Americans and March 10, 1952

Americans and March 10, 1952 / 14ymedio, Gabriel Barrenechea Jose
Posted on March 12, 2016

14ymedio, Jose Gabriel Barrenechea, Santa Clara, 10 March 2016 — In the
early hours of Monday 10 March 1952, a coup closed the democratic cycle
in Cuba, open since the Constituent Assembly of 1940 which has begun
with the Protest of the Thirteen and the university reform movement
captained by Julio Antonio Mella.

Despite what Fidel Castro and his less serious historiographical
followers have stated so many times, in no way can the responsibility
for the coup be placed on the Americans or specifically on their secret
agencies, the CIA and the FBI. As has been recognized even by a long
series of Cuban historians publishing on the island since the 1959
Revolution.

Among them is Newton Briones, who, in his semi-fictional "The General
Returns," describes step-by-step the process of preparation for the
coup. From the Orthodox party dalliances of its promoters led by Captain
Garcia Tuñón, to inspiration from a professor at the Army War College,
Garcia Barcena, until the final links with Fulgencio Batista.

Even in the highly biased The Cry of Moncada, by Mario Mencia, a
complete representation of Castro-regime historiography, we find nothing
to support the official version according to which the Americans
inspired and even led the coup; it only manages to draw on an alleged
"approval by omission" by the Embassy, having not warned President
Carlos Prio.

According to the author, not only did the members of the US military
mission know what was being cooked up in Columbia and Kuquine, the
well-known hacienda of the "Mulato Lindo" – as Batista was called – but
so did almost all of Havana and even the country. If no one took this
stew seriously, it is due to the circumstances of that time in Cuba,
where almost all shared the same blind confidence in the solidity of
democracy.

At the end of February, in the face of the warning from the Venezuelan
Romulo Gallegos – fired three years earlier – of what was afoot, someone
as sharp as Raul Roa responded with absolute certainty that something
like this had no place in the Cuba of 1952.

The latest example is Batista, the Coup, by two historians closely
linked to State Security, Jose Luis Padron and Luis Adrian Betancourt.
The central thesis of this book is that in essence there is nothing to
prove American inspiration behind the barracks coup, and that, on the
contrary, everything seems to demonstrate that the coup was not very
well received by most of the institutions of the United States.

This work admits that it was not the United States that was among the
first to offer de facto recognition to the regime, but rather among the
last, at least in the Americas. It goes on to detail, based on abundant
declassified documentation from the US State Department, the tense
process of recognition and the subsequent chill that the American
embassy in Havana maintained for months toward the de facto regime. The
authors do not fail to clarify that the motives for it were the
well-known links between Batista and the Cuban communists, who generated
great suspicion in the circles of American power.

We can affirm that this lack of a link is no longer based only on the
opinions of the intellectual authority, but on simple and plain common
sense. Still, through covert operations, during the dawn of the Cold
War, Americans have only intervened where it was clear, or at least
highly possible, that the advance of the Communists, or any political
force which by its nature had some chance of allying itself to the USSR
(this breach of tolerance was what allowed the consolidation of the
Fidel regime soon afterwards). This kind of situation could not have
been further from that of the Cuba of the late forties and beginning of
the fifties.

The Communist Party, the PSP, had seen how the masses withdrew their
already low support historically during the democratic period. If in the
1948 elections they got 142,972 votes, less than 6% of the total, in the
reorganization of the parties in November of 1949 and 1952 it fell
respectively to 126,542 and 59,000. This last figure was just a few
thousand votes from the 2% required in the Constitution to legalize a
political party, and, therefore, its electoral demise.

Moreover, to pretend that the Americans promoted the coup to stop the
certain victory of the Orthodox party is complete nonsense. Would the
Yankees have feared the party of Chibás, which was entirely in the hands
of the most implacable and popular enemy of communism in Cuba? Not to
mention, the only Cuban politician of the first-rank who opposed the
leftist government of Juan Jose Arevalo in Guatemala or who sent a
parliamentary commission to investigate the violation of human rights
during the uprising of independence supporters in Puerto Rico in 1950…
that is, the Cuban politician of the first rank least likely to upset
Washington.

It is not very well understand how it served the foreign policy of the
United States to get rid of what was then its democratic showcase in the
Southern Hemisphere. It was an alliance that played an extremely
important role in the defense mechanisms of the hemisphere, in a moment
of incomparable popular approval in Latin America, and in which there
was seen no immediate possibility of marked retreat.

On the contrary, there is abundant evidence of the American displeasure
with the coup, and the supposed complacency of the military attaché in
Havana suggested by Batista, the Coup is highly doubtful. In the
post-coup report the barracks attack was called a danger for American
interests on the continent, which leads us to interpret differently the
efforts of those officers to convince many military of the academy and
great technical capacity to remain in the Constitutional Army. The
American military in reality did not try to strengthen the Batista
regime, but rather to leave a door open for the return of institutional
democracy without the need for a popular insurrections, that is, thanks
to a future civilian-supported military coup.

With regards to the Americans finally giving recognition to the de facto
Batista government, its doing so more than two weeks after it had
usurped the Presidential Palace, and when all of Latin America had
already done so, was the best possible attitude for the continuity of
Cuban political independence.

Calmly analyzing the last 64 years, we understand that the U.S.
Department of State ended up adopting the recognition promoted by the
Democratic administrations since 1933, very knowledgeable about our
susceptibility on the subject, such that we could not accuse them of
interfering with their enormous force of gravity in the seriousness of
our internal issues. The lack of support from the United States is
clearly what got Batista to leave power in less than six months, as was
well-known by many Cuban politicians of that time, but in turn it
profoundly discredited our independence, or at least our capacity to
manage our own sovereignty with a minimum of responsibility.

It is here where the inextricable relationship between our two nations
becomes transparent: having denied recognition, having demanded the
immediate return of the previous government, in the face of a situation
that after almost three weeks did not seem to result in civic rejection
by Cuban citizens, the United States would in consequence become the de
facto guarantor of our democracy and real sovereignty.

From that moment, our authorities could be elected in the most free and
democratic way, but at the end of the day their remaining in their jobs
would depend on the will of the United States to maintain them in the
face of our own authoritarian and anti-democratic forces. This would
have ultimately led us into a quasi-similar position to the years of the
Protectorate, or an even worse one.

It is worth remembering that the alleged control over Cuban society of
the institutions of American intelligence is belied by events occurring
after the 1952 coup, as it failed to discover the massive conspiratorial
movements of Fidel Castro, who came to gather more than one thousand men
who trained for months around the University of Havana.

Source: Americans and March 10, 1952 / 14ymedio, Gabriel Barrenechea
Jose | Translating Cuba -
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