Declassified U.S. documents recall Cuba contacts

Declassified U.S. documents recall Cuba contacts

Author: W. T. Whitney Jr.
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 02/09/09 23:56

George Washington University’s National Security Archives has released classified government documents shedding light on U.S. relations with Cuba. On the National Archives website (gwu.edu), Senior Analyst Peter Kornbluh notes, “This rich declassified record of the past provides a road map for the new administration to follow in the future.”

His message is that any Cuba negotiations undertaken by the Barack Obama administration will hardly occur in a vacuum. Precedents are in place from the Kennedy through Clinton administrations. And reasoning and rationale that informed leaders then carry weight now. Likely as not, their ideas on negotiation methods are still relevant.

The administration of George W. Bush was alone in shying away from contacts with Cuban leaders. He was the only president who used executive orders to intensify restrictions imposed under the U.S. blockade, in force since 1961.

The elder President Bush did sign the onerous Cuba Democracy Act of 1992, which barred foreign-based subsidiaries of U.S. companies from trading with Cuba and blocked ships that visited Cuba from docking at U.S. ports for six months afterwards. President Clinton eased travel restrictions, but joined with Congress in 1996 to enact the Helms-Burton Law, which encouraged U.s. courts to target foreign business owners in Cuba and shifted responsibility for changing embargo rules from the Executive Branch to Congress.

The National Security Archives put eight documents relating to U.S.-Cuba relations on display on its web site on Jan. 22. A brief summary testifies to their significance.

In a secret memo, Kennedy aide Richard Goodwin reports on meeting with Che Guevara in Uruguay on Aug. 17, 1961. This first instance of talks between officials of both countries is remarkable for Guevara’s suggestion that negotiations should begin, and focus on secondary issues “as a cover for more serious conversation.” Responding later to a memo from the U.S. negotiator on releasing Bay of Pigs prisoners, Kennedy expressed interest in pursuing dialogue with Fidel Castro.

http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/14440/

From the article you posted:

In 1974, Henry Kissinger, then President Ford’s National Security Council head, is seen to approve a subordinate’s memo calling for openings toward Cuba. They were responding to Latin American demands for trade and diplomatic relations with Cuba. Kornbluh says Kissinger initiated secret contacts with the Cubans himself.

The next year, Kissinger aides met with Cuban representatives in a cafeteria at New York’s La Guardia Airport. One of them delivered a document approved by Kissinger that said, “We are meeting here to explore the possibilities for a more normal relationship between our two countries.”

Also in 1975, as Latin American nations were preparing to resume relations with Cuba, Harry Shlaudeman, a deputy assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, prepared a memo sketching out the process toward normal diplomatic relations. “Our interest is in getting the Cuba issue behind us, not in prolonging it indefinitely,” the memo states. It speaks of getting Cuba “off the domestic and inter-American agendas.”

On March 15, 1977, President Carter ordered normalization of U.S. relations with Cuba. The directive appearing on the Archives web site instructs Carter’s foreign policy experts to “set in motion a process which will lead to the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba.” U.S. pressure on Cuba to withdraw troops from Southern Africa derailed the effort.

Here's a site discussing some of the material, like the secret meetings Kennedy was arranging with Fidel Castro right before he was murdered, taken from declassified documents released in 2003:

Kennedy Sought Dialogue with Cuba

INITIATIVE WITH CASTRO ABORTED BY ASSASSINATION,
DECLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS SHOW

Oval Office Tape Reveals Strategy to hold clandestine Meeting in Havana; Documents record role of ABC News correspondent Lisa Howard as secret intermediary in Rapprochement effort

Posted - November 24, 2003Washington D.C. - On the 40th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the eve of the broadcast of a new documentary film on Kennedy and Castro, the National Security Archive today posted an audio tape of the President and his national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, discussing the possibility of a secret meeting in Havana with Castro. The tape, dated only seventeen days before Kennedy was shot in Dallas, records a briefing from Bundy on Castro's invitation to a U.S. official at the United Nations, William Attwood, to come to Havana for secret talks on improving relations with Washington. The tape captures President Kennedy's approval if official U.S. involvement could be plausibly denied.

More:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB103/index.htm

There is a documentary discussing this material which gets looped around on the Discovery Channel periodically. It was on several weeks ago, and I saw it there a few years ago, and have noted it showing up on the schedule several times since. Anyone interested should keep an eye on the Discovery Channel. It'll be back, no doubt.

The possibility of a meeting in Havana evolved from a shift in the President's thinking on the possibility of what declassified White House records called "an accommodation with Castro" in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Proposals from Bundy's office in the spring of 1963 called for pursuing "the sweet approach…enticing Castro over to us," as a potentially more successful policy than CIA covert efforts to overthrow his regime. Top Secret White House memos record Kennedy's position that "we should start thinking along more flexible lines" and that "the president, himself, is very interested in ." Castro, too, appeared interested. In a May 1963 ABC News special on Cuba, Castro told correspondent Lisa Howard that he considered a rapprochement with Washington "possible if the United States government wishes it. In that case," he said, "we would be agreed to seek and find a basis" for improved relations.

The untold story of the Kennedy-Castro effort to seek an accommodation is the subject of a new documentary film, KENNEDY AND CASTRO: THE SECRET HISTORY, broadcast on the Discovery/Times cable channel on November 25 at 8pm. The documentary film, which focuses on Ms. Howard's role as a secret intermediary in the effort toward dialogue, was based on an article -- "JFK and Castro: The Secret Quest for Accommodation" -- written by Archive Senior Analyst Peter Kornbluh in the magazine, Cigar Aficionado. Kornbluh served as consulting producer and provided key declassified documents that are highlighted in the film. "The documents show that JFK clearly wanted to change the framework of hostile U.S. relations with Cuba," according to Kornbluh. "His assassination, at the very moment this initiative was coming to fruition, leaves a major 'what if' in the ensuing history of the U.S. conflict with Cuba."

channel to Krushchev, as well as Kennedy's overall plan to END the "Cold War," at length, in his book, "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters" (recently published by the Maryknoll fathers). Douglass convincingly establishes that these efforts by Kennedy to end the "Cold War" were why the CIA assassinated him.

A very important book.