Jim Hampton
Editor
The Miami Herald
If we have learned anything in Fidel Castro's 37-year dictatorship, it is that he always can be expected to do the unexpected. Consider, in that light, a startling seven-paragraph report in the March 6 edition of the authoritative British publication Jane's Defence Weekly.
The report is headlined
"Havana's strategy in pursuing such training," explains Jane's, "is to
attack the staging and supply areas for U.S. forces preparing to invade
Cuba." Those areas could include (my interpretations) the Air Force's
Special Operations Command School near Jacksonville, Tampa's MacDill
Air Force Base, the Homestead Air Reserve Base, and Navy bases at
Pensacola and at Boca Chica in the Keys.
"The political objective [of these Cuban-commando attacks] would be to bring the reality of warfare to the American public and to exert domestic pressure on Washington," says Jane's. It would do that, all right.
But wait! Didn't President Kennedy, in resolving the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, promise Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev that the United States wouldn't ever invade Cuba if the Soviets removed their 42 intermediate-range ballistic missiles from Cuba? Yes, he did.
And hasn't that no-invasion pledge been embedded in U.S. policy toward Cuba since then? Yes again.
So whence cometh Castro's expectation that the United States might invade anyway? And why would he invite his own apocalypse by a preemptive commando strike on the United States? Such a strike in all likelihood, Florida.
For this rationale I give you Ernesto Betancourt, former director of Radio
and TV Marti. Jane's thesis, says Mr. Betancourt , "immediately brings
[laughter] from most Americans, and in particular from our security or
military people. Using pragmatic American logic, they consider such
potential behavior as leading to a suicidal outcome. The U.S. military
has the power to crush Cuba and what would Castro gain from such a
provacation?"
"Well," Mr. Betancourt answers,"Castro has a different way of looking at potential outcomes for his regime. And we better start taking them into serious consideration."Yes, let's
In Mr. Betancourt's view, "nothing will make him [Castro] happier than to end his career with Cuba crushed by an American invasion. What he dreads is to be overthrown by a popular explosion or a coup. And my judgement is that that is closer than many people think." That's plausible.
Why? Mr. Betancourt reasons:
"With the failure of the 1996 sugar crop now almost a certainty, the decline in agricultural production leading to a food-supply crisis, increasing civic resistance as he moves to crush the growing dissidence that grew under the limited opening he allowed and the drying up of the foreign-investment option as the consequences of [the] Helms-Burton [bill] hit home. I expect Castro to move to the grandiose finale he seems to have been preparing for...."