Put Castro to the Test: End Embargo : Nixon was right, our hard line has failed; so why do we persist in trying to topple Fidel?

“History will absolve me,” claimed Fidel Castro while on trial as a student rebel 41 years ago when he first attempted to overthrow the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

Cubans will eventually decide whether Castro was right or wrong. But what about history’s judgment of the United States?

When Castro finally toppled the gangster-dominated Batista regime in 1959, it wasn’t long before the tiny Caribbean island nation was swept up in the mad politics of the Cold War.

In the heat of the 1960 presidential election, candidate John Kennedy accused the Republican Administration of being soft on communism in our hemisphere. A strangling embargo was promptly placed on Cuba to ensure that Richard Nixon wouldn’t suffer from such red-baiting charges.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that Havana was fast turning from a modern-day Sodom to a city a proper Republican could take his family to, the U.S. government was simultaneously launching a Keystone Cop carnival of assassination attempts on Castro. And, ironically, the CIA used the Mafiosi who had run Havana’s powerful drug, prostitution and gambling cartels for these failed attempts at international terrorism.

We now know the full details of that sorry chapter, thanks to the release last year of the CIA’s internal audit of its first seven years of plots to assassinate Castro.

The first Mafia hit was initiated in August, 1960, two months before the embargo was put into place. At that time, the CIA report tells us, “Richard Bissell, deputy director for plans, asked Sheffield Edwards, director of security, if Edwards could establish contact with the U.S. gambling syndicate that was active in Cuba. The objective clearly was the assassination of Castro . . . .”

The CIA gave an initial payment of $150,000 of taxpayer money to the mob to kill Castro with poisoned cigars, infected saccharine pills and explosives, always denying to Congress and the public that they were doing anything of the sort so as not to undermine the pristine sanctity of our democratic system. Ironically, Castro was quite popular at the time in Cuba, in part because he was able to break the Mafia’s hold.

Accompanying all this was the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion ordered by Kennedy in April, 1961. And so, within two years of his takeover, we had driven Castro into utter dependence on the Soviets, setting up the Cuban missile crisis and a near-nuclear war.

Nearly 35 years later, after agreeing to open trade with North Korea and Vietnam, after sending Ron Brown to frolic with American CEOs on the Great Wall and after watching the demise of Castro’s backers in the Soviet Union, we continue our wrongheaded, counterproductive policy on Cuba.

Maybe it’s not surprising that Clinton has held to the same retrograde policy as his predecessors--Republicans and Democrats alike have kept up the harassment, not wanting to look weak or to lose the support of the powerful Cuba lobby.

Take Robert Kennedy, who had made his reputation going after the mob as a congressional counsel. His outrage on being informed of the CIA/mob hit plans was surprisingly procedural rather than moral: “I trust that if you ever try to do business with organized crime again--with gangsters--you will let the attorney general know before you do it.” Nothing was said about stopping the attempt to assassinate a head of state, and efforts to work with the mob continued.

The CIA later seemed somewhat embarrassed by this adventurism. As the report states: “We cannot overemphasize the extent to which responsible agency officers felt themselves subject to the Kennedy Administration’s severe pressures to do something about Castro and his regime. The fruitless, and in retrospect, often unrealistic plotting should be viewed in that light.”

So, too, should all other aspects of the three-decades-plus effort to topple Castro. Why not put Castro to a test he has never had to face--the threat of open trade and travel? Those are the tactics that helped bring down the Soviet Union; why not try it 90 miles from home?

In a book published at the time of his death, Richard Nixon offered advice on the handling of Castro that President Clinton should take seriously: “The hard line against him has failed . . . our best service to the Cuban people now would be to build pressure from within by actively stimulating Cuba’s contacts with the free world.”