Fidel, Kennedy and the Roughneck State

There is an old riddle from the 1960s and 70s, when coups d’état were a staple of the Latin American diet: Why has this region seen so many coups d’état, while in the United States there has never been one? Obviously, it’s because there is no American embassy in the United States.

Though the old story — and it is a story — painted a cogent and accurate picture of the Latin American reality, it was in actuality overly optimistic with respect to the U.S. True, there is no American embassy, but there sits the mother of all embassies and driver of (almost) every coup in history: the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency. And when the beast is cranky, it will not hesitate to bite the hand that feeds it. Accustomed to using scheming, undercover operations and assassinations as its modus operandi in foreign policy (in Iran, Guatemala, Congo and Vietnam, to take only the examples from those years), there was nothing stopping the organization from turning [the focus of] those tactics onto U.S. domestic policy.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy was basically a coup d’état orchestrated by the CIA and supported by “the vested interests of big business, the obsessions of the military and the ideological phobias of extremists,”* according to the book on Kennedy, “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters,” by James Douglass. The book has been quietly but surely making waves among the mass of frivolous, trendy or CIA-subsidized literature that has flooded American bookstores to mark the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination. What’s curious about this case is that, while it took the gringos nearly half a century to arrive at this conclusion, Fidel Castro saw it with complete clarity the very next day.

In a long speech broadcast on Cuban television on Nov. 23, 1963, Fidel made an analysis that brings to mind the best of the Marxist tradition, capable of overcoming the rigidity of mere structural analysis to unearth unexpected nuances, situations and happenings (Marx’s “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon” comes to mind).

To very briefly summarize, Fidel said that:

1) If the United States is indeed an imperialist country, there are degrees and shades of gray even within imperialism itself, from more liberal forms of capitalism right up to Nazism — the most extreme form of imperialism.

2) If Kennedy had indeed been a driver of this imperialism (particularly with respect to Cuba), in the months leading up to his death he had become distanced from the far right to such an extent that “in the wake of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (signed with the Soviet Union barely a few months before) and following a number of speeches that were unanimously attacked for being too lenient toward Cuba”* it could hardly have been a surprise that they had decided “to eliminate a president whose policies flew in the face of those promoted by America’s more reactionary circles.”*

3) In a country like the U.S., where “a number of economic vested interests have developed … a president with total authority makes for a less dangerous situation than when the president has no authority.”* (Those who think that all governments are equal would do well to remember this.)

Fidel finishes his analysis with a call to the American people themselves to ascertain whether the assassination of their president was not perhaps part of “a macabre plan to see through aggressive and war-mongering policies, to put the U.S. government at the mercy of the more aggressive circles of big business, the military and the worst government agencies in America. It is in our interest, the interest of all people and the American people that we demand this.”*

Douglass’ book, in addition to arriving at basically the same conclusion as Fidel by way of careful historical investigation, climbs to a practically theological and metaphysical level in order to answer a worrying question: Why did the U.S. people not do as (their supposed archenemy) Fidel Castro expected of them? For this, Douglass turns to Thomas Merton, American monk, thinker, essayist and poet who was a pioneer of Vietnam War criticism. Merton, in addition to aligning himself with Buddhist monks, was the mentor and friend of Ernesto Cardenal, the “Trappist Poet of Solentiname,” who was publicly reprimanded by John Paul II during his ill-fated visit to Nicaragua in 1983.

Though it is impossible to explain in a paragraph the profound theory of Douglass and Merton, we might attempt a brief summary: There are things that we don’t see, quite simply because they are not big enough to see. It is neither only nor mainly because of the physical difficulty of appreciating things that are too close to us, but due rather to a psychological, existential reluctance to recognize something with implications too terrible to contemplate. There opens before us an anxious void that we prefer to fill with denial and self-deception.

Let us propose a couple of famous examples. How long has it taken us Mexicans to recognize the implications of the fact that an ex-Coca Cola executive became a Mexican president? Or, back in the U.S., how many realized at the time just what it would mean to have an ex-director of the CIA (Bush Sr.) as president?

A few days ago we read in La Jornada how Chomsky branded the U.S. a “roughneck state” that had completely abandoned all “decent respect for the opinions of humanity.”* The assassination of its president 50 years ago could well have been the moment when the U.S. lost all of its remaining decency. That said, Douglass affirms that there is still hope, if a people can face up to the unspeakable.

*Editor’s note: The original quotation, though accurately translated, could not be verified.