Did you know CIA had a liberal, pro-Castro wing in the 50s opposed to Eis-

[1932]

enhower's right wing faction of the CIA?

I'm reading Richard Gott's _Cuba_. This is only mentioned briefly. Apparently the entire Havana branch of the CIA was philosophically supportive of Fidel. They were liberals and didn't like Batista (who was a real mixed bag at first -- he idolized FDR, swept out the old guard, modeled some of his reforms on the New Deal, but eventually became a tyrannical dictator). They thought Fidel could stabilize the country.

Eisenhower and the right wingers in the CIA back in DC preferred Batista and supplied him with weapons. Eventually, they realized that Castro's victory over Batista was inevitable, so they backed off in their opposition. But they thought Castro would only last two to five years -- like every other attempt at reformist government in Cuba -- before there would be instability which the US would then take advantage.

It seems that, no matter who is in power in the US, there are always some people in the CIA and the State Department who don't always side with the right wing. However, I have yet to see an example of anyone in the Department of Defense siding with the liberal side of conflict.

[expatriot]

1. My amateur opinion as of why this is....

The nature of the CIA's work collects its bureaucrats from a wide variety of backgrounds... a very large portion coming from the academic world (linguistics, international studies, psychology, the social sciences, etc.) while a very, very large portion of the bureacrats within the Department of Defense are career military, who have a high tendency to be of a conservative worldview, or political appointees that either are handpicked by top brass or the defense industry, or if not a "military insider" already if they do not get along with the establishment they will probably not last long and certainly not different administrations. This is just my initial amateur analysis.

[Warren DeMontague]

2. Castro, like Ho Chi Minh, started out as "our guy".

Funny how that works.

[1932]

3. Not really, according to Gott

Che was always very suspicious of the US and so was Martí, who was their founding father and inspiration. Castro didn't play his hand with the US. However, Castro was never really supported by the US. The Havanna CIA branch wanted him to succeed, but Eisenhower gave guns to Batista instead.

The previous 50 years of Cuban history had been so schizophrenic, it was never clear who was going to become what kind of leader. Batista started off looking liberal, but finished very right wing. The US wasn't really sure how Castro was going to turn out (or if he would even dominate the coalition taking part in the revolution). Since the lines were never so clearly drawn (the daughter of Bacardi's lawyer was one of Castro's representatitves, and Castro himself was from a family entwined in the commercial life of the island), the US was willing to sit back and just hope that US interests would dominate in an environment of chaos.

I think it's fair to say that Castro was willing to work with the US (provided that whatever relationship Cuba had with the US didn't upset Che's hightened sensitivity to imperialism). But I don't get the impression from Gott's book (so far) that the US supported Castro against Batista, and, in fact, the US did the opposite.

The US, Gott notes (IIRC), could have given Battista even better weapons, but they didn't either because they didn't think the Cubans had the training to use them effectively, or because Eisenhower felt the the US's interests would be served if the battle lasted a long time.