US government documents declassified in April reveal that in 1961 US President John Kennedy pushed ahead with economic pressure and covert actions against Cuba despite the Cuban government's willingness to give in to the US on key points, according to a report in the Miami Herald.
On August 17, 1961, Ernesto "Che" Guevara arranged to meet with Kennedy's assistant special counsel, Richard Goodwin, at a cocktail party while Goodwin was in Uruguay working on the US-sponsored Alliance for Progress.
According to a memo Goodwin sent Kennedy, Guevara, who was then part of Cuba's revolutionary government, said Cuba was ready to drop any political alliance with the Soviet bloc and to pay for nationalised US properties; Cuba would also consider cutting support for leftist insurgents in other Latin American countries.
In exchange, Goodwin wrote to Kennedy, Guevara "said ... they didn't want an understanding with the US because they knew that was impossible", but they "would like a modus vivendi".
Goodwin advised the US president to reject the offer. "Pay little public attention to Cuba", he wrote, and "quietly intensify" economic pressure.
Kennedy followed Goodwin's advice. In November he authorised Operation Mongoose, a $50 million covert action with 477 full-time employees, headed by the president's brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
"My idea is to stir things up on the island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder, run and operated by the Cubans themselves with every group but Batista-ites and Communists", the attorney general noted in a handwritten November 7 memo. "Do not know if we will be successful in overthrowing Castro, but we have nothing to lose in my estimate."
"[D]iscussion of the assassination of Cuban leaders should not be put in writing", a Central Intelligence Agency memo warned, but a State Department annotation said that the CIA "twice ... supplied lethal pills to US gambling syndicate members working on behalf of CIA in a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro" in early 1961 and early 1962, with a third effort in mid-1962.
[From Weekly News Update on the Americas, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY, 10012, USA; email nicanet@blythe.org.]