company called Zodiac, which turned out to be a CIA front. He dropped his investigation.40

In 1961, amid much fanfare, the Kennedy administration unveiled its showpiece program, the Alliance for Progress. Conceived as a direct response to Castros Cuba, it was meant to prove that genuine social change could take place in Latin America without resort to revolution or socialism. If the only alternatives for the people of Latin America are the status quo and communism, said John F. Kennedy, then they will inevitably choose communism. 41

The multi-billion dollar Alliance program established for itself an ambitious set of goals which it hoped to achieve by the end of the decade. These had to do with economic growth, more equitable distribution of national income, reduced unemployment, agrarian reform, education, housing, health, etc. In 1970, the Twentieth Century Fund of New York-whose list of officers read like a Whos Who in the government/industry revolving-door world-undertook a study to evaluate how close the Alliance had come to realizing its objectives. One of the studys conclusions was that Cuba, which was not one of the recipient countries, had

come closer to some of the Alliance objectives than most Alliance members. In education and public health, no country in Latin America has carried out such ambitious and nationally comprehensive programs. Cubas centrally planned economy has done more to integrate the rural and urban sectors (through a national income distribution policy) than the market economies of the other Latin American countries.42

Cubas agrarian reform program as well was recognized as having been more widesweeping than that of any other Latin American country, although the study took a wait-and-see attitude towards its results.43

These and other economic and social gains were achieved despite the US embargo and the inordinate amount of resources and labor Cuba was obliged to devote to defense and security because of the hovering giant to the north. Moreover, though not amongst the stated objectives of the Alliance, there was another area of universal importance in which Cuba stood apart from many of its Latin neighbors: there were no legions of desaparecidos, no death squads, no systematic, routine torture.

Cuba had become what Washington had always feared from the Third World-a good example.

Parallel to the military and economic belligerence, the United States has long maintained a relentless propaganda offensive against Cuba. A number of examples of this occurring in other countries can be found in other chapters of this book. In addition to its vast overseas journalistic empire, the CIA has maintained anti-Castro news-article factories in the United States for decades. The Agency has reportedly subsidized at times such publications in Miami as Avarice, El Mundo, El Prensa Libre, Bohemia and El Diario de Las Americas, as well as AIP, a radio news agency that produced programs sent free of charge to more than 100 small stations in Latin America. Two CIA fronts in New York, Foreign Publications, Inc, and Editors Press Service, also served as part of the propaganda network.44

Was it inevitable that the United States would attempt to topple the Cuban government? Could relations between the two neighboring countries have taken a different path? Based on the American record of invariable hostility towards even moderately leftist governments, the answer would appear to be that theres no reason to believe that Cubas

revolutionary govern-: ment could have been an exception. Washington officials, however, were not immediately ill-disposed towards the Cuban Revolution. There were those who even expressed their tentative approval or optimism. This was evidently based on the belief that what had taken place in Cuba was little more than another Latin American change in government, the kind which had occurred with monotonous regularity for over a century, where the names and faces change but subservience to the United States remains fixed.

Then Castro revealed himself to be cut from a wholly different cloth. It was not to be business as usual in the Caribbean. He soon became outspoken in his criticism of the United States. He referred acrimoniously to the 60 years of American control of Cuba; how, at the end of those 60 years, the masses of Cubans found themselves impoverished; how the United States used the sugar quota as a threat. He spoke of the unacceptable presence of the Guantanamo base; and he made it clear enough to Washington that Cuba would pursue a policy of independence and neutralism in the cold war. It was for just such reasons that Castro and Che Guevara had forsaken the prosperous bourgeois careers awaiting them in law and medicine to lead the revolution in the first place. Serious compromise was nor on their agenda; nor on Washingtons, which was not prepared to live with such men and such a government.

A National Security Council meeting of 10 March 1959 included on its agenda the feasibility of bringing another government to power in Cuba .45 This was before Castro had nationalized any US property. The following month, after meeting with Castro in Washington, Vice President Richard Nixon wrote a memo in which he stated that he was convinced that Castro was either incredibly naive about Communism or under Communist discipline and that the Cuban leader would have to be treated and dealt with accordingly. Nixon later wrote that his opinion at this time was a minority one within the Eisenhower administration.46 But before the year was over, CIA Director Allen Dulles had decided that an invasion of Cuba was necessary. In March of 1960, it was approved by President Eisenhower.4 Then came the embargo, leaving Castro no alternative but to turn more and more to the Soviet Union, thus confirming in the minds of Washington officials that Castro was indeed a communist. Some speculated that he had been a covert Red all along.

In this context, its interesting to note that the Cuban Communist Party had long supported Batista, had served in his cabinet, and had been unsupportive of Castro and his followers until their accession to power appeared imminent.48 To add to the irony, during 1957-58 the CIA was channeling funds to Castros movement; this while the US continued to support Batista with weapons to counter the rebels; in all likelihood, another example of the Agency hedging its bets.49

If Castro had toned down his early rhetoric and observed the usual diplomatic niceties, but still pursued the policies of self-determination and socialism which he felt were best for Cuba (or inescapable if certain changes were to be realized), he could only have postponed the day of reckoning, and that not for long. Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, Mossadegh of Iran, Cheddi Jagan of British Guiana, and other Third World leaders have gone out of their way to avoid stepping on Washingtons very sensitive toes unnecessarily, and were much less radical in their programs and in their stance toward the United States than Castro; nonetheless, all of them fell under the CIA axe.

In 1996 it was revealed that in August, 1961, four months after the Bay of Pigs, Che Guevara had met with Richard Goodwin, President Kennedys assistant special counsel, at an international gathering in Uruguay. Guevara had a message for Kennedy. Cuba was prepared to forswear any political alliance with the Soviet bloc, pay for

confiscated American properties in trade, and consider curbing Cubas support for leftist insurgencies in other countries. In return, the US would cease all hostile actions against Cuba. Back in Washington, Goodwins advice to the president was to quietly intensify economic pressure on Cuba. In November, Kennedy authorized Operation Mongoose.50

31. Indonesia 1965

Liquidating President Sukarno ... and 500,000 others

Armed with wide-bladed knives called parangs, Moslem bands crept at night into the homes of communists, killing entire families. ... Travellers ... tell of small rivers and streams that have been literally clogged with bodies. River transportation has at places been seriously impeded.

Time magazine, December 1965 1

Nearly 100 Communists, or suspected Communists, were herded into the towns botanical garden and mowed down with a machine gun ... the head chat had belonged to the school principal, a P.K.I. [Communist Party] member, was stuck on a pole and paraded among his former pupils, convened in special assembly.

New York Times, May 1966 2

Estimates of the total number of Indonesians murdered over a period of several years following an aborted coup range from 500,000 to one million.3

In the early morning hours of 1 October 1965, a small force of junior military officers abducted and killed six generals and seized several key points in the capital city of Jakarta. They then went on the air to announce that their action was being taken to forestall a putsch by a Generals Council scheduled for Army Day, the fifth of October. The putsch, they said, had been sponsored by the CIA and was aimed at capturing power from President Sukarno. By the end of the day, however, the rebel officers in Jakarta had been crushed by the army under the direction of General Suharto, although some supportive army groups in other cities held out for a day or two longer.4

Suharto-a man who had served both the Dutch colonialists and the Japanese invaders5-and his colleagues charged that the large and influential PKI was behind the junior officers coup attempt , and that behind the party stood Communist China. The triumphant armed forces moved in to grab the reins of government, curb Sukarnos authority (before long he was reduced to little more than a figurehead), and carry out a bloodbath to eliminate once and for all the PKI with whom Sukarno had obliged them to share national power for many years. Here at last was the situation which could legitimate these long-desired actions.

Anticommunist organizations and individuals, particularly Muslims, were encouraged to join in the slaying of anyone suspected of being a PKI sympathizer. Indonesians of Chinese descent as well fell victim to crazed zealots. The Indonesian people were stirred up in part by the display of photographs on television and in the press of the badly decomposed bodies of the slain generals. The men, the public was told, had been castrated and their eyes gouged out by Communist women. (The army later made the mistake of allowing official medical autopsies to be included as evidence in some of the trials; and the extremely detailed reports of the injuries suffered mentioned only bullet wounds and some bruises, no eye gougings or castration.)6