Richard Whalen

Retiring 81-year-old Communist dictator of Cuba, Fidel Castro, is America’s most durable enemy left over from the Cold War era. His regime is as much an antique today as the beat-up 1950s American-made jalopies the Cubans are forced to patch together and drive because of the U.S.’s continuing economic embargo.

Our enforced isolation from Cuba cuts both ways. We have hurt ourselves by waging a generations-long, secret and murderous vendetta against Castro. The bearded Communist tyrant never did succeed in exporting his Marxist-Leninist Revolution to the rest of the Western Hemisphere. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is not a Castro clone but an America-hating local clown.

From recently declassified Central Intelligence Agency and other U.S. government documents released after 40 years in storage, I now know that President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, had personal knowledge of the CIA’s repeated attempts to assassinate Castro. Bobby’s counter-assassination program was called “Project Mongoose.” Whether we will ever find Castro’s yellowed “death warrant” bearing JFK’s initials is doubtful.

President Lyndon B. Johnson was stunned to discover that the CIA had been “running a Murder Incorporated all over the Caribbean.” He and Robert Kennedy alike suspected this anti-Castro plotting had backfired on the slain president. “Jack wanted to get Castro but Castro got him first,” Johnson told intimates according to The Castro Obsession by Don Bohning, published in 2005.

I had personal reasons for my own investigation of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. While writing my 1964 book, The Founding Father: The Story of Joseph P. Kennedy, my instincts as an investigative reporter prompted me to enter the labyrinth of U.S.-Cuba relations after the Castro brothers and the Kennedy mutually declared a deadly war of attrition.

It all begins in April 1961,when a force of some 1500 Cuban exiles landed on a remote swampland known as the Bay of Pigs, more than 100 miles from Havana. Only a narrow causeway connected the invasion beach to the mainland. The Cuban exiles had been financed, organized and trained by CIA officers, some of whom – in violation of their orders – accompanied their comrades to the beach. Castro was waiting with tanks and heavy guns.

The “invasion” was bogus , a betrayal of the Cubans who called themselves “Brigade 2506.” And it was also a betrayal of the new young president who was blamed for calling off the air cover and allowing the “invasion” to fail.

My research convinces me that the Bay of Pigs “invasion” was basically a “dumping” operation, eliminating many conservative, Catholic anti-Communist Cuban exiles, including the sons of the island’s leading families. The U.S. stage-managers took Brigade 2506 where it wanted to go but it was predestined to fail.

Castro, a seeming nationalist hero in the eyes of liberal “experts” high in the U.S. government’s bureaucracy, was given the gift of a triumph he didn’t deserve because the U.S. blinked before Castro did.

Raul Castro, 76, now presides, subject to his ailing older brother. Before Fidel Castro dies, America should reach out to our small neighbor and begin to end our economic sanctions that have hurt many American industries, especially agriculture for half a century. Clearly these sanctions have not worked as an effective foreign policy and the anti-American sentiment aroused by our economic sanctions often strengthens the popularity of tyrants such as Castro.