moving:
fawning Fidel
JC King was the CIA Chief who recommended Castro's "elimination" in December 1959. Forty years of attempts on the revolutionary leader's life followed.
King was Brooklyn born to an international businessman and failed New Jersey Republican gubernatorial candidate. JC graduated from West Point in 1923. He left the army study diplomacy at l'École Libre des Sciences Politiques in Paris and graduated in 1925. He was a Monroe Doctrine style liberalism who worked for his father's mine in Mexico, Jonson and Johnson in South America and was a member of Nelson Rockefeller's pan-American OCIAA. During WWII he worked in Argentina for Army intelligence.
His was an exemplary experience of the American century. The first half of this century is known as the the Banana Wars (1898-1934). After America took control of Spanish possessions in 1898 it used military invasions to open and control markets for American companies. This includes the construction of the Panama Canal and the invasion and occupation of places like Nicaragua, Haiti, Dominican Republic and Honduras (also the Philippines and Hawaii).
WWII changed the conditions for the second half of the American century. Imperialism of this period was no longer occupation. Truman called it "third world" "development" the "Point Four Program" (1949) defining his vision of foreign policy in the post war era. This focus developing nations (and reconstructing Europe) was part of the global war against Communism. As such, the clandestine CIA developed into an important part of international policy during the second half of the American Century unlike the Banana Wars period which didn't have the intelligence organs which were yet to emerge from the WWII Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to confront and cooperate with Nazi, Soviet and British analogues. This is where JC King was during the war--feeding Japanese spies counterintelligence as part of the secret global struggle of peer nations. He was not a soldier bulldozing Banana Republics for steel producers like the previous, War is a Racket (1935), generation.
America's sixty years of domination of their "little brown brothers"--beginning in the Spanish American War (1898); based in the Monroe Doctrine (1823); the logical extension of Manifest Destiny--is the lens through which JC King viewed Castro. That attitude is evident in his infamous memo (1959) that recommends "elimination of Fidel Castro...[which]...would greatly accelerate the fall of the present Government." King actually hedges a little bit--"many informed people believe..." and does not put a hit out on Raul or Che because they don't "have the same mesmeric appeal to the masses" as Fidel. How any of this is King's business--and not the consent of the governed--is only understood through the centuries old, imperial relationship.
There are three sections to the memo which describe the situation, define an objective and make recommendations. The objective is to "overthrow Castro within one year and his replacement..." by a "friendly" and democratic "junta" willing to hold (presumably rigged) elections.
King defines the situation as an "established" and "unfriendly" government characterized as a "dictatorship of the far left" (whatever that means). The dictatorship of the proletariat in Cuba is a one-party democracy which has survived decades of sanctions, interference and exploitation. One charge against Castro is "oral criticism" and the sentence is death. The Banana Wars are given a Domino Theory update by King's memo as Castro threatens American "industrial and agricultural" properties and "will encourage similar actions against U.S. holdings" in their sphere of influence. The conflation of American state and corporate interests is here notable.
Stifling another country free speech and political parties is a gross overstep of national sovereignty indicative of the American Century hegemony. It does make more sense when it is framed as an anti-communist nationalism. Clandestine international intrigue run by the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is not more democratic than the revolutionary socialism run by the dictatorship of the proletariat. America's bourgeoisie state has evolved into neoliberalism and Cuba's proletarian state has evolved into (and from) Bolivarianism. American sanctions aside, developing nations have better prospects following the Cuban model than the chasing American companies and international debt.
King describes Castro's model in the memo. It includes nationalizing "banks, industry and commerce" and this would lead to a "small group" capitalizing on "several hundred million dollars" from the 1960 sugar crop. This money might be turned to "further...revolutionary objectives...[in] the Caribbean and South America," which is the looted purview of the American military industrial complex, a hegemony maintained after WWII by the CIA.
King states "Castro has lost the support of the upper class and most of the middle class" and but not the "masses..." of "popular support." The memo describes the transition from an minority run oligarchy to a majority run democracy. Then it advises anti-democratic methods intending interrupt the transition. Both "propaganda" and "violent action" are suggested to break Castro's "approaching stranglehold" and return to island to plantation owners, casinos and the Mafia under an American puppet. King sees a two-year window of action before Castro rises to a "position of leadership in Latin America" and, inversely, America's position will be "weakened."
The three recommendations are "clandestine radio attacks" from the Caribbean, radio and TV "intrusion operations" from inside Cuba and "encouragement of pro-U.S. opposition groups...to establish by force a controlled area" inside the island. From that beachhead "radio stations" could be operated. Here, opposition members, remnants of the defeated Cuban army and anti-Castro guerrillas could organize. This was envisioned as a masculine place, "separating the men from the boys." It was also an internal front that Castro needed to deal with intended to "curtail [his] plans for revolutionary action" within the American sphere of influence.
The agency tried hundreds of times to assassinate Castro and failed. Other internationalist revolutionaries were killed by America and its proxies in service of an unelected class of bankers who run the country.
sources:
J.C. King, Chief of Western Hemisphere Division "MEMORANDUM FOR: Director of Central Intelligence / SUBJECT: Cuban Problems" 11 December 1959. Declassified 1994/NARA 3 November 1995 via The Gerald R. Ford Library.