Historical Image of the Day

Still from the film, Them, 1954

Book Review: Alex von Tunzelmann, Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder, and the Cold War in the Caribbean

Alex von Tunzelmann, Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder, and the Cold War in the Caribbean , Henry Holt and Co, 2011.

Americans remain fascinated by the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the fall of 1962, American planes photographed Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. The situation quickly escalated with members of both the American and Soviet governments calling for nuclear war. Mercifully, both U.S. President John Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev came to their senses before blowing up the world.

At the heart of the conflict was Cuban leader Fidel Castro, whose 1959 revolution threw American leaders into fits of fury. Alex von Tunzelmann’s new and very readable book, Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder, and the Cold War in the Caribbean, certainly will appeal to readers fascinated by the intrigue between Castro and Kennedy. This relationship became implanted in popular memory both through the missile crisis and with the rumors that Castro was behind the plot to assassinate JFK.

We don’t know anything concrete about Castro’s involvement in that murder, but we do know that Kennedy did approve several plots to kill Castro. That’s just the start of von Tunzelmann’s detailing of American outrages committed in the Caribbean during the Cold War. Focusing on Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic she paints a deeply disturbing picture of the United States propping up brutal dictators, overthrowing democratically elected governments, and undermining social reform in the name of anti-communism.


Beginning with the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States dominated Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean. In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt declared it U.S. policy to act in the best interests of its irresponsible American neighbors. In practice, this meant supporting governments that protected American business interests and sending in the Marines when governments threatened those interests.

These interventions caused long-term resentment toward the United States. As the Cold War developed, Americans became obsessed with keeping its neighbors communist-free, even though, as von Tunzelmann points out, Stalin had no interest in world revolution. Equating social justice and economic rights with communism, the CIA gave almost unconditional support to Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.

Batista’s corrupt government gave rise to many protest movements, but under amazingly long odds, Fidel Castro and his tiny group of guerillas in the Sierra Madre convinced the dictator to flee at the end of 1958. While Castro first avoided identifying with communism, the United States took his revolution personally, particularly as he looked to end American domination of Cuba. The 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion to topple Castro proved an unmitigated disaster for the United States. Moreover, it forced Castro into the arms of the Soviets, precipitating the missile crisis, solidifying his support among the Cuban people, and creating long-term hostilities between Cuba and the U.S.

Von Tunzelmann revisits the frequently asked question of when Fidel Castro became communist. I find this debate tiresome but she usefully points out that Castro had flexible ideological leanings in these years. She accurately refers to him as a pragmatist, unlike Che Guevara or Raul Castro, both of whom supported communism from the revolution’s start. Fidel’s primary goal was a nationalist Cuba free from U.S. Intervention, he might have avoided the Soviet alliance had he any alternative. Of course, once he committed to communism, he turned his attention to developing a centrally planned economy, but his relationship with the Soviets waxed and waned over time.

Von Tunzelmann shows that no head of state took advantage of Castro’s rise as effectively as the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo. Ruling over his nation with an iron fist since 1930, Trujillo tortured, murdered, and raped opponents into submission. The United States supported him throughout his decades in power, seeing him as an unfortunate but necessary anti-communist leader. When a democratic government followed Trujillo’s assassination in 1961 and began instituting social reforms, the United States balked. Von Tunzelmann excoriates Lyndon Johnson for ordering the 1965 invasion that led to another three decades of right-wing dictatorship.

Her connection between Cuba and the Dominican Republic is clear. But at first, the reader wonders why she spends so much time on the non-ideological regime of the murderous Francois Duvalier’s Haiti. Americans thought of him as a mad man and plotted his overthrow. But Duvalier masterfully played Trujillo, Castro, and successive American presidents. Although he had no particular ideological agenda, he created enough “communists” to convince Americans of his importance. By promoting order, he established alliances of convenience with the Dominicans. This point may be von Tunzelmann’s greatest contribution: the United States would and did actively promote any type of human rights violations to support short-term goals on fighting communism.

While I liked the book, von Tunzelmann sometimes panders to American sensibilities. I find her suggestion that Kennedy had learned from Cuba and might not have invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965 highly dubious and ahistorical (p.316). This is a prime example of perpetuating what I call the “Evolving Kennedy myth” in popular history: Kennedy about to become a champion of civil rights, Kennedy pulling out of Vietnam, Kennedy rejecting American domination of Latin America. Maybe this would happened. Who knows.

All we can do as historians is judge a president on what he actually did. Kennedy did not press hard for civil rights. He expanded American involvement in Vietnam. He approved any number of questionable and illegal activities in the Caribbean. Americans want to think the best of Kennedy, but his actual actions don’t support this interpretation. While Lyndon Johnson pursued a disastrous foreign policy, it’s hard to believe that Kennedy would have done anything much differently. And Johnson is the presidential hero of civil rights, not Kennedy.

Moreover, while von Tunzelmann points out that Castro is not a mass murderer on the scale of Duvalier and Trujillo, for narrative’s sake she frequently lumps the three dictators together. Many Americans may think of Castro as the devil, but it’s worth noting that Cuban health care, education, and life expectancy far surpass almost any other nation in the developing world. I’m not apologizing for Castro’s lack of democratic values. But to compare Castro with Duvalier and Trujillo simply doesn’t make sense except to note that all three were dictators, which is hardly a revelation.

Overall, Red Heat is a useful and readable primer for U.S. Cold War activities in the Caribbean. Americans as a whole lack knowledge of how its government tolerated, trained, and encouraged some of the world’s most notorious dictators. The American government found Fidel Castro so shocking that it nearly plunged the world into a nuclear war. It accepted a homicidal maniac in Haiti because he was non-communist. It overthrew a democratically elected government in the Dominican Republic because it feared a new Castro. The people of these nations still feel the effects of American foreign policy today in their nations’ poverty, violence, and shaky to nonexistent democratic institutions.

Historical Image of the Day

Cover of "Is This Tomorrow," probably the first anti-Soviet Cold War scare comic book, published 1947

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Advertisement, Good Housekeeping, 1950s. I can't quite read the date at the bottom of the page. July of some year in the 50s.

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Cover of Captain America, May 1954

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This week's images will be of the Cold War within the nation's borders.

Nuclear test, Nevada Test Site, 1951

Historical Image of the Day

"Duck and Cover," the classic 1951 civil defense film.

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"Plowshare: The Peaceful Atomic Atom," 1950s

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"Fallout Shelter," 1950s.

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"Kids Talk about Nuclear Weapons." 1950s evidently, though I can't seem to find a precise date on it. The production values actually suggest late 40s to me, but that's a very loose guess.

Famous Loomises (I): Henry Loomis

I think it's time for an occasional series entitled "Famous Loomises," dedicated to those people out there with whom I share a last name.

Henry Loomis was a foundational figure in the beginnings of the Voice of America. A high-ranking official within the United States Information Agency (USIA) during World War II, Loomis fought hard to open Americans to the value of international propaganda. Oddly enough, those very right-wingers like Joe McCarthy who most decried the potential of communism to take over America also led the charge against funding an agency that would present the U.S. side of things to the rest of the world. They feared the government producing left-leaning propaganda that would then be used to influence American citizens against god and country and whatever. Senseless worries that again remind me that Joe McCarthy was a Soviet dream--no provocateur could have done more to damage the U.S. during those years than McCarthy.

Anyway, Loomis ensured that the USIA retain power within early Cold War foreign policy. In 1958, President Eisenhower named Loomis head of the Voice of America, an agency that had mixed success in its propaganda goals during the Truman and Eisenhower years (again largely because of Congressional interference). Loomis remained VOA head until 1965, when the Johnson administration became agitated that VOA was reporting negatively on U.S. foreign policy.

This always bugged me--the idea that if we don't talk about our foreign policy failures that no one else will either. That's absurd--every other country's news agencies were talking about Vietnam and Cuba and the Dominican Republic--and all we were doing by pressuring VOA and other agencies to be more positive was to lessen our credibility to people around the world.

In 1973, Richard Nixon named Loomis the head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but he spent his five years at the head of that agency fighting with PBS over control of programming, something that showed neither agency in the best of light.

Historical Image of the Day

This week's images will consist of Cold War propaganda films.

"Communism vs. Capitalism," late 1940s

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Navajo uranium miners, 1956

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Cover of Freemasonry Unmasked as the Secret Power Behind Communism, 1956.

Animated Soviet Propaganda

I've been watching a great many Soviet propaganda cartoons this year. This week, I showed a set to my students in my Cold War film class. I think it'd be interesting to discuss them here. Many are on You Tube, which will make it easy. Each day next week I'll be discussing one cartoon. Please watch and discuss. Here's the trailer below.



To analyze this trailer a bit, one thing I consistently find interesting is the lasting power looking at the US-USSR rivalry in terms of good and evil. Certainly that was on both sides, which is understandable in the context of the time. However, we often slip into that language today. This trailer talks about the "disinformation" the Soviet state gave to the people. That may be true, but it's not like Americans were having open and free discussions of communism in 1950, 1980, or even 2010. If we are looking negatively at how the USSR blinded its people with propaganda, we should be honest and admit the U.S. was doing the exact same thing. The Cold War was a war of ideology, fought with great vigor on both sides, both internally and externally. These animated Soviet films are just one, albeit very interesting and sometimes extremely weird, aspect of this broader multinational media war.

Cold War Film Suggestions

Forgive the quietness on my end--I've been in the Northwest, visiting family, attending the American Society of Environmental Historians conference (where I told a lovely story about eye gonorrhea in my paper), and being interviewed for a couple of jobs (wish me luck, I need it!).

But while I won't be back full time until next Monday, I am having a quiet work day today.

And I have a question I could use some help with. This summer, I'm teaching a course on Cold War Film and History. I'm going to show about 12-14 films. What would you show for such a class? I am going to cover a lot of things in a short time, look at films of the time and films made later, and hopefully from all over the world. I am having a specific 4 film section focusing on Latin America.

Here's what I'm thinking so far:

1. One disc of the Animated Soviet Propaganda series, which is awesome.
2. Dr. Strangelove
3. Battle of Algiers
4. The Day the Earth Stood Still
5. Red Dawn
6. The Baader Meinhof Complex
7. I Am Cuba
8. Goodbye Lenin
9. 12:08 East of Bucharest
10. Some Bond film, but I'm not sure which one. Given that I've only ever seen 1 Bond film in my life (yes could can make fun of me for this if you want), I could use some specific suggestions here. 
11. Atomic Cafe

That's pretty heavy on German and eastern European films. And actually it's pretty weak on US-Soviet relations.

I'm probably forgetting some pretty obvious films, so help me out!

America Under Socialism, 1950

Ethan Persoff's useful blog uncovers another classic of American comic book history. This piece, entitled, "America Under Socialism," came out in 1950 and is pretty awesome. Check it out!

Pro-Capitalist Propaganda, circa 1948

This is absolutely fantastic. Very much worth your 9 minutes. I love Cold War propaganda. There's an excellent set of Soviet animated propaganda on DVD. It's out there in part because people see it as so quaint today that there's a market for it. This is just as bizarre. Really there's little difference except that the artistic merit of the capitalist propaganda is less than the communist stuff.

Via Sociological Images

From Colony to Superpower, Part XIX

This is the nineteenth installment in the 20 part series Rob Farley and I have commenced to review George Herring's From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776. See the Herring Review tag below for previous entries.

This week we will discuss Herring's chapter on the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. This is one of the book's better chapters. I like Herring's analysis of both presidents. He puts Reagan in the proper context without mythologizing him. In fact, Reagan comes across looking pretty bad. As Grandpa Caligula should. Reagan certainly was an important person. He represented what Americans of the 1980s wanted to see in themselves and in doing so, he restored national pride after Vietnam and the Iran hostage situation. The Reagan administration did incredible damage to this country and the world--in foreign policy, in the War on Drugs, in attacking welfare, in cutting domestic programs, in destroying labor unions, and in ignoring the AIDS epidemic because it was considered a gay disease. But ultimately, does Reagan deserve the blame or does the American people? It's not as if these policies were unpopular. At least until Iran-Contra, Reagan had a pretty consistently high approval rating. Why did Americans have so much hate in the 1980s toward people of the world and toward minorities, gays, and the poor in this country? I'm not prepared to offer a useful answer, but it's a sad period of American history.

However, the idea that Reagan won the Cold War has no basis in reality. In fact, most of Reagan's policies were terrible. He unnecessarily ratcheted up Cold War tensions in the early 80s, accusing the Soviets of knowing the Korean Air plane they shot down in 1983 was a civilian plane (not true), pushing Star Wars, and using dangerous rhetoric. His obsession with Central America led to disastrous results for the people of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. None of these places threatened the United States, but Reagan promoted horrible policies in each of these places. That he did so illegally, at least in the case of Nicaragua and El Salvador, is even more reprehensible. Where I can let earlier presidents off the hook a bit for their Latin American policies because both parties basically treated these places the same, by the 1980s, there was clear opposition to hardcore Cold War policies in the area. Congress refused to fund aid to the Contras. And Reagan's minions went around Congress. This was a crime and Reagan should have been impeached. The invasion of Grenada was even more absurd. The idea that Grenada, an island approximately the size of my office, could become the next Cuba was completely ludicrous. Nonetheless, invading the island was really popular with Americans looking for an unequivocal victory.

Reagan's policy toward the Middle East was even worse. Sending U.S. troops into Lebanon without a clear mission was a bad idea, pulling them out after the bombing of the Marine barracks made us look as weak as we had in 1973. Demonizing Iran and then dealing with them to fund the Contras was arguably the most hypocritical move in the long sordid history of American foreign policy. Reagan did a poor job of dealing with the rising tide of Middle Eastern terrorism; bombing Quaddafi's Libya was not an effective response. Virtually nothing the Reagan administration tried here went right.

One thing I thought interesting was that in the 1980s it was still possible to have a foreign policy toward Israel that was different than yes. Reagan was pro-Israel, but Begin caused him endless headaches. I guess latent anti-Semitism, especially in the State Department, was what led to a lot of hostility in the U.S. toward Israel, but at least in the 80s you could formulate an opinion about American relations with them. Today, everyone has to fall over themselves vocalizing fealty to Israel; even pointing this out, as Walt and Mearsheimer did, is cause to be accused of anti-Semitism (or self-hatred if the person involved is Jewish). I don't see how this reflexive relationship to one nation is good for the country.

What positive characteristics we can ascribe to Reagan come from the fact that he wasn't as crazy as he sounded when dealing with the Soviet Union. Although I'd like Herring to go into a bit more detail on what caused the Soviet Union to collapse, it's clear from his narrative that Gorbachev deserved most of the credit for leadership. It was his enterprise that thawed the Cold War and liberalized eastern Europe. Reagan just happened to be there. But to the chagrin of the hard-liners in his foreign policy team like the loathsome Richard Perle, Reagan softened considerably toward the Soviets once he realized what Gorbachev was doing. He stayed out of the way for the most part, and agreed to significant deals with Gorbachev over arms control during their frequent summits. Given his harsh anti-communistic rhetoric of his first term, not only was this change in heart unexpected, but also the best thing he could have done.

As for Bush, it seems that China and Iraq are the most important areas to discuss. Yes, he was president for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union, but little he did mattered to this process. He wasn't particularly prepared to deal with this sudden change, but I'm not sure that most presidents would have done better. I do think Bush faced a pretty tough situation after Tiananmen Square. It was horrible, but what was Bush supposed to do? China was too powerful to act strongly against in any meaningful way. We could have completely ended all relations with them, but I remain unconvinced that this would have accomplished much for the Chinese people. As for Iraq, it's hard to argue that we should have let Saddam Hussein take over Kuwait. You really can't sanction nations swallowing their neighbors. The question of whether to leave Saddam in place is pretty tough. Obviously, Bush Jr. taking Saddam out didn't exactly work well. On the other hand, the HW Bush foreign policy team was far more competent than W's, there were active uprisings against Saddam that we might have piggybacked upon, and, for what it's worth, the times were different and the same result might not have happened. On the other hand, this is all speculation. Regardless, promoting internal rebellions and then letting Saddam brutally crush them was pretty terrible and it fits into a long history of Americans promoting democracy and freedom through their rhetoric and then hanging the freedom fighters out to dry when they take it seriously.

Sometimes the long term effects of foreign policy decisions can't be known for years. In 1989, Congress rejected Bush's first choice for Secretary of Defense, John Tower. His second choice: Dick Cheney. Tower might have sucked and maybe Cheney would have been just as powerful in the W administration. But maybe without his term as Secretary of Defense he would have remained a more peripheral player in the latter administration. Certainly the world would be a much better place now had that happened.

From Colony to Superpower, Part XIV

This is the fourteenth installment in the 20 part series Rob Farley and I have commenced to review George Herring's From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776. See the Herring Review tag below for previous entries. Rob's entry for this week is here.

This week covers the Truman Administration (1945-53). It's amazing thinking about what a huge change these years were for the United States. Before World War II, the U.S. tried very hard to stay out of international commitments unrelated to trade, had little interest in policing the world (outside of Latin America anyway), and had a strongly isolationist population. But the war created a new U.S. foreign policy of one of two world superpowers vying for world control. This is one of many reasons why I think World War II is the second most important event in American history (after the Civil War, and just above the introduction of slavery, the Constitutional Convention, and the civil rights movement). It was so transforming to all of America. Maybe I'll do a full post on this soon.

Anyway, the Truman years brought the beginnings of the Cold War, the atomic bomb, the Korean War, NATO, the Marshall Plan, the Chinese Revolution, the Berlin Airlift, the birth of the CIA, McCarthyism, and many other amazingly important events. That Americans dealt with the transition relatively smoothly is surprising. By this, I mean there was little organized opposition to this shift in U.S. foreign policy, with the most substantive criticisms coming from the right, who wanted the Cold War fought with more vigor.

One of the most disastrous success in U.S. foreign policy history may have been the success of covert operations in Greece in 1948. Not that I think Soviet domination of Greece would have been a good thing, but because it converted many in the foreign policy and intelligence establishments of the value of covert operations, leading to many horrible incidents from Iran and Guatemala to Chile and Indonesia. And of course, the Bay of Pigs.

I do wish Herring had dealt a bit more with Vietnam and the our support of French colonialism. It's mentioned, but only in passing. This was a major blunder, as early support of Ho Chi Minh could have created a peaceful transition to power in Vietnam and avoided the Vietnam War, and by proxy, the Khmer Rouge. On the other hand, the U.S. was not mentally prepared to support anticolonial movements in 1945 and failed to do so in almost every case. Racism toward non-whites still dominated the foreign policy establishment and the Vietnamese being more qualified to run their land than the French occurred to few.

On the other hand, I was pleased to see Herring rely on one of the most interesting books of the new U.S. and the World field, Ed Wehrle's Between a River and a Mountain: The AFL-CIO and the Vietnam War, which I reviewed here. The AFL got deeply involved in American foreign policy during these years, supporting conservative labor movements throughout Europe and eventually Vietnam, Latin America, and other parts of the world. They basically offered themselves up to the CIA as stools, particularly under the leadership of the deeply anti-communist George Meany. This is the kind of work that I hoped Herring would reference throughout his work, expanding our view and broadening our understanding on the nation's foreign relations.

Overall, while Truman left the presidency with low ratings and reputation, it's hard to criticize him too harshly on the foreign policy front. He made some terrible decisions (supporting apartheid South Africa for instance), it's true, and he did provide Roosevelt's leadership. But considering he was pretty unqualified and uninformed on these issues when he took office, it seems that he acquitted himself fairly well. He could have tried to run an armed convoy through to Berlin, he could have committed ever-increasing U.S. aid and military advisers to Chiang Kai-Shek in a losing cause, he could have let MacArthur run roughshod over him and bomb China. These were incredibly challenging years, and I can think of a lot of worse outcomes than where we were in 1953 and I can think of a lot of presidents who would have handled things far less well.