BackStory; Small Island, Big Shadow: Cuba and the US

This is backstory. I'm Brian Ballot. President Obama travels to Cuba next week. The first sitting American president to do so in nearly 90 years. And it builds on the decision I made more than a year ago to begin a new chapter in our relationship with the people of Cuba. Many previous chapters in America's relationship with Cuba have been turbulent to put it mildly. There was the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 when President Kennedy learned that the Soviets had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba. Christchurch says would you like them? And Fidel says missiles? Nuclear missiles? Uh, yeah, yeah, I'll take them. Before that, there were freelance efforts by Americans to invade an annex Cuba in the mid-19th century. They had hopes of creating another slave state. A history of US Cuban relations today on back story. Major funding for backstory is provided by the Shia Khan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial

Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis foundations. From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory with the American History Guys. Welcome to the show. I'm Brian Bello, and I'm here with my buddy Ed Ayers. Hey, Brian. And my friend Peter Onos with us. Hey, Brian. President Obama's historic trip to Cuba is part of a larger effort to normalize relations between the two countries after more than 50 years of Cold War hostility. To understand just how significant this policy shift is, it's worth revisiting one of the most terrifying events in the entire Cold War. Good evening, my fellow citizens. This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba. This is President John F. Kennedy addressing the nation on October 22, 1962, the eighth day of the Cuban

missile crisis. For the first time, Americans were learning about something that Kennedy found out just a few days earlier that the Soviets had installed long-range nuclear missiles in Cuba. And for Kennedy, this is scariest speech any President ever gave without exception. This is Jim Blight, a professor at the Balsili School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. He spent the last few decades studying the crisis, and he describes for us the tension in the room that day. Kennedy comes in when he delivers the speech, he sits down in front of the cameras, and this is 50 years ago, so these panels are like, you know, the size of the studio in more than 1,000 nautical miles. He sits down behind the mic, and he has his papers. So you had to be quite adept at reading and looking away from what you're

reading at the same time. So he's got this pile of papers in front of him, and what he does, he takes the papers and he begins shuffling them like a deck of cards. He begins twitching a little bit. You can see if you look carefully, I'm dwelling on details here, because Kennedy is often thought to be the sort of perfect almost like a mannequin president. I mean, he's so beautiful and his family is so beautiful and everything is wonderful. His hair is messed up. He's he's somewhat disheveled, and he's really, really nervous making this speech. And why would he be nervous? I mean, what Kennedy is saying is that if one of these missiles is launched and hits anywhere in the Western hemisphere, he says a full retaliatory response will be forthcoming. It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union. A full retaliatory

response would have blown up the world. Period. That was the only strategy he had to work with in those days. A full retaliatory response destroys the Soviet Union, destroys communist China, and destroys the East block, and about a day later everybody else dies. Fortunately for everyone, the Cuban missile crisis ended with the Soviet to green to remove the Cuban missiles in exchange for Americans doing the same with their missiles in Turkey. For the general public held around their television sets, the drama lasted 13 days. But that is not the crisis. Turns out, like so many aspects of U.S. Cuban relations, the beginning of this story goes back a lot further in time. Today on our show Cuba 90 miles to the south, but always looming overhead. We're gonna take a look at some of the most important moments in the history of U.S. Cuban relations and for lack of a

better phrase, blow them up. What we're after is the story behind the story. In this case, how a country about the size of Pennsylvania has had such an outsized presence in U.S. history. So if the Cuban missile crisis didn't begin with a spy plane photos that were snapped on October 15th, when did it start? Jim Blight says that from the Cuban perspective, Titian started building a year and a half earlier with the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. The Bay of Pigs was the CIA's ill-fated mission to train Cuban exiles to invade Cuba and overthrow Castro. Castro's forces got advanced word of the invasion and beat it back in three days' time. It was a huge embarrassment for Kennedy, some even called for his impeachment. Blight says that this incident led Castro to two conclusions. The first, it wasn't a matter of if the U.S. would attack again, but when? The second was that the attack would trigger a Soviet response, which would trigger an American

response, which would obliterate Cuba. And so the only choice Cubans had was how valiantly they would fight to their death. And this is what he tells his people after the Bay of Pigs. He spends the next 18 months publicly making speech after speech after speech, bringing his people along, trying to explain to them that their options are two. One is to go down meaninglessly and stupidly and capitulate to the Yankees. The other one is to resist to the best of our ability and fight like men. And as the Cubans say, to die facing the sun, that that is our objective. And he, there's never been a great persuader quite as persuasive as the young Fidel Castro in that element. Kennedy concludes something totally different. He concludes from this that he has got to get Cuba off his agenda after the Bay of Pigs. This is ridiculous. I mean, the fact that they're talking about impeaching me because of this little pissant island. I mean, I, I want to, I want a comprehensive test bin. I want U.S. Soviet

real, I want arms control. I want this and I want that. But I mean, these guys in the green outfits with the beards. I mean, this is ridiculous. I am not going to become obsessed with this thing. And yet, if he didn't appear to be getting ready to do even more politically, it was a mess for him. So what Kennedy decided to do was to send a lot of military power into the Caribbean region, thinking that this would be a good way to deter the Soviets from messing around in Cuba. But what he forgot was that they were actually Cubans in Cuba who had their own set of conclusions that they were drawing. And that conclusion was the attack is inevitable. So if you start this story 18 months earlier, how does it change our conception of what was going on by the time we get to October? Well, I think one way to think about it, Brian, is that the crisis became dangerous and almost went over the edge into nuclear war because

of things that happened on the island of Cuba about which Americans knew almost nothing and about which the Soviets really weren't very curious. Khrushchev treats the Cubans like little children. Almost as if he patted Fidel in the head and said, well, you know, you're kind of emotional. He referred to Fidel as a hot-blooded Latin. This is the man who liked to bang his shoe on the table. Well, yeah, I mean, consider the source. Yeah, I mean, if hot-headed Nikita thinks that hot-headed Fidel was hot-headed. That's a statement. That's a statement. Yeah. So he treats him like children, but Kennedy, on the other hand, treats, frankly, the Cubans like Lent. I mean, Cubans and nothing. They don't matter. This is all about a US Soviet confrontation. For Kennedy, then, therefore, none of this stuff with the missiles later has anything to do with the Bay of Pig. That was then. In Kennedy's mind, that was then now dealing with an international crisis. Right. And it's a US Soviet confrontation. The big boys are meeting. Khrushchev believed what Fidel

believed after the Bay of Pigs, which is that it's not a question of whether the Americans invade. It's when. And so immediately after the Bay of Pigs, Khrushchev has this idea of Castro's, he has no idea about missiles. Khrushchev says, would you like them? And Fidel says, missiles? Nuclear missiles? Yeah, yeah, I'll take them. But won't that make us more of a target? Well, yes, but, you know, but if we get them in and we can get them operational, we can shock them with that. I'll come to Cuba in November. He tells Videl. You and I will stand before the Marti monument in front of millions of Cubans and the whole world and we'll say, ah, it's done. If they attack now, we will retaliate from Cuba. And that means they won't attack because they'll be deterred. It'll be beautiful. And the world will be more peaceful because of this. Now, that is a level of delusion that must have some kind of clinical name. The fact that he thought Kennedy would just accept this. I mean, that is so far off the edge of

what was possible that it's almost difficult to describe. Yes. So the Cuban missile crisis is just sort of the, well, I did a calculation the other day. Actually, if it's an 18 month crisis, which it is, it is absolutely an 18 month crisis. 13 days is 2% of the crisis. I mean, someone, the number of people lately as the 50th anniversary of the crisis has come up, have said, you know, they, the relevance of the Cuban missile crisis is that it sort of gives us a little insight of what to do about Iran and the standoff over their nuclear program because Iran is like a Cuban missile crisis in slow motion. But that's not right because the Cuban missile crisis was a crisis in slow motion. And for all, but maybe 13 days plus a few, Chris Jeff and Kennedy are like sleepwalkers. They got their eyes shut, their ears shut, their hands out in front of them. They're bumping around out there. They're talking about Berlin. They're talking about Laos. They're talking about nuclear arms control. And all of a sudden, the Cuban thing just erupts. They were totally disoriented. And the great

thing about Kennedy and Khrushchev is they found a way to gather themselves together in just a few days to crawl out of this thing. It's a miraculous polar rabbit out of a hat moment in late October 1962. But by golly, it should never have happened. It would never have happened if either of these two guys had been really listening to the Cubans because if Khrushchev was listening to Castro about beautiful death, that is the last guy you want to put in charge of nuclear weapons. I mean, if Kennedy had paid attention to what the Cubans were saying, he would have noticed immediately that the Cubans are expecting an imminent attack. All he had to do was to order some of the hardware that he was putting in that area to back off and then send the message on. But he just, what Cuban said didn't matter to him. He couldn't, couldn't care less. Cuba, look, when his group was meeting during the missile crisis, the famous XCOM, the executive committee was meeting, they had many people in the room who had

devoted themselves to the study of the Soviet Union. There was one person in the room, typically who spoke a word of Spanish. And his name was Ed Martin. And he was the assistant secretary of state for inner American affairs. And what Ed Martin did for a living was try to figure out a way to kill Fidel Castro. Not exactly the empathic sort of like get beneath the surface and interpret for us. No, his job was to work with the people who were associated with Operation Mongoose, the covert action wing of the Kennedy administration policy toward Cuba, and figure out a way to kill him. So that tells you pretty much all of what you need to know about what kind of information was reaching the president with regard to Cuba. Jim Blight is a professor at the Bacillus School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ontario. His new project is the Armageddon Letters, a multimedia look at the Cuban missile crisis. Our staff has really fallen in

love with this project and you can check it out at Armageddonletters.com. And you can find a longer version of my interview with Jim on our site, backstory radio.org. In the first part of our show, we explored the connections between the missile crisis and the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, the failed CIA attempt to overthrow the Castro regime. Now, we're going to turn to a story that's strikingly similar to the Bay of Pigs invasion. It too involves Cuban exiles, American support, and a plan to overthrow the government in Cuba. And like the Bay of Pigs, it ends badly for the Americans. But this story takes place over a hundred years before in the mid 19th century. That was a moment when something

called filibustering took hold of the American imagination. Filibustering in this sense had nothing to do with the Senate or controversial bills. Back in the day, filibusters were renegade adventurers who led expeditions to various Latin American countries. And the first country to be targeted by a filibuster expedition was, you guessed it, Cuba. The leader of this expedition to Cuba was a Venezuelan-born bureaucrat named Narciso Lopez. After a checker career working for the Spanish government in Cuba and dabbling in anti-Spanish insurrection, he fled to the United States. In 1848, he began to gather volunteers for a do-it-yourself invasion of Cuba. His plan was to overthrow the Spanish administration and clear the way for a eventual U.S. annexation. Backstoy producer, Jessica Bretson, tells the story. Lopez based his recruiting effort out of New York City, home to many Cuban exiles. He drew up an audacious plan for a two-pronged attack on Cuba's southern coast. By August, he was ready to move. The expedition will sail on

Saturday, a steamer with a thousand men from New York or some point north. This is a letter from one of his supporters, and a steamer of a thousand tons with twelve or fifteen hundred more from New Orleans simultaneously. The U.S. government did not look kindly on this effort to force its foreign policy hand. Before the ship set sail, President Zachary Taylor ordered a naval blockade of Lopez's southern contingent and seized the ship in New York. The would-be invaders were back to square one. That's when Lopez changed tack. He realized that basing his force in the north had been a mistake. Southern politicians had been eyeing Cuba for decades. They wanted to annex Cuba where slavery was legal as a new slave state. That would strengthen the pro-slavery vote in Congress. In 1850, with sectional divisions deepening, Southern politicians wanted all the help they could get. So Lopez moved his headquarters to New Orleans. He asked one Jefferson Davis to lead his invasion, promising him $100,000 and a

coffee plantation. Davis's wife was impressed by Lopez's glowing eyes and snowy hair, but the man himself said no. Robert E. Lee expressed some interest, then decided that the job would conflict with his obligations to the US Army, but both men encouraged Lopez from the sidelines. In 1850, Lopez's second expedition took off. This time, his ship's dodged Navy patrols, but once sailed off course and some soldiers deserted on route. Lopez reached Cuba with only 250 men, and his attack went nowhere. He'd expected the Cubans to rise up and join his battle against the Spanish, but that didn't happen. Instead, a Spanish warship chased the invaders all the way back to Key West, where the US government seized Lopez's ship and arrested him. Southerners rallied to the filibusters cause. Here's a reaction from a New

Orleans newspaper. Our administration will disown all participation in it as an fraction of right justice and good faith, but the design appeals with almost irresistible power to the great heart of the nation, and lists the interests of the masses. Before long, the charges were dropped and Lopez was released. He returned to the south where he was fed as a hero in New Orleans. Supporters urged him to try again. Then, in July 1851, US papers began to report that the Cubans were rising up against the Spanish, just what Lopez had been waiting for. New Orleans was a blaze with talk of a Cuban revolution, so Lopez hurried to set sail. This time, his ship was so crowded with volunteers that a hundred men had to be kicked off before the filibusters could steam out of New Orleans Harbor. The plan of attack had called for a stealthy approach, but Lopez made a wrong turn and ended up in the middle of Havana Harbor. They tried to backtrack, but the Spanish had noticed. So when the filibusters landed West of

the city, Spanish troops were hot on their trail. There was no Cuban uprising in sight. The US papers had gotten that critical detail wrong. The filibusters spent a miserable week lost in the Cuban interior, ran out of food, and killed Lopez's horse to eat. On August 25th, the last of the survivors were captured. A few days later, Lopez was executed in Havana before a crowd of 20,000. The third and last of the Lopez expeditions to Cuba was over. Reaction in the US was fierce. Newspapers published lurid accounts of Spanish abuses. The prisoners who were shot at Havana were afterwards mutilated, dragged by the heels, outraged in a manner our Indian savage would revolt at. Years, fingers, pieces of skull brought away for exhibition and nailed or hung up in public places. In New Orleans, mobs smashed up Spanish coffee houses. In

Rage, Americans demanded that the US end Spanish rule in Cuba by force, if necessary. And here's the amazing part. The US government listened. Just a few years later, the new administration of Franklin Pierce approached one of Lopez's supporters with a plan for one last invasion. By early 1854, that expedition was all set to go. Thousands of men recruited a small arsenal at the ready. And then all of a sudden, a pro-slavery military adventure became too hot for the administration to handle. That's because in March of that year, the Kansas Nebraska Act passed. Kansas, which had been off-limits to slavery, was suddenly opened up to a vote on the question. Thousands of Americans poured into the state, hoping to tip the scales one way or the other. The fight over slavery was no longer about a little island in the Caribbean. It was happening smack in the middle of the United States. The Pierce administration abandoned the filibuster plan. Cuba moved to the back burner. The filibusters continued

organizing on their own, but even they saw which way the wind was blowing. In 1855, they dropped the Cuba plan altogether. And a few short years later, some of the conspirators found a new outlet for their pro-slavery energies. They joined the Confederate Army. Jessica Britson is a former backstory producer. So what's really striking to me about that story is the fact that so many Americans are on board with these apparently crazy expeditions to Cuba. I mean, by the 1850s, even the US government endorses the idea, even though it's illegal by US and international law. Now, it's easy today to think that Lopez and all the people who pay attention to him were kind of off-balance. But what we need to realize is he was really tapping into some deep vein of American thinking. And whenever we have a deep vein, it goes back to the early days, Peter. So can

you dig a little deeper and tell us where this Cuba obsession comes from? Well, it does go back to the beginning. And it goes into the mind of my man, Thomas Jefferson, not just Jefferson, but all Americans had an obsession with Cuba. Let me give you this quote from Jefferson in a famous letter he writes, James Madison in 1809, and Cuba is his central concern in this letter. I would immediately erect a column on the southernmost limit of Cuba and then scribe on it a nay-pluce ultra go-no further. As to us in that direction, we should then have only to include the North in our Confederacy. Okay, here's I hope I haven't stumped you guys. What would the North be? Main? It's another another hard scene. Okay, Canada. Okay, Canada, which would be, of course, in the first war. Yep, listen to our show on the War of 1812. You see how that one turned out. And we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation and I am persuaded. No constitution was ever before. So well calculated

as ours for extensive empire and self-government. Peter, Wow, forgive me. We're going to create an empire for liberty by invading Cuba and Canada. No, no, no, no. Think continentally as the American Revolutionaries did because they called their Congress, the Continental Congress, the Army, the Continental Army. And it's not because those 13 little colonies constitute a whole continent, but the continent was their future. It was their opportunity. And it was also their vulnerability. And I want you to put Cuba on your mental map of the continent. And why do we need Cuba? We need Cuba because of the threat that a foreign power notably the British because the Spanish don't constitute a threat to anybody at this period that the British represent to the United States. Imagine that we're encircled. The Americans are encircled by

the great counter-revolutionary power, Britain, in control of Cuba, in control of Canada. And they can squeeze. They can put the screws on. They can foment surveillance direction. They can unleash their Indian allies in the frontiers. It would be the second coming of the American Revolution, but this time the Americans might lose. It would be almost as bad as having Fidel Castro there. Well, something like that. Yes. What you have to keep in mind is the United States is a weak power. The expansion of the Union is a kind of preemptive move to eliminate future threats. That's the great concern. We think in terms of expansion now that there's something about this young republic, uh, whether it's all that's lusty, young manhood, needing to elbow runes, trapping, strapping, all that stuff. But it's the weakness of the United States that makes it absolutely essential to eliminate possible causes of war and sources of danger. And I'll tell you the real problem, Ed and Brian about the early American Republic

is you can't count on the loyalties of Americans themselves. They would turn if commercial opportunity made it advantageous. And that's true along all the borders. Many Americans move to Canada and become late loyalists in the run up to the War of 1812. Many Americans in the Southwest form alliances with the Spanish. You've got a volatile situation in this entire region. And Cuba stands out. This is where our defenses must be erected because there we command the Caribbean and nobody can hurt us. But we also protect the North American continent at the same time. Today on the show, we're looking at Cuba's surprising influence on US history. And we're going to turn now to an

instance in which a relatively small group of Cubans had a rather large effect on US immigration policy. Between April and October of 1980, 125,000 Cubans emigrated across the Florida streets and landed in South Florida in what has become known as the burial boat lift. Cuba was going through a period of economic turmoil. Many Cubans wanted to leave the island but had been prevented by the Castro regime's strict immigration laws. And so a handful of Cubans took matters into their own hands. They essentially stormed the Peruvian Embassy and it was a major moment of embarrassment to Fidel Castro's regime since it certainly looked like the regime wasn't paying attention to its people. This is Helio Capo, Jr. He's an historian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. After the storming of the embassy and a number of incidents at other embassies, Castro basically threw his hands up and said, fine, you want to leave? You can leave. Just find your own ride. So thousands of Cubans began hiring boats to ferry them to

Key West in Miami. Between midnight and noon today, 23 boats filled with over 800 Cubans reached Key West Florida. U.S. Marines are now on duty at Key West to keep order among the restless refugees waiting resettlement in the United States. They were called Marriolitos. And at first President Jimmy Carter welcomed them with open arms. The U.S. was happy to help people fleeing communism. But after the refugees arrived, he became clear that Castro had used the boat lift to clear out some of his prisons. He wanted to make Cuban criminals into America's problem. Now, if you remember the movie Scarface made in the early 80s, some of this may sound familiar. At the beginning of the film, Tony Montana has just come over from Cuba on the boat lift. In an early scene, immigration officials are peppering him with questions, trying to figure out what the deal is. They ask him, do you know anybody here? Any family in the state, Sony, any cousins, brother, or anybody?

Everybody stays. Are you a criminal? You haven't been in jail, Tony. Me? Jail, no way. Are you crazy? Been in a mental hospital? Oh, yeah. The boat coming over. And then the immigration officials ask Montana another question, something that seems well, a little out of left field. What about homosexuality, Tony? You like men, huh? You like to dress up like a woman? What the fuck is wrong with this guy, man? Get in there or what? Just answer the question, Tony. Okay. No. Okay? No. So what complicates this matter slightly further, again, Julio Capo Jr. Is that the INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service did have an official policy from 1917, all the way to 1990, of barring homosexual aliens from entering the country. A small contingent of the Marriolitos, about a thousand by some estimates were homosexuals. Some came to the US to escape a homophobic environment in Cuba. Others were part of Castro's emptying out of the prisons.

Through the 70s, homosexuality was considered a crime in Cuba and, according to Capo, by 1980, many were still being prosecuted for social crimes. They were considered counter-revolutionary. And that's because homosexuality in Cuba is often interpreted as a sort of self-indulgent act, one that is really the product of urban bourgeois and that in some ways it really reflects capitalist values. And at this moment in 1980, where the United States finds itself really torn about what to do. Which is the greater evil? Communism or gay people? Do we send these refugees back to an oppressive dictator or do we allow homosexuals to cross our borders? Laws barring homosexuals from entering the US had been on the books since 1917. Until 1973, homosexuality was still considered a mental disorder by the American Psychological Association, providing us so-called

scientific basis for excluding gays. But the United States decided that communism wasn't even bigger threat. They couldn't send the Marolitas back to Cuba. They needed to find a way to bend the rules. Immigration officials came up with a plan, something that might actually sound a little familiar today. They thought we do have to enforce this law, but we only have to enforce it if there is irrefutable proof that someone is a homosexual. What Uncle Sam doesn't know won't hurt him. So what they end up doing is while not changing the law specifically, they implement this proto-donast-don'tell policy that really does prohibit, although this is certainly implemented quite differently depending on who's on the other end of the border. But what it really does for a decade is disallow people on the borders to ask questions specifically as to whether one is a homosexual or not and kind of clues. So something, seeing a gay pride button or something could no longer warrant further investigation. And this is, it's certainly implemented in different ways depending on where one is,

but it's not the kind of aggressive policy that had a dominated policy prior. The new policy stated that, quote, an unsolicited, unambiguous, oral or written admission of homosexuality, in quote, was required to deny admission to the United States. As far as anyone can tell, no homosexual Marriolitos were sent back to Cuba. In the end, the homosexual Marriolitos left a permanent mark on U.S. immigration policy. In 1990, a gay Marriolito, named Toboso Alfonso, was denied asylum because of a criminal act here in the U.S. However, his testimony about his time in Cuba, being persecuted by Cuban police because of his sexual orientation, led authorities to stop deportation proceedings. They said he'd be at risk if he were sent back. This case became a precedent. And today, refugees and immigrants generally cannot be excluded from the U.S.

based on their sexual orientation. Special thanks to Julio Capo, Jr., for helping us tell that story. We'll have a link to his writing on the Marriol boat lift at our website, backstoryradio.org. We've seen that we can understand that 13-day drama of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis better if we open the curtains a little bit earlier. The same is true of another defining episode in U.S. Cuba relations, the Spanish-American War. This was the four-month conflict that secured Cuba's independence from Spain, or so the story goes. In reality, the war for Cuba's independence had been going on for three-and-a-half years when the United States stepped in in 1898. And despite our government's claims that it was acting on behalf of the Cuban people,

invading U.S. troops actually prevented Cuban fighters from consumating their revolution. Americans occupied the island for four years after Spain's defeat, and they only left after they thought they had ensured that Cuba would never be a truly sovereign nation. Most Americans know very little about this longer story. One of the few things Americans do remember about the Spanish-American War is the role of the yellow press. As the story goes, William Randolph Hearst played up Spanish atrocities as a way to sell his newspapers. But is that really the reason we went to war? Brian sat down with historian Christian Hoganson, who argues that, well, yes, the yellow press helped push us to war, but there was something bigger going on in the press, the public, and Congress. It all comes together, she says, with gender politics. There was a tendency to depict Cuba as a female figure.

So if you look at political cartoons from this time period, time and time again in the United States, they depict Cuba as a woman. And so the implication is, if the island is a whole is like a suffering woman, then it's all the more imperative that the United States intervene to end that kind of assault on female honor. And I'm wondering if you could talk about a specific cartoon. Right. So I have this cartoon, and it is from the New York world, but it was republished in the review of reviews in April 1898 as the war issue was being debated in the United States Congress. The caption reads, peace but quit that. And what the cartoon shows is Uncle Sam, who is standing in a portal of a battleship with quite a large cannon that is pointing out from virtually between his legs. And the rather phallic looking cannon is pointing directly at a Spanish soldier who's dressed rather like a Matador, not so much

in military uniform. And in his right hand, he has a sword which is dripping blood. And lying prostrate at his feet is a woman who has been terribly brutalized. She is barefoot, haggard with a torn dress that reveals the lower parts of her legs they're exposed. And she's clutching a starving or an emaciated little child to her breast. And the clear implication is it is imperative that the United States intervene to stop such assaults on womanhood. And how would people come across these? What would they make of them? And how did this kind of gendering of the war contribute to war fever in the first place in the prosecution of the war? Well, there was widespread public support for Cuba Libre. There were all kinds of mass meetings, theatrical productions, popular fiction, and newspaper accounts that were very favorable to Cuban

independents. The underlying logic was just as a manly man would not stand pat while watching a woman or child re-brutalized. A manly nation needed to act if there were atrocities being committed against women and children, especially so close to the coast of the United States. What about those hard-headed guys, those politicians in Congress? Is this what got them animated as well? Did this gender interpretation play an important part in the story of the debates leading up to the war itself? It's so funny that you call them hard-headed guys because I see them as very emotional in the Cuban debate. So I think the precipitating event was the thinking of the main. President McKinley sent the main to Havana following a series of riots in the city and it mysteriously exploded on the night of February 15 with the loss of 266

American lives. So then after the main, there are a lot of debates about what should the United States do now. In these discussions on the floor of Congress, there are two words that surface over and over again and the first is honor. So let me quote from two of these statements that I happen to have. One was representative William Arnold to his Republican of Pennsylvania and he said and I quote, our honor is at stake and our flag insulted. If I insult any gentleman in this house, should there be arbitration to decide and inform that gentleman whether or not he has been insulted? And his colleague or actually senator George Perkins, whose Republican from California, said men do not arbitrate questions of honor neither do nations. And then in addition to talking about honor repeatedly and insisting that national honor was on the line, they kept invoking ideas

about manhood. If we declared war, that would be an assertion of American manhood. I have another quotation from representative James, our man who is Republican from Illinois. Good name. That's so true. We fight because it has become necessary to fight if we would uphold our manhood on clothes. You've painted with a broad brush what's happening in the United States. Could you put that in chronological perspective? Why is concerned about gender factors? There were a lot of concerns about manhood in this time period. They were often spoken of in terms of anxieties about overcivilization which implied that the United States had become a softer country that it was losing the hard male virtues that had been carved out in the course of westward expansion. There's a lot of concern about what it meant for American men to be working

increasingly in white collar jobs and larger bureaucratized corporations, not doing as much manual labor for middle class and wealthier men. Added to this were concerns about the passing of the Civil War generation. And there are a number of reunions in this time period that brought the blue and gray together, even though they had fought for very different things in the 1860s. But the conclusion was drawn is that what really mattered by the 1890s was that these men had shown manhood on the field of battle that fighting itself was the thing that mattered, not the reasons for which one would fight. So there was a certain amount of projection onto the Cuban cause. And in the theatrical and romantic depictions of what was happening in Cuba, I think to a large extent it was a way of working through some of the gender anxieties that were so salient in the

United States in this time period. Well, Christian, I want to thank you for joining us today. Well, Brian, it was a real pleasure talking to you. Christian Hoganson is a historian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We've been spending the hour today examining the moments in American history when Cuba has seemed as suddenly burst onto the scene. There were the filibuster rates of the 1850s, the Spanish-American War in 1898, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and the burial boat lift in 1980. But there's another episode in the early 1960s that belongs on this list, Operation Pedro Pan. Robert Armingol, a former producer and backstory grew up in South Florida and has lived in Cuba. Here's his story about Operation Pedro Pan and what that episode in American history tells us about the place of children in the National Seiki. My cross-country coach back in high school was a guy

named Carlos Barking, but we all just called him Bark. His trademark was Barking orders at us. Okay, boys. Stay sitting down, close all the windows, please. Let's do it. That's Bark. He's loading a bunch of football players on a bus for a game in Fort Lauderdale. Bark is actually the school's athletic director, but... No, I don't have enough drivers today, so I've got to drive one of the buses. Bark has worked at Belén Jesuit Prep in Miami for the better part of four decades, and he's grown the sports program from next to nothing to something of a little powerhouse. He was a wrestling champ in high school, and when he coached us, well, let's just say his running drills introduced us day in and day out to new worlds of pain. So I was surprised the other day to hear him say this about coming to the States for the first time. Oh God, that was hard. It took me about three months when I cried every night,

especially when I thought I was not going to see them again. He's talking about his parents. Because the whole new life, here there's a little farm boy coming to a big city, big language barrier. Bark was a child of Operation Beto Pón. His mother and father sent him with his younger brother to the United States from a tiny town in central Cuba in 1962. Bark was 12. Like many Cubans, barks parents had celebrated when triumphant rebel soldiers made their way across the island a few years earlier. They actually marched through town. I remember seeing them with the lone beers and stuff like that. Everybody came out to greet him and say, well, going up towards Habana. It was a moment of joy, I think, for many Cubans who had wanted change in Cuba. This is political scientist Maria de Los Angeles Dorres. She has researched Operation Beto Pón extensively and was herself a Beto Pón child. She was just six when the revolution came to power.

I remember the excitement about the change becoming, at some point, more of a worry. I think in my family, more than the lack of free elections was the fact that the Castro government started using firing squads as a way of qualshing descent. Where a lot of young men were picked up and with some of them were brought to trial, summary trials. One was a very close friend of my parents. He had just turned 17. Rumors were spreading. They were false. It turns out that Fidel was going to take exclusive rights over children from their parents and maybe ship kids off to Russia for indoctrination. At the same time, there was word on the street about a special program for children supported by the church that could provide US visa waivers for kids, offset their travel costs, even find scholarships for them to attend American boarding schools. The program was actually the offshoot of a clandestine CIA operation.

One day, bark was on horseback riding through cane fields near the sugar mill where his father worked. When my brother came riding a bicycle with a telegram in his hands and he was wave and he was happy. The telegram is here. The telegram is here. Their travel permits had come through. We saw that as an equate adventer said, of course, we'd love to go and that's how it all started. Over two years, more than 14,000 minors would board flights out of Cuba in the care of the Catholic Church, but largely on Uncle Sam's tab. A Miami Herald reporter covering the story called it Operation Beto Ban, a Cuban version of the Peter Pan story, where children get whisked away not to never never land, but to America. But in October 1962, everything changed. Good evening, my fellow citizens. This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military build-up on the island of Cuba.

With the Cuban Missile Crisis, all flights from Cuba ended, along with hope for many refugee kids, that they would see their parents anytime soon. Beto Ban had lost its wings, but the name stuck. In Cuba, though, people came to call it Peter Pan to emphasize its US origins and Fidel Castro's own narrative that these children were stolen from the revolution. Remember those rumors about Castro stealing children? Well, it seems they were broadcast from a pirate radio station in the Caribbean, run by American intelligence agents. And Doris' research uncovered proof that the Kennedy administration secretly funded the production of a propaganda film in Spanish and English, that depicted Cuban children adjusting to life in a refugee camp, while playing up fears about the communist brainwashing that kids were said to be escaping. The truth is, for many Beto Ban children, fleeing Castro's Cuba came with serious hardships and sometimes lasting trauma. Doris

tells one story of a close friend, who, along with his four brothers, ended up in an orphanage where abuse was common. In that orphanage, the older boys were oftentimes put in showers, where there was a lot of rapes, and the priest would be outside watching. For the younger ones, if they, for whatever reason, didn't eat the food, the nuns would punish them. If they started wetting their beds, these were six-year-old kids, the nun would wake them up to beat them up. The story told among Cuban exiles is that Beto Ban kids thrived and were immensely successful, like bark. He doesn't have any harrowing tales to tell. It wasn't easy. He bounced from camp to camp in Miami, but along the way he met strong mentors, including Montsenior Brian Walsh, who ran Beto Ban for the church in South Florida. Another was a Jesuit priest who helped

bark get his first job at Belén. Still, he didn't see his mom and dad for almost five years. When his father arrived in Miami in 1967, he had cancer. He died within the year. So, I had to ask bark. Do you feel your childhood was stolen from you? No. I don't. I thank my parents for making the tough decisions that they make. I know that he was much harder on them than he was on us. I know my parents suffer a lot, but I thank them for it because having not been for this, I will not have done what I'm doing today. I love what I do, and I think most of the children that came feel the same. My own family is Cuban. My parents left in the early 60s with their parents and siblings. I don't have any close relatives who were Beto Ban, but I guess the operation has touched me too, through Coach Bark and other teachers and friends. The funny thing is, I still don't know

exactly what to make of it. What I do know is that if we compare Beto Ban with the current situation on the southern border, the contrast at first glance is striking. Today, parents already in the states want to bring their kids and raise them here in stable homes, but they face huge legal hurdles. Children in grave and immediate physical danger want asylum, but have trouble making their case because their plight isn't, quote, political. In the same country that rounded up kids to save them from communism, talks about sending home children who risked everything to make it here. But these two migrations do have a couple of things in common. In both cases, fear seems to be driving public policy, and in both cases, grown-ups ideas of good and bad seem to trump the most commonplace wish of children everywhere, to be with their family. Robert Armingol is a former

backstory producer. Today's episode of Backstories was produced by Tony Field, Nell Bessianstein, Jess Angabretson, Eric Mennell, and Alison Quance. Jamal Milner is our technical director. Special thanks this week to Lewis Perez. Major supporters provided by the Shea Khan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the tomato fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment, and by history channel, history made every day. Brian Ballot is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Peter Oniff is professor of history emeritus at UVA and senior research fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond.

Backstories was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Backstories is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange.