrepreneurs, even though in many cases such lands had long been recognized as the communal property of the native peoples. The idea was to make more land available for commercial agriculture, and also to create a labour surplus. Land once used for subsistence farming, i.e. for local consumption, was thus converted to production for export. Dispossessing the Indians also enhanced the profitability of the export sector, as their numbers swelled the labour market, a fact which kept wages depressed. Thus, in 1881-2, the ruling oligarchy of El Salvador issued a set of decrees declaring private rather than communal property-holding as the only legal form of land tenure, in effect abolishing common lands. In this way the peasantry lost control of vast tracts of the country's land over the next several decades. Without formal title there was nothing they could do to prevent developers from staking a claim to what in law were defined as vacant areas. All this spurred the growth of commercial agriculture in El Salvador, but obviously it also exacerbated the poverty of the population and widened the gap between rich and poor. The timing and rate of change varied from place to place, but in some of the less economically developed areas of Central America the process of dispossession continued well into the twentieth century, even into the 1950s and 1960s.

The expansion of the export-import economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resulted in other social changes as well, and had an important impact on politics. In the most industrially developed countries the urbanized middle sectors of society began to increase in size. In Argentina, for example, half the people were classified as urban by the First World War, and in Buenos Aires the middle class was approaching one-third of the city's population. The establishment of small and often foreign-owned industries in Argentina, Brazil and Chile also spurred the growth of the industrial working class, especially after the turn of the century. Distinct from workers pursuing traditional handicrafts, this class began to form trade unions and mutual aid societies, and laid the groundwork for becoming a political force in the future. For the time being, however, the degree of industrial labour organization remained low, as most manufacturing activity still took place in small shops rather than the huge factories associated with industrialization in the First World. It was not until after the Great Depression of 1929 that the working classes exerted a significant impact, on Latin American politics.

In the meantime the oligarchies of some countries reformed the political system and opened it up to new groups. Argentina may serve as an example. In the face of rising demands for broader political rights (even the middle class was effectively excluded from politics), the national government in 1912 bestowed the vote on all males over eighteen. Yet this was really a transitional stratagem. While the expansion of the electorate did promise to enhance the political influence of the masses someday, it did not make the labour vote the determining factor in Argentinian politics right away. The immediate impact of electoral reform was to draw together the middle and upper sectors of society. The extension of the franchise to its members meant that the middle class acquired enough of a stake in the existing order to make it an ally of the oligarchy. A system of co-optation began to evolve, whereby the upper classes combined with the middle classes to offset the political power of the lower classes. Of course, in the long run electoral reform might co-opt workers into the existing political system as well. It did offer workers the prospect of a share in power, and so might defuse the appeal of anarchism, syndicalism and other revolutionary ideologies. Such ideas were gaining in popularity at the turn of the century, largely among Italian and other European immigrants. But by creating an alliance of the upper and middle classes the immediate effect of electoral reform was to manage and direct the demand for change, at least for the time being.

It should be emphasized, however, that although the reformist model also evolved in Chile and some other countries there was nothing inevitable about it. Elsewhere politics often took a different course. Perhaps the clearest example was Mexico, where from 1876 to 1911 Porfirio Díaz ruled as dictator despite the institutional forms of republicanism Although Díaz used his monopoly of power to promote economic development, the benefits were not widely dispersed among the population. The eventual outcome was the Mexican Revolution, and a very different history than Argentina or Chile. And even in the latter countries governments often resorted to police powers to limit the scope of labour and middle-class politics, and the military sometimes acted to install leaders of its own choosing. There was no single pattern of politics evolving consistently through time for all of Latin America, and the experience of each country was different.

The 1930s Depression, however, once again altered the terms of Latin America's integration into the global market and thus had an impact on politics. The value of its exports fell by half, wiping out the income needed to buy imported manufactures. There was no choice but to concentrate on internal development. The result later came to be described by analysts as "import-substitution industrialization", or ISI. In the 1930s it was mainly those countries which already had an industrial base which followed the ISI pattern. The loss of income from exports provided a type of tariff protection and thus helped ISI along, as Latin Americans lacked the foreign exchange to maintain their normal purchases of imported manufactures. Instead, more of the region's raw materials were utilized at home, at least in some countries. Just as important, the outcome provided jobs and promised to keep the urban labour force from falling prey to radical politics, though the landed oligarchy still feared the consequences of working-class political power.

Indeed, the political system was severely tested by the Depression, and in the years after 1929 military coups took place in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Cuba, among others.

The state sometimes took a leading role in ISI because foreign investment had dried up and because local entrepreneurs lacked the capital necessary to revive the economy. Accordingly, besides raising tariffs (depending on the country, not all followed the same policies) to protect such industry as did exist and investing in infrastructures, governments also made direct investments in industrial undertakings, such as steel in Chile and Brazil or petroleum in Argentina and Mexico (where foreign oil companies were also expropriated). A large role for government in business thus became a normal state of affairs in the region, as publicly owned development corporations assumed responsibility for industrial investment. Perhaps the most famous of these was Chile's CORFO, or Corporación de Fomento de la Producción.

There were, of course, political consequences. The process of ISI meant a further expansion of the urban working classes, though the impact of this varied from one country to another. In Chile a competitive party system survived despite the intervention of the military. By the late 1930s and early 1940s a popular-front government was in power, and included even socialists and communists. It did not remain united for long, but it was an important precedent in Chilean politics. In Argentina a type of populist politics (based on a coalition of urban labour and other social groups) emerged by the mid-1940s under the charismatic leadership of Juan Perón. For the first time the mobilization of the urban working class became a major factor in the country's political life, though only with the toleration of the army. The latter hoped to find someone to manage the masses, and accepted Perón as long as he did so. The politics of personalism evolved in Brazil as well, under Getúlio Vargas from the ,1930s to 1954.

Events in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s also had an impact on the situation, but the European influence suggested channelling popular aspirations in favour of a hierarchical not an egalitarian order. This was the era of Hitler and Mussolini. Many people in Latin America admired their decisive leadership; particularly the way they had restored prosperity to their countries. Further, the fascists of Europe had evolved a corporatist model of politics, i.e. one which appeared to allocate political influence by functional group (e.g. labour and capital) rather than simply by numbers. In this way, presumably, classes with contradictory interests might share power according to their role in society, accepting the fact that some were more important than others and therefore should have a larger say in policy. Not surprisingly some members of the Latin American elite thought corporatism might be the key to political stability in their part of the world as well.

The problem with the emergent populist movements was that they attempted to reconcile contradictory class interests - specifically, to satisfy popular demands without threatening the power of the oligarchy. The hope was that ISI and the earnings produced by rising exports during and after the Second World War would help increase wages and make it possible for government to provide more social benefits for the working classes, thus winning their loyalty. While charismatic leaders might succeed as long as the economy prospered, the faltering of world demand for Latin American commodities at the end of the 1940s, combined with the inflation consequent on high levels of government spending, doomed populism as a long-term policy. By the 1950s economists, and the military, were preaching restraint, and charisma in politics increasingly gave way to even more overt authoritarianism. The problem was that in the long run ISI did not work. It did not occur on such a scale as to reduce the region's vulnerability to the global market, and Latin America remained dependent on exports rather than internal development as the mainstay of its prosperity. The regional economy was as a result still susceptible to global cycles of boom and bust, and politics reflected this fact.

There were a number of reasons why ISI proved inadequate. First, while the governments of the region could raisé capital more easily than the private sector, they still did not have enough to achieve a level of industrialization comparable to that of the First World. Second, the technology for industrialization still had to be imported, so that Latin America remained financially indebted to Europe and the United States. Third; the deployment of advanced technology meant that fewer jobs were created than expected. Imported technology was capital-intensive precisely because it came from the most industrially developed countries of the world, and was not well suited to solving Latin America's unemployment problems. And fourth, the amount of demand for manufactures in any single country or even region of Latin America was insufficient to sustain a high level of industrial activity without access to world markets. But it was the precipitate decline of the global market in the 1930s that had accounted for the economic crisis in the first place. Moreover, the Depression brought a wave of economic nationalism, so that the nations of the world, including some in Latin America, raised their tariffs in an effort to protect their own industries from outside competition. In the face of the Depression, however, ISI was the only strategy available, so many countries attempted to make it work. Such success as ISI did seem to achieve was really the result of the Second World War and the post-war boom in the First World. This is not to say that ISI made no contribution to regional prosperity, but only that it was not enough to bring about economic and hence political stability.

The result was that by the 1950s and 1960s governments were moving back to a foreign-financed export-import economy, usually at the behest of military regimes. It often took repressive governments to accomplish the retreat from ISI. Economic stagnation translated into political unrest among the working classes, both urban and rural, so that the army moved to demobilize popular political parties. Indeed, leftist guerrilla movements had begun to appear in many places by the 1960s and 1970s, giving the military authorities another reason to act. Once in power the latter attempted to stimulate the economy by attracting multinational corporations. But the multinationals only found the region attractive in so far as they could take advantage of cheap labour and raw materials, so that the cycle of dependency was renewed. Repression by the host governments created a favourable investment for foreign capital by abolishing or restricting the right to form labour unions, setting low wages, demobilizing political opposition even at the cost of a free press and free speech, and otherwise clearing the way for highly exploitative labour relations. In sum, Latin America's dependency had come full circle, and the result was likely to be continuing social and political

Argentina and Juan Perón

Argentina was perhaps the clearest example of some of the above trends, particularly the new mass politics represented by populism. (Remember that populism in Latin America was urban-based and associated with the rise of industry and the expansion of the city working class, in contrast to the experience of the United States where it was a rural and even anti-urban movement.) As in many other countries, the 1929 Depression served as the catalyst for an army coup (in 1930), and a provisional military government was established, headed by General José Uriburu. But the events of 1930 were more than a seizure of power by the officer corps, and in fact the army was not in the habit of turning out governments (it had not done so since the 1860s). Although they took the initiative, the officers had the support of the cattle and wheat barons and even some factions of the middle and working classes. There was little doubt, however, that the army's closest allies were the cattle and wheat oligarchy which had dominated politics before the First World War. Since then, and as the result of legislation extending the franchise, putatively middle-class parties had been in power. After the 1930 coup, however, the army's hope was that the old oligarchy might take control of the political system once again, and serve as a bastion against the political forces unleashed by the rise of industry. Elections in late 1931 restored the legal niceties of civilian rule, though the military banned the candidate of the chief opposition party and thus guaranteed the victory of one of its own, General Agustín Justo.

With the decline of the export sector, however, Argentinian entrepreneurs had few options but to increase their stake in industry. This was less the result of a coherent economic plan on the part of the government than the outcome of the Depression. The economic crash devastated the market for Argentina's traditional exports. Moreover, the members of the British Commonwealth closed ranks in the face of the Great Depression, and at the Ottawa Conference of 1932 agreed to establish a system of "imperial preferences". This simply meant that they would trade as much as possible among themselves, to the exclusion of outsiders. Canada, Australia and New Zealand thus threatened to take over Argentina's role as one of the major suppliers of beef, lamb, wool and grain to the United Kingdom. Buenos Aires responded by allowing British manufacturers free access to its domestic market if the UK would continue to buy Argentina's primary commodities. In other words, the Argentinians bargained to be exempted from the application of imperial preferences. This saved the country from the worst effects of the Depression, though at the cost of leaving its industrial sector open to foreign competition. Yet it turned out not to make a great deal of difference, because Argentina simply could not afford to buy foreign made products. The effect of the 1930s Depression was to provide virtually the same protection as tariffs for some of the country's infant industries. Industrialization thus advanced despite and not because of government policy. It was ISI by default.

In reality, though, the army and the cattle-and-wheat oligarchy hoped to preserve the old export-import economy, because such a pattern of growth would head off the expansion of working-class power associated with industrialization. In the absence of any alternatives available to the private sector, however, the country's industry did experience modest growth. Furthermore, by the late 1930s it was about 60 per cent owned by Argentinian rather than foreign capital. But it was the resumption of massive exports during the Second World War, not domestic manufacturing, that brought the country out of the Depression. Once again the world needed Argentina's primary commodities. The problem was that such industrialization as already had occurred proved quite sufficient to exacerbate the social changes which so worried the old elite. The industrial workforce grew from 500,000 in the mid-1930s to about two million by the late 1940s. Although enterprises of fewer than a hundred employees were still the norm, many of these people worked in large factories.

The governments of the 1930s and early 1940s thus remained in power less as the result of a coherent economic plan than a combination of coalition politics and rigged elections. The army and the oligarchy had much to fear from the political consequences of the expansion of industry, so that even the 1940s promise of prosperity did not lead to a democratic opening. Indeed, from 1931 on only the forms not the substance of competitive politics had been observed, and while a later president, Roberto Ortiz, did seem amenable to free elections for a brief interlude beginning in 1938, not even these were conceded after 1940. Illness forced Ortiz out of office, and his vice-president, Ramón Castillo, proceeded to suspend the national congress, despite (or more likely because of) the rising numbers of city workers. The rise of industry also created a new entrepreneurial elite, which was another threat to the power of the traditional political authorities. In effect the 1930s and early 1940s witnessed the last hurrah of the old cattle-and-wheat oligarchy. With the help of the army they proposed to dominate politics and to exclude the new groups created by urban-industrial development.

Yet the demographic trends associated with industry were bound to have an impact on politics sooner or later, and the potential for disorder remained high. The only thing the civilian leaders did, however, was to manipulate the political system in favour of the existing ruling groups. This could not work for ever, and the lack of real participation simply heightened the demands of the middle and working classes for a share in political power, not the tokenism of the past. What good was it to have universal manhood suffrage if the state moved against opposition parties and labour organizations, and outlawed their candidates for office? Thus the pressure for change was increasing. At the same time the generals hovered in the background, growing ever more restless and wondering whether the civilian politicians could ever achieve order. Further, the outbreak of the Second World War encouraged the military's ultra nationalism. The army's pro-Axis sympathies (Argentina did not declare war on Germany and Japan until 1945) reinforced its sense of mission, as many officers believed that Hitler and Mussolini were models to be emulated. The argument was that in Argentina as in Europe decisive leadership was needed to save the country from class war and the threat of Bolshevism. Anti-Semitism was rife, and during the war years Jews and other minorities were the victims of both vigilante and official violence. Increasingly the generals came to regard themselves as once again called upon to rule directly rather than through civilian intermediaries. These views were shared by more junior officers as well, particularly a new military brotherhood organized in 1942-3 and known as the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos, or GOU, the Group of United Officers.

The result was another military coup, on 4 June 1943. A new government, first under General Pedro Ramírez and later General Edelmiro Farrell, assumed office. But the 1943 coup only confirmed the army's aspiration for power, not its readiness to find a new political formula for ruling the country. Initially there was no change in either domestic or foreign policy. However alarmed the officers may have been at the threat of political instability under civilian rule, it turned out that few of them had any better ideas about how to manage the new political classes that had been forming over the last several decades. But one among their number did. This was Juan Perón. Before the coup he had been under Farrell's command, and when the latter was appointed war minister in the Ramirez government, he brought Perón along to fill the number two post. It was a lucky break for Perón, an undistinguished colonel in the Argentinian army but one of the GOU's founding members. He had had a secondary role in the army coups of both 1930 and 1943, but with Farrell's patronage was poised for greater things. Because of past failures to produce political order, Perón opted to mobilize rather than resist the masses. He therefore inaugurated a new era in Argentian politics.

Perón served the 1943 Ramirez government as under-secretary of the War Department and as labour secretary, neither of which were major postings at the time but which he used to good advantage. This was possible because his immediate superior (Farrell) was not politically adept and therefore depended on him to an unusual degree. The War Department placed Perón in a position to influence appointments in the army and thus to increase his personal following among the officer corps. And the Labour Department provided an opportunity to cultivate the masses, mainly by intervening in strikes to win settlements favourable to the working class and by co-opting the trade union leadership. Indeed, Perón promoted the expansion of labour organization as a way of furthering his own political ambitions, and hundreds of thousands of new members joined at the encouragement of the labour secretary. At Perón's prodding, the military government also improved health and retirement benefits for the working class, and provided for job security, workplace inspections, and paid vacations and holidays. By the time Farrell took over the presidency in 1944, Perón was well on his way to becoming the most important man in the government, and thus added the vice-presidency and the top position in the war ministry to his roster of offices. Earlier, in November 1943, the Labour Department had been given a much higher priority, and social security was officially added to the secretary's responsibilities. Perón made certain that the public understood that the advances in social welfare were his doing.

Perón saw the necessity of a new political strategy, one that would satisfy the masses, if stability were ever to be more than a mere chimera. The people could not be ignored any longer. He soon overshadowed the president, who was really a caretaker ruler acting on behalf of the army. A charismatic figure, at ease with the common folk, Perón was also a demagogue, and he proved quite willing to use force and terror against his enemies. But most recent governments had been capable of the latter, so that what distinguished Perón was his talent for drawing the masses behind the kind of strong leadership the army favoured. The problem was that the crowd could only be pleased as long as the economy remained strong. It took prosperity to provide the government and the private sector with the tax revenues and profits to finance benefits for labour and the middle classes.

Yet in 1945 Perón was still not president, and in fact his popularity with the masses was initially a cause of alarm among the officer corps. Most of the army still feared the consequences of democracy, and did not understand that Perón was less a democrat than a rabble-rouser and a master of mob rule. He would run the people, not be run by them. Accordingly, on 9 October, an army garrison forced Perón to resign and imprisoned him in what amounted to yet another coup. Farrell was left in office, but this time the outcome was more than the military bargained for. At the bidding of Perón's political lieutenants crowds of union members and others took to the streets of Buenos Aires in such numbers that the generals concluded that it was too dangerous to risk a confrontation. Disunity in army ranks on how to handle the crisis also recommended caution, and no doubt helped Perón. His mistress, Eva Duarte, played a vital role in events. An actress and singer of dubious talent, she none the less was a forceful and (as would become more apparent in time) demagogic personality, and she steeled Perón's resolve to wait out the crisis rather than go into exile. Soon she would marry Perón and become his partner in ruling the country. Unsure of its ability to control the crowds and unwilling to risk civil war, the army backed down and freed Perón on 17 October. What started out as an attempt to eliminate him from power only proved the success of his earlier measures for cultivating the masses, and left him as the front runner for the presidential election of 1946. In sum, the army's intention boomeranged.

What followed was almost anti-climactic. Perón won the election, though not by an overwhelming majority. He received 54 per cent of the popular vote, though his supporters achieved a stronger showing in the national congress. But once in office he relied on the post-war boom to consolidate his power. Accumulated credits from wartime sales also helped. Argentina had exported to both sides, Axis and Allied, during the Second World War, and made huge profits by charging what the market would bear. But the conflict had also reduced the flow of imports. Both the state and business therefore had accumulated reserves which Perón could draw upon, at least for a while. The good times lasted until about 1950. Meanwhile the government embarked upon a new programme of industrialization. The idea was to expand the domestic market, which would be a gain for Argentinian entrepreneurs, labour and the urban middle class, i.e. for Perón's principal supporters. Government policy offered considerably less to the rural sector, as the day of the cattle-and-wheat oligarchy had passed. Of course, industrial development required importing foreign technology, machines and energy supplies, so the country's reserves were quickly depleted. Government-dictated wage increases and social benefits had the same effect, however politically profitable for Perón. In 1947 Perón issued a symbolic declaration of economic independence from foreign domination, and the next year the government bought control of the country's railways (which had been mainly British-owned) and assumed ownership of most of the banking, insurance, shipping, grain elevator and communications sectors. More importantly, it promoted a state agency to take over the marketing of the country's key exports (still mainly primary commodities) and the purchase of imports, and to guide the reallocation of resources from the rural to the urban sectors. This was the IAPI or Instituto Argentino de Producción e Intercambio.

While Peronistas cultivated an image of social progress, they also backed this up with a heavy dose of repression. The strategy was to trade social welfare for civil liberties. For example, Eva Perón established a philanthropic foundation to distribute assistance in her name, and for all practical purposes she guided Labour Department policy. But corruption afflicted the whole system, including the IAPI. A new constitution gave the vote to women in 1949, and the president's wife took charge of managing the new bloc of votes. The Partido Perónista Feminino was established to complement the Partido Perónista. For critics of the regime, on the other hand, there were the descamisados. These were gangs much like Mussolini's Black Shirts or Hitler's Brown Shirts, and were deployed by the Perónista Party to discipline the regime's enemies. The methods were the same as in the Nazi era: beatings, destruction of property and other forms of terrorism. The legal authorities helped by the opportune use of their powers of arrest. Even opposition members of the congress were intimidated and imprisoned. In 1951 Perón suggested that his wife run as his vice-presidential candidate in the coming elections, but the army (not surprisingly the stronghold of Argentinian machismo) vetoed this. She died of cancer the next year at the age of thirty-three. Her value to the regime was perhaps nowhere more apparent than in scattered but vocal demands that the Roman Catholic Church canonize her as a saint. It was not to be.

The storm clouds were on the horizon well before Eva Perón's death. By the early 1950s exports fell drastically, as European agriculture recovered in the years after the Second World War. Shipments of meat, for example, fell to about one-third of pre-war levels. The result was a decline in income for both the public and the private sectors. Further, the country's accumulated reserves were exhausted by the cost of repatriating foreign-owned enterprises and by the regime's social-welfare measures. Yet the industrialization programme still depended on importing foreign technology, because Argentina did not have a highly developed research and development sector or a machine tool industry. In the face of declining revenues, therefore, the government adopted a policy of fiscal restraint, but this meant a slowdown in public investment. More and more the government turned to the descamisados to silence its critics. It imposed censorship on the press, including the famous opposition newspapers La Nación and La Prensa, and in contrast to 1946 rigged the 1952 presidential election. The opposition did run a candidate, but government control of the media limited his access to the electorate, and thugs disrupted his public appearances. Perón won 65 per cent of the ballots cast, and it may well be that he was still popular enough to be the genuine choice of the people. After all, he still promised them a great deal, and projected an anti-establishment image. Yet the regime's interference in the election showed Perón's increasing sense of insecuriy.

Indeed, once he was confirmed in office, the country's economic problems induced Perón to reverse his government's commitment to economic independence. The result was a fundamental shift in policy. Perón invited foreign capital back into the country, and when Milton Eisenhower (brother of the US president) visited Buenos Aires in 1953, he was feted as the advance agent of Yankee money. Equally important, Perón informed labour that it was time to freeze wages and social benefits. Perhaps most interesting, though, was the president's attack on the Catholic Church. Perón had built his political career on his talent for wooing the masses, yet in 1954 he began a campaign against an institution which enjoyed the loyalty of most of his followers. He took steps to legalize divorce and prostitution, dismissed clerics from the education system, and ordered his congress to revoke the status of the church as the country's established religion. Popular demonstrations against these attacks resulted only in police and descamisado violence against church property and the clergy itself. In June 1955 Pope Pius XII issued a decree of excommunication against all government officials who acted against the clergy. Perón seems to have been reacting to the efforts of a few churchmen to penetrate the labour movement and to promote a reform party (the Partido Demócrata Christiano). But his response was out of proportion to the threat and turned out to be a major political blunder. At last he gave the opposition an issue to rally the masses, as most Argentinians were Catholics.

The key actor in the events of the next few months, however, was the army. The country's economic and political troubles provided the rationale, and the attack on the church provided the context in which the military could act with some confidence that a coup d'etat would be accepted by enough of the population. The military had never entirely welcomed Perón's ascendancy (remember October 1945), and it was apparent the president was slipping. For the officers to remain loyal meant tying their fortunes to a falling star. Their sense of survival was too keen for this. The end came in September, beginning with a series of army revolts in the provinces and then spreading to Buenos Aires. The military was far more united than in 1945, and so the descamisados were no match. The navy threatened to bombard the city, and overflights by the air force spread panic among the population. By the twenty-first the capital was occupied, and Perón quietly went into exile.

Yet Perón had mobilized important forces in Argentinian society, and these did not disappear. As in the past, the generals were better at diagnosing the disease clan prescribing a cure. The problem for the future was to find some way of co-opting the Peronistas into a movement acceptable to the army, and this became the central preoccupation of government, whether military or civilian, over the next decades. Most of the post-1955 regimes were run by soldiers, as the army intended whenever it appeared that the few civilian presidents were making too many concessions to Perón's followers. The outcome was steadily worsening political polarization, so that by the early 1970s small urban guerrilla movements began to appear, and Argentinian politics seemed to be on the brink of civil war and possibly social revolution. This persuaded even the army that perhaps it was time for Perón's return to power after eighteen years of exile. But this is a story for the future.

The United States and the hemisphery security

Thus the eventual failure of populism drove Argentina back into the arms of outside investors and renewed its dependency on the First World. The army reimposed a regimen of foreign-led economic growth, and in effect restored the export-import economy of the past For the officer corps, economic recovery was more important than democracy, and it proved capable of enforcing a solution, at least for the balance of the 1950s and the 1960s. The same was not true throughout the Western Hemisphere, and to the United States the danger seemed acute in Central America and the Caribbean. There local leaders welcomed foreign capital, but failed to preserve the stability essential for a favourable investment climate. Moreover, the region was of immediate strategic importance to the USA, simply because it was close to home and because of the Panama Canal. There was also the need to protect 'our' raw materials (as the State Department's chief Soviet specialist, George Kennan, undiplomatically put it) and to prevent the USSR from exploiting the possibility of social revolution on the very borders of the USA.

The United States therefore became more deeply entangled in the internal affairs of Central America and the Caribbean than in the rest of the Western Hemisphere. Indeed, this had been the case before as well as after 1945. The United States sent troops to Cuba during its war for independence from Spain in 1898, but then imposed a protectorate which lasted until 1934. This included the right to control the country's foreign policy and to intervene in its internal affairs. In fact, Washington forced the Cubans to confirm these rights in their constitution. Troops were stationed in the country from 1898 to 1902 and from 1906 to 1909, and returned for brief episodes in 1917 and 1922. The US formally surrendered its privileges in 1934, but retained a naval base at Guantanamo Bay and was able to keep watch over Cuba and indeed the entire Caribbean region. But Cuba was only the beginning.

In 1903 the United States used the threat of force to separate Panama from Colombia, because the latter had resisted plans for an isthmian canal across what was then its territory. The US in effect created the country of Panama so that it could proceed with its plans. Panama became a de facto US protectorate, and remained so until 1936. The surrender of the Canal Zone, however, was not conceded until much later, with the ratification of the Panama Canal Treaties in 1978. These provided that Washington would transfer complete authority to Panama, but only by the year 2000. Even then the US retained the right to intervene to defend the Canal should it ever be endangered.

Yet the list did not end there. The Dominican Republic was a United States protectorate from 1905 to 1940, including a period of military occupation between 1916 and 1924. Washington also acted as guardian over Nicaragua from 1911 to 1933, and marines occupied the country in 1909-10, 1912-25 and, after a short break, 1926-33. The troops were withdrawn only when Nicaragua established its own National Guard (under Anastasio Somoza García), which for the next four and a half decades proved capable of preserving a regime which Washington continued to support despite its dictatorial character. Similarly US troops left Haiti in 1934, though Washington retained the right to supervise the country's finances until 1941. The 1911 Mexican Revolution also caused a crisis in US-Latin American-relations. Marines occupied Vera Cruz in 1914, and in 1916 President Woodrow Wilson ordered General John ('Black Jack') Pershing to cross the border and track down the famous Pancho Villa, leader of one of the contending factions in the Mexican revolution. Villa had crossed the US-Mexican border, but Wilson's real objective was to influence the policies of the revolutionary government. Pershing's forces soon grew to over 10,000 troops and penetrated more than 300 miles into Mexican territory. The Mexican president, Venustiano Carranza, feared that the USA might be planning to establish a permanent presence, and there was a real danger of all-outwar between the two nations. Before the crisis was over, Wilson called up the National Guard and dispatched 100,000 troops to protect the US border. Deepening US involvement in the First World War, however, compelled Washington to reconsider its priorities, and Pershing's expedition was ordered home without having captured Villa. The last US troops withdrew by February 1917. Wilson did not have a great deal to show for his interference, and in the 1920s the State Department began having second thoughts about the effectiveness of direct intervention. This view gained more and more credence throughout the decade. There was never unanimity, but because US relations with Central America, the Caribbean and Mexico remained troubled the advocates of a new approach gained a hearing. The eventual result was the 'Good Neighbour Policy', formally announced by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. In sum, this committed the United States to surrender its self-proclaimed right to take unilateral military action in the Western Hemisphere.

Yet there was less to the Good Neighbour Policy than met the eye. Roosevelt made much ado about the new approach, as though the USA deserved special credit for seeking non-military solutions to its problems with nearby countries. In fact, the Good Neighbour Policy did not represent a hands-off strategy, but a greater emphasis on economic rather than military leverage. Besides, direct intervention fomented anti-Yankee resentment, and so the State Department increasingly viewed such tactics as counter-productive.

Moreover, while the above concerns were uppermost in the minds of policy-makers during the late 1920s and the 1930s, in the long run it turned out that the military option had not really been abandoned. It simply assumed new forms. For example, US Marines would not be needed so often if Washington were to provide training and weapons to indigenous military forces. These could act as surrogates in place of US troops, because the new armies were controlled by governments dependent on Washington for aid and trade. The precedent for this was Somoza's National Guard in Nicaragua, which had been organized in the 1930s, but the main impact of the policy came in the 1950s and after.

While billions of dollars were spent on hardware after the Second World War, training was every bit as important in upgrading the capabilities of the military in Latin America, and the scale of US activity was considerable. Almost 83,000 military personnel from twenty-one Latin American countries were processed between 1950 and 1979 under the US International Military Education and Training Programme and the Military Assistance Programme, and many of these people later went on to assume positions of political leadership in their home countries. One of the most important training-centers was the School of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone. In addition, foreign personnel attended, among others, the US Army Infantry School in Fort Benning, Georgia; the Army Military Police School at Fort Gordon, Georgia; the Army Intelligence School at Fort Huachuca, Arizona; the Army Institute for Military Assistance, or the so-called 'Green Beret' school, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; the Naval Amphibious School in Coronado, California; the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island; and the Naval Guided Missile School in Dam Neck, Virgilua. The main point of this training effort was not to assist the US in its global or hemispheric operations, but to enable local armies to head off internal threats from social revolutionaries. Much of the training therefore concentrated on counter-insurgency and anti-guerrilla tactics, the hope being that the local military could take care of its own domestic problems so that US intervention would not be necessary.

There were other qualifications to the Good Neighbour Policy, though again these emerged most clearly after the Second World War. At Rio de Janeiro in August 1947 the United States renewed the interventionist option, but as a multilateral undertaking in unison with countries it would help arm. The new approach resulted in the signing of the Inter-American Treaty for Reciprocal Assistance (the Rio Pact). This was simply a hemispheric defensive alliance. From Washington's point of view perhaps the most important feature of the Rio Pact was that it took advantage of provisions in the United Nations Charter (Articles 51-3) which allowed regional associations to act independently of the UN in emergencies. The real import of the new alliance, therefore, was to create a system which the United States hoped to dominate, though within a structure of shared power. American businessmen and members of the US Congress did not relish the prospect of UN interference so close to home. After all, the Soviets had representation in the United Nations, so this was a sufficient reason for limiting its authority in the Western Hemisphere.

More important than the Rio Pact, as it turned out, was the Organization of American States, founded at Bogota in 1948. The OAS was supposed to regularize the process of hemispheric consultation by providing a framework for discussion, and to complement the military alliance created at Rio. As with the Rio treaty, however, the effect was to exempt the Americas from UN interference and thus protect the claim of the United States to a special role in the region, though again within a framework of multilateral rather than unilateral action. Article 15 of the OAS charter provided that "no State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State", and thus seemed to provide international sanction for the Good Neighbour Policy. But the import of Article 15 was vitiated by another clause which allowed for action to be 'adopted for the maintenance of peace and security in accordance with existing treaties', such as the Rio Pact.

That the United States regarded the latter as the operative clause in case of internal or external subversion soon became clear in State Department interpretations of the OAS charter. Briefly, US policy makers concluded that 'the doctrine of nonintervention never did proscribe the assumption by the organized community of a legitimate concern with any circumstances that threatened the common welfare'. Intervention was still acceptable as long as it was the work of the group and not just one nation acting alone. Because Washington was determined to dominate the OAS, however, many other American nations regarded its interpretation as a distinction without a difference. The question of intervention thus remained a live issue in the years to come, as the nations south of the Rio Grande resisted or vitiated repeated US schemes' for OAS action on Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua. The mere creation of a new multilateral organization did not banish the spectre of US hegemony, and USA-Latin American relations remained disturbed. Indeed, the future would show that, if Washington could not have its way on multilateral action, it was prepared to abandon the Good Neighbour Policy and resort to unilateral action, though preferably by indirect means. A crisis in Guatemala proved this soon enough.

Counter-revolution: Guatemala

On 15 May 1954, 2,000 tons of small arms and ammunition arrived

in Guatemala from the Eastern Bloc, thus setting the scene for a US-sponsored coup d'état against the government of Jacobo Arbenz the same year. The weaponry had been manufactured in Czechoslovakia and shipped from the port of Szczecin in Poland on a vessel chartered by a Swedish company from a British company. Most importantly, it was Guatemala which had been looking for an arms deal, not the USSR, so that the sale was not part of a concerted Soviet plan to intervene in Central America (though the East no doubt was willing to take advantage of an opportunity to cause trouble in the heart of the Western sphere). In fact, the USSR did not even have an embassy in the country, though it had accorded diplomatic recognition to a new Guatemalan government in 1945. Guatemala was in the market because the United States and its allies had refused to sell it arms since 1948. The decision to buy from Eastern Europe was apparently a last resort. Indeed, Arbenz and his predecessor, Juan José Arévalo, had attempted to make purchases in Western Europe, Mexico, Cuba and Argentina before turning to the East, but all sales were blocked by the USA. The United States was unhappy with developments in Guatemala, and withheld military aid and even sales as a way of pressing the government to make changes. Then the introduction of Czech arms into the region provided the excuse for a direct blow against the regime.

Far more was at issue than the arrival of the first shipment of communist-made weapons purchased by a Central American government, as United States-Guatemalan relations had been deteriorating ever since the end of the Second World War. In point of fact the 1954 coup had less to do with any Soviet threat than with the fate of US property. It was hardly in the interest of the United States government, however, to publicize this, and the media failed to note the omission. Far better to blame the Russians than to see the region's problems as the product of unequal economic relations between the First World and the Third World. The latter would imply that the crisis was of the West's own making. Many people in the United States therefore saw 1954 as an isolated event rather than as one chapter in a long series of US-Central American confrontations.

The Guatemalan crisis really began a decade earlier, with the overthrow of the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico and the holding of free elections in 1944. The victor was Juan José Arévalo, an exiled author and teacher who had returned from Argentina to run for the presidency. The problem was that the preceding years of dictatorship had prevented the formation of a stable party system, so that the restoration of democracy saw the emergence of a myriad of political factions. No single party was capable of ruling alone. Arévalo ran on a platform he characterized as 'spiritual socialism', and relied on a fluid coalition of various leftists, including communists. The new president, however, was not a communist himself. Neither he nor his successor, Arbenz, proposed nationalizing the entire economy, but only key sectors, and therefore represented a middle ground between a totally collectivized and a totally privatized system. Arévalo proscribed the communist party as such, though it regrouped under various names and sometimes in competing organizations. Communists were even deported during his administration. But Arévalo also defended the right of all citizens who stayed within the law to enjoy full civil rights, and so individual communists and their sympathizers soon played a large role in events. The communists' advantage was that they had a coherent programme to offer, in contrast to some other movements. The disarray of the political system thus placed the left in a strong position to influence policy, especially as Arévalo's own platform was not very specific. Given the legacy of repression and exploitation under Ubico, however, the left would most likely have been strong no matter who led the government, and therefore the United States became alarmed at the direction of Guatemala's politics.

To red-hunters in the United States the proof of the country's communization came soon enough. For example, the Law of Forced Rental required large landowners to lease uncultivated properties to peasants at nominal rates, raising the spectre of more radical land reform sometime in the future. In addition, the government introduced social security, established a central bank, and permitted unions to organize and to go on strike. Communist labour leaders were particularly successful in negotiating wage increases, and they dominated the Confederación General de Trabajadores de Guatemala, a coalition of labour organizations. By the 1 950s the urban labour movement had become the principal base of communist influence over the government.

Elections were held in 1950, but the State Department found little encouragement in the outcome. The new president was Jacobo Arbenz, an army man and defence minister in the previous cabinet. In the complex manoeuvring over the succession during the preceding year Arbenz had emerged as the candidate of the left. His chief rival for the presidency had been Francisco Javier Arana, head of the armed forces and the most influential right-winger in the government. As Arana's star rose, however, the left closed ranks behind Arbenz. Then, on 18 July 1949, Arana was assassinated in an ambush outside Guatemala City. The new president therefore came to power under a cloud of suspicion that he had engineered the removal of the candidate of the right. This had the effect of further polarizing Guatemalan politics.

Yet there was a great deal of support in Guatemala for the type of programmes proposed by Arbenz. They seemed to be what the majority of people wanted, though not the oligarchy, so that it is too simple to explain the new president's policies as simply the pet projects of a few leftist king-makers. After all, at the peak of its power in 1954 the Guatemalan communist party had only 4,000 members, this in a country of five million. Even the national congress of fifty-six members included only four communist representatives, and none held cabinet positions. And as would become obvious at the time of the 1954 coup, the communists did not control the army, which in the end proved to be the most important centre of power. The main source of communist strength was in the union sector. The president's policies, however, were not the result of overwhelming communist control, but reflected popular demands for change in response to hundreds of years of exploitation. This did mean that in the Guatemalan case communists and non-communists supported many of the same policies, making it possible for Washington to condemn virtually any supporter of the government as a red. For his part Arbenz assessed the domestic political situation, and increased the pace of reform. His mistake was to underestimate the international repercussions. He harassed US businesses and allowed the communist party to operate in the open, so that within a few months of his inauguration Arbenz found himself in Washington's disfavour.

It was the land question which proved to be the test case. This brought Arbenz into conflict with the local oligarchy but also the United Fruit Company, the largest US enterprise in Central America and a symbol of Yankee imperialism. With major investments in banana production, transportation, communications and electric utilities, United Fruit was Guatemala's biggest employer (over 10,000 workers). It was also the country's principal landowner. In fact, it monopolized vast tracts which were left untilled. The idea was to deny competitors access to fertile lands, but this also blocked alternative uses, especially to grow food crops and to relieve peasant demands for land reform.

On 17 June 1952 the Arbenz government promulgated the Agrarian Reform Law. This was a popular measure considering that only 2 per cent of the total population held tide to about 72 per cent of agricultural land. Since the fall of Ubico, however, the formation of peasant unions had progressed to the point where the Confederación Nacional Campesina de Guatemala (CNCG) was established in 1950. This was a federation of campesino, or peasant, organizations, and at its height claimed 400,000 members. The CNCG leadership was independent of the communist movement, but none the less formed an increasingly close alliance with it. The peasants and also Arbenz needed the communists political support on the land question, while for their part the communists saw the C N C G as an ally in attacking the oligarchy. Once again communists had an important say in developments, yet were not the sole or even the main impetus behind them. The pressure for land reform had far more to do with the monopoly power exercised by United Fruit and the local elite.

The 1952 law was aimed at large plantation owners, whether Guaternalan or foreign, and provided for the expropriation of holdings which were not under cultivation. Plantations in full production were exempt. Compensation was to be in the form of government bonds, but with a catch. The value of the land was fixed on the basis of the owners' current tax assessments. As these tended to underestimate the real worth of their property, owners soon found that compensation would be considerably less than they wanted. One of the hardest hit was United Fruit, and the next year the government moved to expropriate 234,000 acres of unused lands owned by the company. Compensation was set at $630,000, but the State Department demanded almost $16,000,000. And because United Fruit held title to hundreds of thousands of acres more, it was clearly vulnerable to additional losses. Indeed, in 1954 the government prepared to take another 173,000 acres in a second expropriation. In all, the government took approximately 1.5 million acres from about 1,000 plantations around the country. Further, peasants were given the right to participate in the administration of the programme, so that the CNCG grew in political importance. And while communists played a large role in these events, the campesino unions did not fall under outright communist control.

The United States government could hardly fail to take notice of events, especially since the former law firm of the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had represented United Fruit. Furthermore, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Allen Dulles, had been a member of the company's board of trustees. This is not to say that the events of 1954 were designed exclusively to save United Fruit. But it is to say that the Eisenhower administration probably shared the company's perspective, and found cause for alarm in its treatment at the hands of Arbenz. It was simply the focal point in a larger dispute over the treatment of private property. The outcome might influence events elsewhere in Central America, so Washington was not about to let it pass.

Accordingly, in the late summer of 1953, the Eisenhower administration decided to act. The plan was to stage a coup against Arbenz, and to replace him with Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. The CIA arranged to train a small force of Guatemalans in neighbouring Honduras (on United Fruit properties). In effect the US launched a conspiracy to overthrow the legally constituted government of Guatemala, though it did attempt to gain the sanction of international law. In March 1954, at the Caracas meeting of the OAS, John Foster Dulles presented a resolution condemning communism in the Western Hemisphere and calling for 'appropriate action in accordance with existing treaties'. A number of Latin American nations regarded this as simply an excuse for US intervention. In rebuttal Dulles pledged his belief that there is not a single American state which would practise intervention against another American state'. Given the CIA's activities, of course, such a statement was at variance with the facts. The resolution passed, but with Mexico and Argentina abstaining and with Guatemala opposed. Yet even many of those who voted with the United States did so in the expectation that the US would provide much needed economic assistance as a quid pro quo in exchange for their political support, and later they expressed reservations. A Somoza might offer enthusiastic endorsement, but i~ was clear that the OAS did not regard the Guatemalan crisis in quite the same light as Washington, and that the passage of the Dulles resolution was virtually meaningless as an endorsement of United States policy.

In Washington's view legalities were less important than property rights and hemispheric security, and the delivery of communist- made weapons in May provided the excuse to invoke the Caracas resolution. The outcome was a move back to unilateral intervention, though behind the mask of indigenous forces. Castillo Armas and a few hundred supporters crossed into Guatemala from Honduras on 18 June 1954, but made little headway. The CIA provided radio services designed to confuse the Guatemalan people into believing that the invaders were marching on the capital city, but the hoped-for popular uprising against Arbenz failed to materialize. This left Castillo Armas in considerable danger, and when two of his aircraft were shot down President Eisenhower approved the transfer of two P-51 fighter bombers to third parties, who then were to assist Armas. The dictators Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic also helped. The aircraft were used to cause panic among the population by strafing and bombing population centres.

The outbreak of fighting, of course, placed the Guatemalan army in a position to determine the outcome. Would the officers stand by the country's president? Before the coup Arbenz had considered setting up a people's militia, but the officer corps feared the consequences of creating a competing military force and therefore opposed the idea. Indeed, for some time the army had entertained reservations about several other policies of the president, so in the face of a crisis the military turned on Arbenz and the game was up. He had no choice but to resign and clear the way for Castillo Armas. John Foster Dulles went on US television to explain how little Guatemala had headed off 'the evil purpose of the Kremlin to destroy the inter-American system', though obviously the real threat to US interests came from within the hemisphere.

Castillo Armas cancelled land reform and restored the property of the United Fruit Company and other large landowners, forcing peasant families to vacate their newly won farms. In addition he welcomed back foreign investors, rescinded the labour laws of Arévalo and Arbenz, and executed hundreds of their supporters. He established literacy qualifications for voting, thus effectively eliminating the peasantry from a role in politics. United Fruit did contribute 100,000 acres to a government resettlement programme and agreed to pay higher taxes, but the defeat of democracy would only lead to turmoil in the future. Indeed, within three years Castillo Armas himself fell to an assassin. Perhaps the United States would have learned to live with an Arbenz if it had known what lay ahead. The Guatemalan coup meant the effective end of the Good Neighbour Policy, though it is doubtful whether it ever had any substance. The United States reclaimed the right to intervene unilaterally, and thus assumed the burden of arbitrating the crises to come. For the short term, however, the 'Colossus of the North' seemed to be having its way in Central America. The same could not be said for the rest of the Caribbean basin, and in Cuba the United States was to encounter its most serious challenge.
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Revolution: Cuba

The Guatemalan operation was a great success for the United States, or so it was thought in the 1950s. More importantly, the outcome shaped Washington's responses to other crises as well. The catch was that Guatemala also contained lessons for revolutionaries. When the US attempted to pursue a similar strategy in Cuba a few years later, the other side was better prepared. The fall of Arbenz had a major influence on Fidel Castro, who provided much of the leadership and inspiration behind the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Moreover, one of his chief collaborators was Ernesto Che Guevara, an Argentinian who had finished a medical degree but then travelled throughout Latin America and met with radicals and revolutionaries in several countries. He reached Guatemala early in 1'954, where he witnessed the coup later in the year. Although he played no important part in events, the experience crystallized his commitment to revolutionary action. He fled to Mexico and in due course joined Castro. Castro had studied law and been active among radical political groups at the University of Havana, and subsequently led an ill-fated attack on the government of dictator Fulgencio Batista: But instead of toppling the regime, Castro found himself in prison and then exile. By the time Guevara and Castro joined forces in Mexico, the latter was planning his return to Cuba.

For Castro and Guevara the lesson of Guatemala was very clear indeed. The Eisenhower administration had succeeded in overthrowing a popular revolution mainly because the officer corps defected. Therefore, the first thing Castro did when he assumed power in Cuba was to dismantle the army of the old regime and replace it with a new organization of his own. Unlike Arbenz he made certain that the revolutionaries controlled the military. The result was to make it considerably more difficult for the United States to act against the Cuban Revolution.

To policy-makers in the United States, Cuba hardly seemed the most likely candidate for a revolution. Economically it was better off than many nations in Latin America. Literacy rates, educational opportunities, the general level of health and wages also compared favourably. As elsewhere, though, the ownership of land was highly concentrated, income inequality was severe, and much of the workforce depended on seasonal labour. About 80 per cent of the country's export earnings came from sugar, with the United States buying 50 per cent of the total crop during the 1950s. The US paid higher than world prices, though purchases were strictly controlled under a quota system dividing its market among several sources of supply. The price scale really had the effect of providing a small subsidy to US manufacturers, because high sugar prices meant that Cuba could import more from the USA. Also, many of the sugar companies in Cuba were owned by US citizens, who wanted a guaranteed return. For its part Havana granted tariff concessions on US-manufactured goods. The system therefore made sense from Washington's point of view. The rest of the sugar crop was less profitable for Cuba. Over-production kept world prices depressed. In fact the instability in world markets induced US investors to sell many of their sugar plantations and mills to Cubans, so that, while almost 80 per cent of production was foreign-owned on the eve of the Second World War, it was down to 40 per cent by the time Castro came to power. More US dollars wound up in other types of investment than sugar. Still, Cuba received more investment from the United States than most other Latin American countries. The problem was that its well-being depended too much on a single crop and on trade and investment from a single source, the United States. But, perhaps most important, the country had been ruled by Fulgencio Batista for twenty-five years, and had degenerated into dictatorship, repression, racketeering and gangsterism.

Batista came to power several months after widespread uprisings and strikes had broken out against the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado in 1933. In the aftermath he co-operated with a leftist junta which briefly assumed authority. Only a sergeant in the Cuban army, Batista turned out to have his own political ambitions and a keen sense of how to realize them. The junta needed the support of the military, and so looked not to Machado's officers but to Batista as the presumed representative of the enlisted men. He was appointed colonel and placed in charge of the army, which soon became his personal power base. The new colonel was no radical, however, and staged a coup in January 1934. Moreover, he acted with Washington's encouragement. Franklin Roosevelt had ordered the US Navy to take up positions off Cuba's shores. While the United States had not threatened intervention against Machado, it was another matter when the spectre of socialism was at hand. Batista became the strong man of Cuba for the next quarter of a century, usually ruling through puppets but sometimes assuming office himself. Though early Batista governments instituted various reforms (including wage and social legislation, public works and better education), by the end the result was hardly any better than under Machado. In 1952 turmoil in both the economy and politics induced Batista to suspend the constitution and to rule directly as dictator. It was at this point that Castro and also a variety of other opposition forces became a factor in events, though without the support of Cuba's communists.

Moscow dominated the communist party of Cuba, virtually neutralizing it as a revolutionary force. This was the result of the popular front strategy before the Second World War. A major factor in the Cuban labour movement, the communists agreed to support the pro-Batista government in 1938, and except for a minor break after the signing of the Nazi-soviet Pact of 1939 continued to co-operate until the Cold War era. In return Batista allowed them to operate as a legal political party, eventually operating under the name Partido Socialista Popular. The deal revealed the communists' opportunism, a trait which would be exhibited again and again. In 1942 two communists joined the cabinet. After the war the party continued to follow Moscow's lead, but the US S R had in effect conceded countries like Cuba to the West. And the Cold War meant that there was no chance that the popular-front strategy could last. In due course the communists were driven underground. But, given the marginal role of Cuba in Soviet foreign policy, Moscow's directives did not change, so that the real anti-Batista opposition was left to other forces. When Castro finally did come to power, he was not indebted to the communists for his success.

To Castro, and others who had emerged from the milieu of radical university politics, Batista's dictatorship left no alternative except a resort to armed force. The official political system was simply not open to opponents of the regime. Moreover, the revolutionaries would have to rely on a dramatic strike (i.e. on arms alone), because the mass of the population had yet to be mobilized. Perhaps such a move would be the first step towards inciting a popular uprising. Therefore, on 26 July 1953, Castro led a contingent of perhaps 165 would-be revolutionaries against the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba, but was taken prisoner. His tiny group of radicals hardly seemed a threat to the life of the regime, however, and in 1955 he was freed in a general amnesty. This was a capital error on Batista's part, because Castro went to Mexico and began building a new force. In December 1956 he returned with about eighty men and landed on the Cuban coast, only to be met by Batista's army. A dozen survivors escaped to the Sierra Maestra Mountains, including Castro and Guevara. There they regrouped. They also established links to other anti-Batista forces. Castro was not yet the undisputed leader of the opposition (particularly for the urban resistance), but his dramatic forays from the hills and the legend of 26 July soon made him the best- known resistance figure. The spreading rural and urban guerrilla war left Batista in desperate straits, and the brutality of his response was such as to alienate his closest allies at home and abroad. The United States prohibited the shipment of arms to Cuba in March 1958. It turned out, however, that the US had something else in mind besides a Castroite victory.

By the summer of 1958 Castro's 26 July Movement had joined forces with several other opposition groups. Though Cuba's communists established tentative contacts with Castro early in the year, they still held aloof. More importantly, the emerging coalition included representatives of business, professional and middle-class interests. The problem for Batista was that all classes in Cuba, not just the dispossessed, were coalescing against him. The middle and upper layers of society were not threatened so much by economic exploitation as by the political system. Batista's terror endangered the lives of all his opponents, and his dictatorship denied business and the intelligentsia a role in determining policy. With the alienation of these people, Batistais days were numbered, so that for Washington the question was no longer whether Batista could survive but who would be his successor.

Accordingly, early in December 1958, the United States suggested privately to Batista that he step down in favour of a military junta, which would then offer concessions to the opposition. The idea was to deny the fruits of victory to the other side, especially the revolutionaries, but Batista refused to co-operate. Yet it proved impossible for his government to hold out. At the end of the month he fled the country. Only then did he name a military officer as his successor. The army had been the foundation of his power, and so a leader drawn from its ranks could be trusted to arbitrate among the contending forces. Castro understood this all too well, though in reality Batista's army was falling apart and there was little chance that the ploy could succeed. Nevertheless, when the revolutionary forces marched into Havana on 1 January 1959 and a new government was established, Castro and Che Guevara immediately took charge of the army. Until late 1958 the 26 July Movement consisted of just a few hundred guerrillas. Batista's forces were considerably more numerous. Hence the need to act. Otherwise the government reflected its origins as a coalition of anti-Batista forces, and José Miró Cardona (representing the professional and business reformers) assumed the role of prime minister, though not for long. Castro's armed revolutionaries and not the middle class held the preponderance of power. Consequently within a few weeks Miró Cardona resigned, and Castro took his place. Though hardly pleased, Washington recognized the new government. After all, at that time it still represented a broad coalition of forces, so there might be the opportunity to limit Castro's influcnce.

The Revolution in action

Even with the departure of some middle-class representatives from the coalition, the first months of 1959 (until May) witnessed only the typical reforms of a newly installed nationalist regime: the state- decreed reduction of rents and utilities rates, the takeover of the US-owned Cuban Telephone Company, and the trial and subsequent execution or imprisonment of hundreds of Batistianos charged with torture and other atrocities. While individuals were singled out for specific crimes, there was no immediate attack on important property-owners as a class or on the government bureaucracy as such, though it and the regular army were purged of the more notorious members of the preceding government. There was not even a wholesale seizure of foreign-owned enterprises. The new government initially promised to abide by the Constitution of 1940, but in February legislative and executive power was vested in the cabinet and elections postponed indefinitely. It was at this point that Castro took over as prime minister. He travelled to the United States in April amidst talk of possible aid and credits, but made no attempt to conclude an agreement. His idea was to avoid any appearance of selling out to Washington.

For its part the Soviet Union took a guarded approach to Cuba, and did not send an ambassador right away. Batista had broken off diplomatic relations with Moscow in 1952, and although the USSR recognized the new government in January 1959, it was not until June that Che Guevara established contact with the Russians. A Tass correspondent took up a permanent posting in Cuba by the end of the year, and Soviet deputy premier Anastas Mikoyan signed the first of several aid and trade agreements with Havana in February 1960. Yet the formal restoration of full diplomatic relations did not occur until May 1960. For some time Castro seemed more of a reforming nationalist than a social revolutionary, so that the State Department decided to be patient.

Yet the United States was about to discover that it would be very difficult to reach an accommodation with Havana. The trial of the Batistianos raised tensions right away. The victims included some of Washington's more dependable Cuban allies. Had they continued to play a part in the country's politics, they could have been relied upon to offset revolutionaries in the regime. But perhaps the problem with the most potential for disturbing US-Cuban relations in the future was that Castro did not have a detailed plan of action when he came to power, only a set of general principles, such as land reform and a Cuba independent of US control. The specifics of implementing his programme were unclear, and he therefore reacted to events as they unfolded. Given the inherent conflict between his aspirations and the US goal of protecting its stake in the country, the tendency was for tensions to escalate, as one ad hoc response led to another.

From the first, Castro was predisposed to expect trouble with the United States, perhaps another Guatemala-style intervention. He was also keenly aware of the danger of internal subversion. The threat of disunity at home persuaded him to move against other political factions, though for the time being the old Cuban communist party remained a minor factor in developments. As Castro began attacking the interests of the anti-Batista middle classes, however, large numbers of them joined the exodus of Batistianos to Miami and other US destinations. While this no doubt helped the regime consolidate its power at home, it also created a community of counter-revolutionary exiles who proceeded to launch armed forays against their homeland. Throughout 1959 Washington's official policy was to prevent the US mainland from being used as a base for activities against a government which it recognized. But as US-Cuban relations worsened, the Central Intelligence Agency began recruiting among the exiles, and moreover did so no later than December 1959. Castro did not identify openly with socialism until early 1961, and did not declare himself to be a Marxist-Leninist until December of the same year. The State Department, though, had come to this conclusion well before then.

In May 1959 Havana proclaimed the Agrarian Reform Law. It was a half-way measure in that it limited the size of holdings but did not nationalize all land. It thus restricted single farms to about 1,000 acres and grazing operations to 3,300 acres. Any holdings in excess of these limits were to be expropriated. It applied to Cuban as well as foreign owned property, and so was not a specifically anti-US act. The State Department therefore did not protest the principle of land reform, especially as Havana acknowledged the right of compensation (though the exact terms remained a subject of dispute). On another issue, however, it took a hard line and resisted Castro's efforts to buy arms. He first approached sellers in the United States and Western Europe, but Washington refused to permit sales and pressed its allies to do the same. Accordingly, in March 1960, Castro warned that he would buy wherever he could, meaning Eastern Europe. Besides embargoing arms, the US also considered disciplining Cuba by cutting the sugar quota, though the Eisenhower administration took no action in 1959.

To the Bay of Pigs

Events quickened with the arrival in Havana of Soviet first deputy premier Anastas Mikoyan in February 1960. The Russians saw a chance to take advantage of the situation, and signed agreements committing the USSR to buy Cuban sugar for five years and providing S100 million in credit. (Earlier the USSR had purchased small quantities of Cuban sugar from Batista as well.) East Germany and Poland also purchased Cuban sugar in due course, though Moscow became the mainstay of the Cuban economy. A month after Mikoyan's visit Castro accused the United States of sabotaging a shipment of French munitions that had arrived in Havana Harbour. It was no mere coincidence, therefore, that on 17 March 1960 President Eisenhower formally ordered the CIA to 'organize the training of Cuban exiles, mainly in Guatemala, against a possible future day when they might return to their homeland'. Thus the United States began contemplating a resort to military force, but with the help of surrogates acting on its behalf. On 28 March Castro repudiated the Rio Pact, and the first shipment of Eastern Bloc arms arrived some months later. In the spring and early summer he also nationalized a major US-owned mining company and the four principal US-owned hotels in Havana. Yet the question of compensation remained open, suggesting that the Cuban government did not intend a clean break with the United States.

The problem was that other matters agitated US-Cuban relations, and precluded compromise. Soviet oil became a key test. Cuba's principal source of energy was imported petroleum, but Western suppliers were under pressure from the United States to cut sales. Accordingly Castro turned to the Soviets as an alternate source of supply. When the Cuban branches of Texaco and Esso (along with Shell, an Anglo-Dutch company) refused to accept Russian oil for refining, however, Castro interpreted this as a direct affront to Cuban sovereignty. He therefore nationalized the offending companies, which in fact had acted upon advice from the US State Department, whereupon on 6 July 1960, the Eisenhower Administration cut the sugar quota (it would be effectively ended once and for all in December). Havana's response came with the nationalization of twenty-six US companies in August, all US- owned banks in September and finally another 166 enterprises in October.

It was up to the US to make the next move, and on 19 October the administration imposed a trade embargo on Cuba, exempting only medical supplies and certain foods. This simply drove Castro closer to the Soviets, and as his dependency increased he began placing old-line communists in prominent posts throughout the government. The summer of 1960 marked the turning-point of communist influence on the Cuban revolution. The paradox was that Cuban communists had expressed doubts about the nationalizations of August to October, fearing additional reprisals from Washington. It is likely that this reflected the tentative nature of the Soviet commitment to Havana up to this point. But soon the failure of US plans to topple Castro by force opened up new opportunities for the USSR, and drew Moscow into its most dangerous adventure since the end of the Second World War. In the meantime a new president assumed office in the United States, John F. Kennedy.

Although before his election Kennedy was not informed of secret contingency plans for an invasion of Cuba by exiles, he had taken a strong stand against (Castro during the 1960 presidential campaign. He therefore approved of Eisenhower's decision to break diplomatic relations with Havana on 3 January 1961. And once he assumed office later in the month, everything conspired to force an early decision on invading. There was the sheer momentum of a project that had been afoot for nearly a year. Vested interests, particularly in the CIA, were eager to improve on the record of Guatemala. The US loins Chiefs of Staff and the president's top civilian advisers seemed prepared to go along with the idea. The president of Guatemala wanted the exiles out of his country as soon as possible. And Kennedy needed to back up the tough stance he had taken during the campaign. Perhaps most important, he insisted that no US troops be directly involved in the landing, though Americans might provide air cover and intelligence. This had the effect of making it easier to decide in favour of the enterprise. If something went wrong, it would be possible to deny everything. Kennedy therefore approved on the condition that the exiles understood that they were mainly on their own. Their leaders, however, were convinced that the CIA would not allow the venture to fail, so apparently the precise terms of US support were not clear to all those involved. In any event, Kennedy gave the go-ahead.

The landing took place at the Bay of Pigs on 17 April 1961, and was a disaster from start to finish. There were only 1,400 invaders. The hope was that news of their arrival would inspire an uprising inside Cuba and precipitate the fall of the government in Havana. But this was wishful thinking. The Cuban Revolution, particularly land reform, was popular at home if not in Washington, and every US action against Castro simply increased his support. The Cuban army met the invaders on the beach, and there was no uprising Further, it was immediately apparent that the United States was behind the plan and that it was not an independent initiative by exiles. There was no covering up Washington's complicity. And, more than any other event, the Bay of Pigs served to tempt the Russians into establishing a larger presence in Cuba, though they never signed a formal military alliance with Castro which would commit them to any specific action.

The missile Crisis.

The Soviets decided to install nuclear missiles in Cuba, and caught the US State Department with its guard down. In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, Khrushchev had given assurances to Kennedy that although the USSR was prepared to defend Cuba against another attack it did not plan to establish military bases of its own on the island. In fact this was consistent with Soviet practice generally. Heretofore the USSR had refrained from locating offensive nuclear missiles in other countries, not even in Eastern Europe. Moreover, the Russians had adhered to this policy despite the American decision to place nuclear weapons in Western Europe and Turkey. Only in the 1980s would Moscow deploy medium-range missiles in the countries of the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet Union had thus been more circumspect than the United States about basing nuclear weapons on foreign soil, but then Cuba proved to be a dangerous exception.

In July 1962, more than a year after the Bay of Pigs, US spy planes detected an increase in Soviet shipments to Cuba. On 29 August the first surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) were sighted, yet these were clearly defensive not offensive. In other words, they were designed to shoot down incoming aircraft. They did not have enough range to reach any other country and thus initiate a war. As a result of the Bay of Pigs, Havana wanted to upgrade its defences, and Washington was prepared to tolerate this. But, just to be on the safe side, in September Kennedy requested that the US Congress authorize him to place as many as 150,000 reserve troops on active duty. Further, he increased the number of spy flights over Cuba. On 3 October Congress urged the White House to stop by whatever means may be necessary, including the use of arms, the creation in Cuba of a foreign military base that endangered United States security. All these steps were taken before there was any definite sign of a Soviet offensive capability in the Western Hemisphere, so that there were no grounds for misunderstanding the US position. On 14 October, however, aerial photographs revealed an offensive missile base under construction. Two days later the White House set up an executive committee (known as 'Ex Com') to advise the president on what to do next.

The fear was that Moscow planned a test of US resolve in the wake of the Bay of Pigs. From the Soviet point of view there were a number of outstanding issues which might be pressed. Khrushchev had been agitating on the Berlin question for some time, and wanted to end the West's right to occupy part of the city, a right dating back to the Second World War. After all, Berlin was in the heart of the Eastern Bloc and hence something of a Trojan Horse. The USSR had nothing like it in the West. The Western zones of occupation were also an escape route for refugees from communism, and 152,000 people from the East took advantage of a porous border in 1960. The escape rate kept rising the next year (the peak occurred on 6 August, when 2,305 people crossed from East to West Berlin), so on 13 August 1961 the East Germans began building the Berlin Wall to seal off the border. Another live issue for the Russians was the presence of US Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy, though because the Jupiters were fast becoming obsolete a more telling threat came from plans to deploy Polaris nuclear submarines in the Eastern Mediterranean. There was also the chance that Moscow's aim was to achieve a major strategic coup in the Western Hemisphere and undermine the Monroe Doctrine, though improving its position in the East-West conflict was more likely to be the main consideration.

Ex Com reviewed these and other issues, searching for a link to developments in Cuba. After all, Castro offered the Russians an opportunity to challenge the US advantage in air power, missiles and nuclear weaponry, an advantage which had prevailed consistently since the Second World War and which still existed. While Kennedy had scored political points in the 1960 US presidential campaign by making much of Western weaknesses, the Soviets so far had been unable to catch up. Kennedy's so-called 'missile gap' was really in the East not the West, notwithstanding his campaign rhetoric. By mid-1961 the United States had deployed considerably more than a thousand tactical and intercontinental bombers, 48 Polaris missiles, 40 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and about 100 intermediate range missiles (based in Europe) aimed at the Soviet Union. The Soviets' intermediate bombers and missiles, of course, could threaten Western Europe but not the continental United States, whereas for Washington the same type of weapons (based in Europe) could strike at the very heartland of the Soviet Union. Geography seemed to be on Washington's side. The USSR had fewer than 200 intercontinental bombers and possibly just four (and probably no more than ten) ICBMs capable of a direct attack on the USA. Moreover, US intelligence had successfully probed Soviet weaknesses. Until 1960, and the shooting down of a U-2 spy plane piloted by Gary Powers, the United States had conducted a series of reconnaissance flights over Soviet territory. Khrushchev therefore needed to restore the credibility of the Russian nuclear threat and to do so quickly. Cuba provided a ready solution. Bases close to North America would do the job, because short-range and medium-range missiles then could reach the USA itself.

Both sides maintained secrecy for the time being. Moscow needed to complete the construction of its offensive missile sites before it would be in a position to threaten the US, while Washington needed to calculate a response. Yet Kennedy did face a time limit. He had to make the first move, so as to confront the Russians before their missiles were armed and ready to fire. Otherwise, the USA itself would be likely to be hit in any military confrontation over Cuba or any other issue. Ex Com therefore quickly divided into two groups. One favoured the 'Bast Track', i.e. a surprise air raid on the missile sites, with an invasion as a possible sequel. The other favoured the 'Slow Track', a naval blockade on the shipment of military equipment to Cuba. The problem with the first was that it was irrevocable and would force a Soviet response, possibly precipitating a world war. Kennedy thus chose the second, in order to give the Russians time to retreat. There was still the risk that a Soviet ship might try to run the blockade or that Khrushchev might strike at US missiles in Turkey, but at least the Slow Track did not predetermine the outcome to the same extent. None the less, by 18 October the US Department of Defence began deploying aircraft and troops in case orders were issued for bombing and invading the island. The next day the press started asking questions about troop movements. Obviously the time was fast approaching when Kennedy would have to make the crisis public. Organizing for possible military action was simply too massive an operation to hide for very long.

On 22 October 1962 the president went on US television and announced that a blockade would go into effect in two days' time. Nineteen US naval vessels moved into position off Cube, and twelve of the twenty-five Russian ships travelling to Cuba either halted in mid-ocean or altered course. On 25 October, and with the advice of the United States, the secretary-general of the United Nations, U Thant, called on the Russians to cancel all ship movements for the time being. He also asked Kennedy to avoid a confrontation. The hope was that this would head off an encounter between Soviet and US vessels, and buy time for diplomacy. By the next day both Kennedy and Khrushchev had replied affirmatively. From Washington's point of view, however, the blockade was not really working. It was supposed to halt preparation of the missile sites, yet despite the suspension of Russian ship movements construction continued. If the installations became operational, then Kennedy's position would be virtually untenable. An attempt to destroy the missiles would mean that the Soviets might fire them against the continental USA. On the other hand, it was debatable whether Moscow was prepared to risk a war with the United States over Cuba. Still, Ex Com was uncertain, and therefore reconsidered whether it should recommend an air strike before the missile sites were finished.

Then an apparent breakthrough occurred on 26 October with the arrival of a rambling message from Khrushchev. The Soviet chairman had apparently composed it himself. In a roundabout way he proposed that the USSR remove its missiles permanently in exchange for an end to the blockade and a pledge by the USA not to invade Cuba in the future. The next day, however, Radio Moscow broadcast another missive in Khrushchev's name. This was considerably more formal and probably the work of the Soviet equivalent of Ex Com. It raised the price of Soviet withdrawal to include the removal of Jupiters from Turkey. United States intelligence also reported that one Russian ship had resumed a course for Cuba and that construction on the missile sites was continuing. Further, a U-2 spy plane had just been shot down over Cuba by a surface-to-air missile. It began to seem as though Khrushchev's first message was a diversionary tactic, so the US Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended an air strike by no later than 30 October. Yet Kennedy resisted precipitate action. He ordered the Jupiters in Turkey disarmed, and followed a suggestion that he reply only to Khrushchev's first message and ignore the second. At the same time the Soviet ambassador in Washington was informally told that the US was likely soon to remove its Jupiters from Turkey and Italy, but not as part of a deal over Cuba.

Submarines armed with Polaris missiles were to be deployed in the Mediterranean in 1963. On the other side, the Russians also showed a capacity to compromise, however belatedly, in that they decided to overlook the president's failure to concede anything openly on the Jupiters, even though the Russian demand had been made in public. On 28 October the USSR offered to cease construction of the missile bases in return for a US pledge not to invade Cuba. Further, it agreed to allow United Nations representatives to verify the dismantling, though Castro refused to co-operate on the last point. Kennedy accepted right away, and the immediate crisis was over.

The Aftermath

The missile crisis thus represented a defeat and a victory for both sides. The Russians had failed to gain a strategic advantage against the West, a plus for the USA, while Washington was forced to pledge that it would not invade Cuba, a gain for the Eastern Bloc. It was a fact, however, that some officials in Washington continued to devise ways of toppling Castro, but by covert means. United States Congressional investigations later discovered evidence that CIA operatives had arranged possibly eight assassination attempts against Castro, though the Cuban leader claimed the actual number was much greater. On other fronts, though, Washington and Moscow agreed to set up a direct communications system (the 'hot line') between the two capitals, to assure the rapid interchange of information end views in the event of another major crisis. In addition talks (already in progress) were pressed forward on a treaty partially banning the testing of nuclear weapons. For the first time since Hiroshima both sides (along with Britain) proved willing to sign an agreement limiting the testing of atomic weapons. They did so on 5 August 1963.

The treaty proscribed tests in the atmosphere or under water, but did allow underground testing. Between 1963 and 1965 over ninety countries added their signatures. The People's Republic of China and France refused to sign, but the treaty was at least a first step towards arms control. For the PRC, Khrushchev's retreat in Cuba confirmed its analysis that the USSR had ceased to be a revolutionary state and was unwilling to challenge the United States as the greatest single threat to the Eastern Bloc. Beijing's view was understandable considering the US role in the Korean war and given Washington's contingency plans against China in the early 1950s. The Chinese therefore opted to continue developing nuclear weapons, and exploded their first atomic bomb in 1964. For the president of France, Charles de Gaulle, Kennedy's preference not to consult with but only to inform his allies during the missile crisis suggested that the Atlantic Alliance was not really a partnership of equals but an instrument for arrogating all authority to Washington. While he supported Kennedy's handling of the crisis itself, he also concluded that it was time for France and Europe to pursue a more independent course.

The idea of Europe as a Third Force was hardly new, nor was de Gaulle's well-known sensitivity to slights against the prestige of France. Long before Cuba he wondered whether the USA might sacrifice Europe in the event of an East-West crisis. Upon assuming leadership of the Fifth Republic he had proposed a tripartite directorate of Paris, London and Washington to determine Western policy. His objective was to offset the special relationship between Britain and the United States, and (given that France was not then a nuclear power) to gain a veto over any decision to use atomic weapons. Washington and London failed to respond with concessions, and so de Gaulle withdrew the French Mediterranean fleet from NATO's command in March 19S9. He also resisted US requests to station nuclear weapons on French soil. Of even more significance for American authority, he accelerated plans for the so-called 'force de frappe'. This was a small nuclear arsenal just capable of threatening Russian cities. The theory was that it would not take many bombs to make the Russians wary of Paris. It was thus possible for France to resume its former place in global affairs. Kennedy hoped to prevent this by proposing the formation of the Multilateral Force, or MLF, in which the control of nuclear weapons in Europe would be shared. The catch was that Washington would provide the weapons only if the MLF were integrated with US defences, so it was apparent Kennedy did not intend to surrender ultimate control. The real purpose of the scheme, to head off the development of national nuclear deterrents independent of US control, was much too transparent. Then the missile crisis shook de Gaulle's confidence in Kennedy all the more (it had never been very great), and confirmed Paris in pursuing its own course. In January 1963 de Gaulle vetoed British plans to enter the Common Market on the grounds that the UK's close ties to the United States would simply make it a stalking- horse for Washington in Europe. Paradoxically he acted just after Washington had backed out of commitments to supply Britain with the Skybolt missile. The British had counted on the Skybolt as the basis for their own nuclear-strike capacity, and though Kennedy agreed to provide Polaris submarines instead, the result was a crisis in Anglo-American relations. Kennedy made the mistake, however, of not offering the same deal to de Gaulle, who thus remained convinced of American perfidy. Eventually, in 1966, de Gaulle withdrew all French forces from the NATO command structure.

The missile crisis also had important ramifications for revolutionary change throughout Latin America. For an interlude of about five or six years at most Castro followed a course more independent of Moscow precisely because the crisis revealed Khrushchev to be unreliable or at least incompetent. Castro's chief goal was to survive the depredations of the United States, so clearly demonstrated at the Bay of Pigs, but also to avoid becoming a pawn of the Russians in the East-West struggle. After all, Cuba's immediate need was to consolidate the revolution at home and to achieve hemispheric security, not to resolve the Soviet Union's strategic problems. Yet in the missile crisis Havana had been drawn into East-West issues and used by the USSR. In the aftermath there was little choice for Castro except to rely on the USSR for aid and arms, but even before the events of 1962 he had come to the conclusion that perhaps Cuba should seek safety in an alternative approach as well. Havana should become a centre of international revolutionary activity. If the cause of social revolution could be advanced in the rest of Latin America, the regional hegemony of the USA would be compromised and Cuba would no longer be surrounded by hostile states beholden to Washington. Maybe this would be a better way to achieve security for the Cuban Revolution than relying exclusively on the Russians. Thus, even before the missile crisis, Castro and Che Guevara were making plans to export the Cuban Revolution, but the events of 1962 emphasized the importance of proceeding with urgency.

The tactic was to promote guerrilla warfare, whether by communist or non-communist revolutionaries. Ideological purity was less important than the task of overthrowing right-wing, pro- American governments, so Cuba was prepared to work with a variety of movements in the region. In Havana's view Bolivia, Venezuela, Colombia, Paraguay, Honduras, Guatemala and Haiti seemed ripe for change, especially in light of the less-than- impressive results being achieved by Kennedy's Alliance for Progress. This was a programme of aid for development, and though the USA provided the major part of the funding (other powers in the Americas provided the rest), the amounts were hardly sufficient to the need. Further, the Alliance tended to bolster existing governments (which was Washington's intent), and thus had a dubious impact on reform. Yet exporting revolution proved more difficult for Havana than expected. Che Guevara resigned from the Cuban cabinet in 1965 in order to carry the new strategy to the mountains of Bolivia. The idea was not to wait for a specific set of conditions that presumably predisposed a nation to revolution. In Cuba events had moved rapidly, suggesting that the guerrillas themselves could create the right conditions. Besides, the masses of people were too oppressed to develop a vision of a new society or to mobilize without the leadership of outsiders more experienced in social reconstruction. Guevara's approach thus was to launch a guerrilla war first, with the result that the people would be drawn into the struggle. As in Mao's China, the struggle itself would force the population to choose sides. And because the majority of Third World peoples were impoverished, their choice would undermine the old order. But in the autumn of 1967 the Bolivian army captured and executed Guevara.

Even before Guevara's death, however, it had become evident that the strategy was flawed, as the peasants of Latin America did not immediately rally to the cause. His analysis was indeed based on the Cuban experience, but it overlooked some of the factors which explained the rapid and easy victory there (easy by comparison with other settings, for example, Vietnam). Not least in explaining the success of the 26 July Movement was the attitude of the United States. While hardly welcoming Castro, Washington had abandoned Batista. There was no military intervention on his behalf, something that could not always be counted upon. Also, the situation under Batista brought together a variety of interests and classes, so that it was not exclusively a peasant revolution. The multi-class coalition also meant that the Castroites had strength in the cities, a distinct advantage in challenging power at the centre. Che was unable to duplicate this in the mountains of South America. In Cuba the coalition held together until well after Batista's flight, and helps explain Castro's success.

Perhaps the most important factor constraining the Cuban initiative, however, was its isolation internationally and hence its unavoidable dependency on a single patron, the Soviet Union. In the long run, economics once again forced Castro to become more receptive to Moscow's ideas about the possibilities in Latin America. Mismanagement at home (notably the shortfall in the 1965-70 sugar quota), plus the US trade embargo (which by 1962 was supported by all the nations of Latin America except Mexico), translated into a permanent deficit in Cuba's balance of trade. The Russians doubted that a large-scale challenge to US hegemony in the Western Hemisphere could succeed at this time. They did not want to provoke Washington again, and feared that Castro's internationalism might do precisely this. Moscow was not about to give generously to Castro unless he accepted the party line. Havana's recognition of this was symbolized by its support of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 (see Chapter 10), so that by the end of the 1960s the Cuban initiative was in retreat. Only in the 1970s would it be revived, but under very different circumstances and at Moscow's explicit direction. Then the USSR would rely on Havana to act as its surrogate in Africa, i.e. in an area where direct intervention was not practical for the Russians. If Cuba were to send troops to an area in turmoil, it would be considerably less provocative than if the US S R were to do so. But this only illustrated Cuba's dependency on the Soviet Union. Moreover, Cuba's later activities in Africa stood in stark contrast to its low profile in Latin America. Even so, the Cuban Revolution did result in an improved standard of living for the average citizen, and a marked reduction in the economic and social inequalities of earlier times. Castro may not have succeeded abroad, but at home he continued to enjoy widespread support.

The results of Washington's Cuban policy were thus quite different from the outcome in Guatemala. Hence, in April 1965, when supporters of the reformist Juan Bosch launched an armed uprising in the Dominican Republic, Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, moved quickly and, in contrast to Guatemala and Cuba, by direct US military action. Bosch had been elected in the wake of the assassination of Rafael Trujillo (dictator from 1931 to 1961), but then was overthrown by rightist forces in 1963. Yet the US did not see fit then to intervene to protect him as the constitutional president of the country. The possibility that the left- leaning Bosch might return to power in 1965, however, induced Johnson to dispatch a contingent of US marines which eventually rose to 25,000 personnel.

Most world capitals regarded Washington's response as an over-reaction, and it certainly banished the ghost of the Good Neighbour Policy once and for all. Johnson did not consult the Organization of American States before acting, thereby violating an explicit treaty obligation of the United States. But the US president justified his action on the grounds that the Dominican situation could provide another opportunity for communism. This was a gross exaggeration of the politics of Juan Bosch. Nevertheless the next month Washington applied pressure and obtained the approval of a divided OAS for a peacekeeping force of troops from the United States and Brazil (Brazil was under military rule, but in the 1960s was one of the largest baneficiaries of US aid in the world). This force supervised elections in June 1966. Not surprisingly the result was a victory for the anti-Bosch forces, and so the troops left in the autumn. The new president, Joaquin Balaguer, introduced a regime of token reform backed up by firm rule if not outright authoritarianism. Balaguer was a former associate of Trujillo, yet his election did bring political stability to the country. From a regional perspective the whole episode was symptomatic of the US determination to prevent another Cuba. The only question was what means were most effective. Economic warfare and indirect intervention had failed in Cuba, and had tempted the Russians into a crisis which threatened a Third World War. While the Dominican affair came on too quickly for Johnson to do anything but act directly, the issue remained as to the most effective defence against the spread of social revolution in the Western Hemisphere. Few in Washington questioned the right of the USA to intervene, only how best to do it. Accordingly the potential for conflict remained high.